Has online customer service taken a nosedive in recent years?

[bernard]

I don't know if it is just me, but I feel like service in general has become absolutely lacklustre in recent years. Companies spend a lot of time making it almost impossible to find a chat agent and if you do get through, you have to wait a long time. I don't think 15-30 minutes of wait is ok if you're a big hosting company to use an example.

Then when you finally get through, you talk to some Indian. Now, nothing against Indians (actually I do have a lot of bad experiences with indians), but most of these customer reps are absolutely useless. They are just trained to copy paste some boiler plate nonsense. Google is infamous for this, where complete incompetents copy paste useless shit ad infinitum while having some badge as "premium contributor".

I feel the rage really building when talking some third world incompetent, when I want to fix something in my business. It instantly reflects very poorly on the company.

Second, I see more and more companies just blatantly fucking with you, like taking money from your card without sending you a receipt. Big companies. Then when you complain, they just say "fuck off" in nicer terms. In the past, you would usually get compensation for small mistakes like this. '

Part of a bigger problem?

I think so.

I think big online companies have too lax laws and are too removed from their customers.

I have bad days with pain and fatigue and those days I have absolutely no tolerance for bs companies and corporations.

 

[eliquid]

This isn't just ONLINE customer service. But customer service overall in general everywhere.

I remember the days if you waited too long in McDonalds drive thru they would say they were sorry and give you a free apple pie, cookies, and upsize your fries. Yeah, I lol too thinking about it, but this wasn't the only example.

I remember I paid a lot of money to go to Disney World one year with the family and on check in, they were not ready with our fancy room at the Grand Floridian I got. We waited like 2 more hours than we should have. They took good care of us in that 2 hours so we weren't just sitting there and in the end they upgraded our room to a massive quad suite in the corner of the hotel with the best view in the whole hotel. I swear, this was something like Walt himself would have stayed in.

While I paid a lot of money for a nice room, I didn't pay for what was basically half a floor where all the rooms themselves were penthouse-esqe each and interconnected.

Today though?

Yeah stuff like that isn't going to happen.

No offense to younger folks, but today you have a 19 year old at the counter, a 21 year old as their manager, and maybe some 30 year old neckbeard as their Director that only is thinking about what time they get off work to watch Breaking Bad reruns and play a round of DOTA. Peoples morals and attitude in general as individuals are at a shitty all time high to begin with.

They don't care if you lost time, had a bad experience, or need extra attention for something.

But it's not ONLY their fault, the company itself also does not care anymore because extra time, extra "things" ( apple pies and bigger suites ) all cost money and it's all about the bottom line that day. More people will come, more money will still flow in, so let whoever is put out stay put out.

When you back both those things together.. shitty attitudes of workers with companies that don't care, you get what you have today. The shitty people stay at the companies and nothing changes.

But when the companies take time to care and weed out those shitty attitudes, you have a company that grooms and weeds out bad employees and is eventually left with better or good employees that have good attitudes.

This is why you have places like Chik-fi-la. A company that not only is damn good at customer service, but is making more money per store than McDonalds and Burger King combined at almost every market.

In the end, things are only going to get worse. For every Chik-fi-la like company, you have 999 Burger Kings that don't care. Companies can make millions and billions being shitty, so why change?

At some point they do end crashing and burning, but that takes years. Look at JCPennys and Sears and Toys R Us. Sure, they have crashed and burned, but someone at the top had decades to cash out their golden parachute.

 

[bernard]

Google has abysmal customer. Google has tons of obsolete tutorials. Google for some reason redirects all their indexed content from Advertisercommunity to some new url frontpage, so that all indexed results give no result when clicked.

It wont impact them in the slightest.

This is about all the things you mention @eliquid but Google could not get away with this if they werent a monopoly.

I also have been desperately trying to avoid a certain company, but they've simply bought out each and every competitior and now I'm stuck with their shitty service again.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I got a domain transferred to me to (sigh) GoDaddy recently. No matter what I did, I could not verify the change in WhoIs data. You had to click links in emails to do this, but the page would load and say "invalid" or something with not enough info to figure out what to do.

So I call GoDaddy and eventually get connected to some cheap outsourced customer service. It was an Indian chick who could speak perfect English, but her accent was so thick I was having a hard time understanding her through her crappy headset.

She starts out by just reading crap from a script until she realizes I have a real problem on my hand and abandons the script, but starts getting pissed at me (lol) because I had to have her repeat herself every few sentences.

She's trying to come up with these workarounds, making me change my GoDaddy account email to match the one I need on the WhoIs info, just tons of little hacks and tricks, wasting both of our time. Finally she decides she needs to escalate my call to a higher department and I go on hold again.

While on hold, I'm still trying stuff myself and open up a private browser and then click the links in the email. Perfecto. Turns out if you're logged in while clicking the links, it won't work.

If I was nice I'd have stayed on the line and told GoDaddy that, but the experience was already so useless and frustrating that I just hung up.

Had a pal screenshot me a chat log with them from the other day, and the GoDaddy customer support guy on the other end couldn't even copy and paste in readable English. It was insane.

GoDaddy and 1&1 Hosting are supreme examples of companies that are brute-forcing their way to the top with huge marketing budgets while having sub-par everything else.

 

[bernard]

Yeah that's exactly the thing I'm talking about.

 

[GNews]

My experiences with GoDaddy have been A1. Can't deny that, in reading the post above.

But i agree.. Every since we started exporting customer service to foreign countries, it's gotten worse and worse.

Why? It's simple. I've lived in the Dominican Republic 4 years.... Serbia , Italy, Croatia... for 30+ days each.

Our services and understanding are far more ahead and the way people think/do things in foreign places = way more relaxed and dimissive. Companies don't even give refunds to a lot of smaller countries, they totally abuse the people there honestly. Dominican Republic Ikea .. i couldn't believe the shit they did..... irritates me just thinking about it.

 

[Erayz]

Yep.
When the internet was still new ans more customers were needed, they had to be nice.
Now many companies have reached critical mass they can cut costs knowing that it's much harder to gain customers than loose them.

On the other side there is the myth that "good customer service", whatever that may be, will beat low prices.
Walmart proved that concept wrong, then came Amazon and took it one step further with the pitch that people and inventory weren't even needed.

There are still a few examples of great customer service companies, but they only seem in niches that are oversupplied and generally are a hobby or enthusiast market.