We have all been there. You’ve got a problem with your car or your internet or your flight, so you call customer service. And then you get routed, rerouted, and then re-rerouted – for hours. The call gets dropped, and after a few minutes of screaming into the void, you start the whole thing all over again.
Or you get a virtual assistant that, no matter how many times you yell “operator!”, will not connect you to a real person. And then slowly, your will to fight starts to dissolve.
After enduring his own customer service ordeal, reporter Chris Colin started to wonder if these headaches and frustrations of customer care are by design.
In a recent article for The Atlantic, Chris says, a lot of times they are.
Roman speaks with Chris about those obstacles baked into customer service, and some strategies for surviving the worst aspects of modern day customer care.
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One trick I have learned is to couch what you really want into something innocuous. I got royally pissed at a major phone provider, made other arrangements for phone service and called to disconnect my service. When they said “how can I help you” I told them I wanted to disconnect service. Cllck. Four times. Then I asked in my sweetest little old lady voice “I need to change my service, please.” They bit. I got my disconnect. And I will never again to business with At-At, that was 10 years ago.
Not fair to blame consumers for still choosing to patronize bad actors when unchecked mergers and acquisitions have only left one actor in many markets. As one example, before the United and Continental merger, both airlines would offer direct flights at effectively the same time of day for the routes I usually travel; not so anymore!
Thank you for 15 years of entertainment and information. I have listened to untold hours of the work you all put out and I’m so thankful that it’s been there for this time. I had honestly forgotten about several of the things that got brought up towards the end of this episode.
I hope you somehow have 15 more years in you because there are so many mostly invisible things to explore and bring to the light.
But regardless of how long this continues I will keep listening and I hope you always stay passionate because that comes through and touches all of us listeners.
The term for this is enshittification
Listening to this episode today, December 3rd, I realized I have a name for what I am going through right now: sludge. The day this episode came out, October 28th, a delivery driver for a major online retailer hit my car parked in front of my house in one of the retailer’s delivery vans. The driver was delivering packages to our residence and to our neighbors directly across the street. These neighbors witnessed the entire accident from start to finish and even spoke to the driver face-to-face. Here I am, six weeks later, with no resolution or acknowledgement of responsibility on the part of the driver, the retailer, or its third-party administrator of insurance claims (note not actually an insurance company itself, just another layer of sludge) even though I’ve gotten the police and my state’s insurance commissioner involved and submitted signed statements from the neighbors to just about everyone as proof. The retailer’s special “incident response team” requires multiple steps to reach, and I’ve experienced long hold times, hang ups, argumentative call center agents, and the retailer and its TPA sending me back and forth for answers. It’s been a maddening experience. Listening to Chris Colin talk about his experiences dealing with Ford, I felt my heart rate go up because I realized I probably have at least two more months of wading through sludge.
I’ve been a customer of said retailer for 25 years and even pay an extra monthly fee for services. As Chris said, I feel like my only recourse as a consumer lost in their sludge is to severe all ties.