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When Customer Dissatisfaction Is a Tech Business Model

Posted by Soulskill on from the friendly-until-they-have-your-money dept.

jammag writes: A new trend has emerged where tech companies have realized that abusing users pays big. Examples include the highly publicized Comcast harassing service call, Facebook "experiments," Twitter timeline tinkering, rude Korean telecoms — tech is an area where the term "customer service" has an Orwellian slant. Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?

24 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Free market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.

    1. Re:Free market by therealkevinkretz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      bought-and-paid-for politicians using the law to favor their friends isn't "the free market"

    2. Re:Free market by GameboyRMH · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I find it funny how people who defend capitalism in this day and age like to say that what we have is "crony capitalism" and if we'd just give real capitalism a try for once it would be super awesome.

      What does that sound like?

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    3. Re:Free market by Sentrion · · Score: 4, Funny

      No TRUE Scotsman would fall for such a thing.

    4. Re:Free market by wiredlogic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No. The execs have realized that they can get fatter paychecks if they eliminate "cost centers" that don't deliver any perceived value. Anyone not working in the executive suite is viewed as a liability to the company and needs to be eliminated to reduce the pesky overhead involved in having real employees.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    5. Re:Free market by twotacocombo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Good customer service is expensive.

      Good customer service is less expensive than bad customer service. A smaller call center staffed with decently trained and compensated CSRs is far more cost effective than watching the headcount continuously grow and churn to deal with the increased call volume due to poorly trained staff dumping calls, permaholds, supervisor escalations, previous callers figuring out they've been lied to, etc. At some point, your call center will outgrow its allotted space, and then you'll have to deal with a costly move or additional locations. Both companies I worked for experienced this, one of them had to move TWICE in 4 years, and the cost was mindblowing. Then, as you lose a lot of your customers, there's the cost of downsizing.. all of which could have been avoided by just properly hiring, training, and compensating a solid, core group of people to take care of your customers and make sure they didn't become unhappy with the thought of giving you their money.

    6. Re:Free market by bickerdyke · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, I once thought that too.

      But after receiving the same shitty customer "service" from a more expensive phone company, I decided that if I'm to get screwed over, I'm not going to pay extra for it.

      --
      bickerdyke
    7. Re: Free market by bistromath007 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The natural result of a truly free market is socialism. Members of a vibrant community tend to realize that they do better when their neighbors do, and empathize with them enough to know that a streak of bad luck could make them the pest in their neighborhood, so it's good to take care of those who fall behind.

      Capitalism is separate from the free market, and a perversion of it. A wealthy member of a community, before this "genius" invention was made, would've been happy to organize large projects for the public good simply for the prestige of having been in charge of them. Now they require that a portion of workers' labor be diverted to them permanently, returning far more value than they ever contributed. This encourages the venture capitalist to go play in other markets, leaving the community that made him with all the money he's stolen from it, and polluting others that he cares even less about.

      While it has made large projects easier to start, those projects have had less and less value to the common people over time. At this point, the labor market is an arrangement whereby you either build something you don't care about for a rich person, or you don't eat. It is functionally indistinguishable from slavery, and it is not meaningfully consensual, given that is harder than ever to be an entrepreneur. We make a big noise about how the internet allows the little guy to make globalism work for him, but in practice what that means is that, in addition to the chokehold multinationals have on every mass market, you're fighting over the scraps of every niche market with literally every other person in the world with a vaguely similar idea.

      Capitalism only benefits the people who won the game before everyone else had a complete grasp of the rules. It won't even work for them forever; the harder they play, the less is left for them to win. Capitalism will one day be remembered mainly as the most efficient way to exploit a community to death. Unfortunately, most of us have to rediscover what a functioning community is first, and that's not going to happen before an economic collapse that kills thousands of white people.

  2. Fleeing abusive companies? by robinsonne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where are customers supposed to flee to? Many of these companies are de facto monopolies in many areas or at the very least in lock-step with their "competitors." There aren't very many choices for tech companies unless you want to do without, which is unpalatable for many.

    1. Re:Fleeing abusive companies? by Matheus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ^ This exactly (mod parent up).

      Every single company listed in the summary has little to fear from competition at the moment. They have no incentive to placate the user base so the corporate drive of "maximize profits and growth" goes unabated.

    2. Re:Fleeing abusive companies? by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's almost like large organizations have voting rights.

      What do you mean "almost"?

      They have more voting rights than you, me, or anyone.

      And you know what? We've got "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who will fight you tooth-and-nail to defend that, in spite of their own interests.

      --
      BMO

    3. Re:Fleeing abusive companies? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nononono, they don't have voting rights. They get to choose who you may vote for, and you then get to choose between their candidates.

      IIRC it's called "separation of power" or something like that.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    4. Re:Fleeing abusive companies? by xlsior · · Score: 5, Funny

      "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company"

  3. Where would we flee to? by Maxwell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Required comment: the big corps have won. Deal with it.

    1. Re:Where would we flee to? by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I work for a big corp, and we don't treat our customers like crap.

      I think what you're looking at is companies like Comcast who have government guaranteed monopoly in the areas they serve. Smaller outfits or community broadband outfits are either forbidden from competing or are forced to pay exorbitant easement fees. Not by the federal government, but by the local governments. For companies in Comcast's position, there's no need to be concerned how you treat the customer, mainly because the local governments tell them not to worry about it.

  4. Customer/product by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Remember, if something is free you aren't the customer, you are the product and so long as they're not pissing off their advertisers these companies can do anything that doesn't significantly reduce their user counts.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  5. Free market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.

    The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.

  6. People should leave. They Don't. by whistlingtony · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Right after the BP oil spill, I stood outside my house and watched cars go into an AM/PM for gas. Right across the road was a Shell (not that Shell is innocent or anything). I thought to myself "BP just did a Bad Thing, why are people buying from AM/PM? It says 'part of BP' right on the sign!"

    Perhaps it was habit? Perhaps it was that the gas was 5cents cheaper a gallon?

    This still bugs me to this day. Five cents a gallon, with each person having approximately a 10-15gal tank.. They couldn't or wouldn't spend 50-75 cents to send a message.

    There are already a lot of posts saying "where would they go to?". I get that. I do. But we still need to pull our heads out of our (not so) collective asses. There is only one thing that a company fears, and that is a drop in profit. As long as it's profitable to take advantage of us, they will. It's not THAT much effort to be a conscious consumer. People have been doing it with food. They just need to extend it to other things.

    1. Re:People should leave. They Don't. by idontgno · · Score: 5, Informative

      Perhaps it was habit? Perhaps it was that the gas was 5cents cheaper a gallon?

      A nickle a gallon? I'd buy gasoline made from pressed baby kitties and the condensed death agonies of the last endangered whales on earth for a 5 cents a gallon less than the local competitors.

      I guess that makes me part of the problem.

      And, of course, as other responders have pointed out, the BP pumps were stocked from the exact same local distributor as the Shell pumps across the street, and the Exxon ones up the road, and the "independent" one across town... and quite possibly all from crude from the platform and oil field that went "boom!".

      So unless you were willing to completely give up all petroleum products (including textiles and agro-chemical based foodstuffs), or drill your own well in your own back yard and build your own refinery, you aren't going to be able to avoid feeding the machine you hate. Welcome to the 21st Century.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  7. Lesser of two evils. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Funny

    " Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?"

    Sure, would love to move. Where do you want me to go, Boardwalk or Park Place?

  8. Flee? That's what they want. by PPH · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The best (most profitable) customer is the one that can be bullied into puting up with your bullshit. The demanding ones, the ones who know how the service should work and cause trouble when it doesn't measure up are worth getting rid of.

    Thank you, sir. May I have another?

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  9. Not putting up with jerks by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You don't have to put up with jerks.

    • Internet provider - Sonic.net DSL. No packet filtering, good support, no nonsense.
    • Phone - Caterpillar B15 ruggeized Android phone.. Bought from Caterpillar dealer, not carrier. Declined Google account at first power up. Google services disabled. No updates from Google.
    • Cellular carrier - T-Mobile. Has no control over phone. No carrier apps.
    • Email - IMAP server. SpamAssassin spam blocking.
    • Main desktop machine - Ubuntu 12.4 LTS.
    • No Google account. No Twitter account. No pay TV. Ad blocking on all browsers.
    • Main news source - Reuters. (More news about Ukraine and ISIS, less about Bieber and Apple.)
    • Main food store - Trader Joe's. No "club card" required. Good prices.

    For almost every crap business, there's a competitor that isn't crap. Find them.

  10. The "free market" rewards greed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The "free market" rewards greed in all forms. It is intended to reward these behaviors.

    The entire purpose of capitalism is to turn the greed in human nature into a force of productivity. But the side effect is that it rewards that greed. One of the only things that can keep that greed in check is regulation. But that has a side effect of creating a separate power base and thus regulatory capture and barriers to entry and so on. So what's the next step? How do we watch the watchers? We need a new framework for productivity but I am confident we can find it. Civilization and democracy has reliably marched forward. The world has (mostly) ended slavery, brought reading and writing to the masses, eradicated diseases, put a man on the moon, and so on.

    This science of "how much the consumer will endure" is not limited to tech companies -- nor even customers. This is the approach of the corporation to all matters, legal, financial, PR, lobbying, etc. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. Sure there are a few good corporations, and some acts of altruism and benevolence. But the "free market" rewards greed.

    So we need a new framework for productivity, and we need to start looking now.

  11. Run away! Run away! by Obfuscant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?

    Fleeing to where? Some other company where the service is just as bad or worse?

    I'm currently displeased with T-Mobile and the lies they told me about their "no overages fees" promise. I walked into AT&T and asked "how much to put your SIM in my phone?"

    "$20 a month for 300Mb data, unlimited talk/text". Oh, ok!

    "Plus $25/month to use a phone with that service." WTF? You can buy a service that requires a phone and then charge EXTRA to be able to use a phone with it? MY own phone, to boot?

    I could understand if you were adding additional devices to the service (two phones sharing one plan, e.g.). I could understand a charge to get a phone from them. But I consider it dishonest to separate out the plan from any devices that you need to have to use that service. It makes the cost look artificially low.

    $20/month! Great deal. $45/month, not so good anymore.

    Adding in that they charge for texts coming through the email to SMS gateway despite being "unlimited text", the service was more expensive for less product. I could choose to send a message to T-Mobile but it would wind up costing me more per month, and I have no reason to believe that AT&T's customer service is any better than T-Mobile's.

    So, it is likely that the idea of fleeing companies with bad customer service would only result in increased thrashing as 100 people move from company A to company B and 100 move from B to A, and 200 people find out that neither one is any good at helping them, and 200 people find out that they couldn't get as good a deal at their new provider as they had at the old.

    There is also the issue of the devil you know vs. the one you don't. AT&T may have better service, but they probably don't, and I already know how bad T-Mobile is. Changing providers for no benefit, added cost, and potentially no better service is a lose for me and T-Mobile probably wouldn't even notice.