[texan]

"Wait, are you saying the headset can’t connect to a computer via native Bluetooth? And you knew it the whole time? While you asked me to try a different device, to update drivers, to install Jabra software, to meet with your technician… You were just trying to wear me down?!?"

This encapsulates what is most wrong and abhorrent about US customer service. This methodology is employed by thousands of companies, it is ingrained in the culture of their customer service reps. It is a "Never Back Down" attitude. They will consistently string a desperate customer along, through a maze of reps and procedures, knowing that the customer is more likely to burn out and give up before realizing that the road they are being led down does not result in resolution of the issue.

There are companies that do not engage in such behavior, yet they are primarily B2B rather than consumer facing, and usually in regard to items that are being purchased in the dollar range of tens and hundreds of thousands.

[SaltyBackendGuy]

I work in the B2B space. One thing I've noticed is that if Enterprises aren't happy with the product they signed up for or the product doesn't deliver as promised they will refuse to pay (The ultimate motivator).

I feel like in the customer space you have less leverage and it's more of a headache to simply not pay or get a refund (in this case).

[hotsauceror]

It's surprising to me how much power enterprises have over every aspect of a business relationship. Our company was acquired by a Large Consultancy. The first thing they did was tell our (corporate) landlord, "We pay everything 90 days late, and we will not pay late fees. Period." And that was that. Anyone else trying to violate the terms of a contract would be told where to go but the landlord swallowed it without a second thought.

[CountSessine]

That's not enterprise 'power' - that's leverage. The landlord could have told them to go kick rocks and your boss would have had to come up with a new offer or would have been scrambling to find a new office that optimized for your needs. This suggests that the market for office space in your city favors renters. Just wait and see what happens to your 'contract' when the market shifts!

[dublo7]

Where is this business located? Our city has a real estate boom going on. The landlord night honor the lease rather than incur the cost of fighting it but would be unlikely to renew with that attitude.

Then again evicting a person is hard enough. I have no idea how hard it is to evict a company.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Can you imagine the prices and support you'd get if customer purchases were net-10?

Buy something with your credit card and if it's garbage, you just tell your credit card to hold payment.

[pjmlp]

Yes, testing, proper programming languages and QA processes would finally be taken seriously by management.

[jopsen]

Assuming you don't have massive fraud issues, it wouldn't change anything.

When the product has a low price and many customers, then if the product works for most people. Things are fine :)

A Bluetooth headset that works with your phone works for most people.

[twunde]

Agreed. There is limited leverage in the customer space. The main balance are regulatory agencies and your state district attorneys. Something that will get a company's attention in a hurry is when a district attorney or a regulatory agency calls.

[ConceptJunkie]

If you've purchased something, you've already paid. If you want your money back, you have to do the legwork, and about the only option you have is to get a refund from the place where you bought it.

[bluedino]

My company refusing to pay CDW or Headsets.com doesn't hurt Jabra in anyway.

[jnty]

It does when large resellers suddenly drop their entire range as unprofitable.

[josefresco]

This resonated with me because a few months back I went back and forth with Comcast regarding my shitty Internet speeds. Eventually I gave up, exhausted and unwilling to invest more time into a path I knew would not fix my issue (spoiler: Comcast has over sold our local network)

Here's the summary:

1. Notice my Internet speed was especially shitty on Sunday.

2. Run speed test (laughably slow), post to Twitter, tag Comcast.

3. Comcast replies, blaming my wifi and device.

4. Post more speed tests from other devices, within inches of my router. Post speed tests during off hours showing how the speed recovers.

5. Comcast still blames my wifi. How this explains why I get full speeds at 5AM I have no idea.

6. Run speed test (graphed and logged) from a wired PC, send to Comcast.

7. Comcast techs immediately "notice some issues" with my home connection. Why they didn't see this on step 2? No idea.

8. Technician comes, replaces some connections but nothing obvious, we geek out, he's an awesome guy and basically explains that my town got shafted with too few "nodes". He explains in his town, the user to node ratio is much better. His last advice is for me to get a "combo" router/modem from Comcast, instead of my leased modem and third-party (new) router. His explains this might help a tiny bit but has no other advice for me (other than move to his town - hilarious)

This final setp would involve me taking my modem (Internet down the whole time) to my local Comcast office (during work hours), and hopefully getting a combo router/modem with no issues.

I would then need to setup new combo device, and then graph and log my connection speed on Sunday and engage support again. At this point, there would be nothing they could do for me because I will have already exhausted all options. A new combo router/modem will not improve my speeds of 2 Kbps during peak hours so this is where I gave up!

[ericol]

Well, I had a similar experience with... Coursera, a couple weeks ago, so I assume it affects the whole spectrum of customer support.

I was doing a course, and had to access a Jupyter Notebook that was residing in a different server. When clicking the URL, the page will appear with a loading circle, and would die out after around 5 minutes (I measured it).

I was using my laptop (W7 + Chrome) but have a server also running Debian, with Forefox as browser. Tested in both places before accesing the chat.

I put as much into in the chat before hand.

A person shows up, tells me to "clean cookies and cache".

Tell her about the different test (This was never acknowledged, BTW).

Tells me "must be your connection".

"OK, let me test with my G4 phone"

"That kind of connections can be what is giving you problems, try ADSL"

OK, this is getting funny now.

Tells me to test a different url that she sends me over the chat.

"OK, not working here, let me test in firefox"

"We advise to only use Chrome, our apps might not work in other browsers" (THEIR page stated otherwise, and it was not a browser problem)

Told her nothing works: Tested Chrome on W7 over G4, Firefox in Debian over ADSL, nothing.

"Coursera cannot take responsibility about the content, we can only support the apps" ???

So, I was having a chat with a support tech that couldn't tell one thing form the other, as it was obviously the server (Had tried other notebooks from the same course)

Finally, asked to raise this to 2nd level. Told me not to ask opther people to download the notebook for me, as in that case if I submitted my work this would be taken as if it worked.

A couple of hours later, I notice a "forceRefresh" parameter in the url, changed it's value, app starts working.

As a side note, based in my experience support people are not prepared to deal with people with a certain technical level on the customer end.

[bubblethink]

>His last advice is for me to get a "combo" router/modem from Comcast, instead of my leased modem and third-party (new) router.

Bad idea. However, you shouldn't be leasing a modem. Buy them outright. Breaks even in a few months.

[jvagner]

I need to replace my Charter modem about once a year... does that hold true even in that case?

This has been true for at least the last 5 years running.

[cptskippy]

Even with the latest DOCSIS modems, Comcast has been deprecating 2 channel and 4 channel modems in favor of 8 and 16 channel devices.

Were you buying the cheapest supported modem? Your modem was probably deprecated when you bought it.

Also, at least for Comcast, the fact that they don't support your modem doesn't mean it won't work. It just means they won't be pushing updates and if you call in with a problem they'll tell you to first replace the modem.

[bubblethink]

Replace for what reason ? That sounds abnormal if you have such a high failure rate. Might point to electrical issues in your house.

[jvagner]

Not sure.. the Charter employees who come out usually test everything and everything else tests normal.

They don't seem bothered by the frequency ("is normal..")

Everything else connected to that part of the house seems normal.

The cable junction point out in the yard is usually under water... they replaced all that too, but said that's normal for this neighborhood (we're adjacent to wetlands). How that bombs out the modem inside the house continues to be a mystery.

I'm probably here for one or two more replacements, and I'll move to another part of my city.

[js2]

As counter points, here’s some companies I’ve dealt with recently that had excellent customer service: Home Depot, Lowe’s, Moen, REI, Garmin, Prana.

With all of them I either had a customer service rep on the phone within minutes and a replacement shipped to me free of charge without argument, or was able to easily return/exchange an item well past any reasonable return period, in some cases without receipt. On products that were years to over a decade old. Heck, Prana is shipping me a new pair of pants when all I requested was a replacement button to sew on myself.

There are companies that provide good customer service and we should reward them with our business. But this service costs those companies money and your average consumer, I reckon, looks only at price.

[wil421]

I’ve started to only buy from companies who are know for customer service. If you know your buying from a good place it’s worth paying a few percent more. Just in case something happens. Trying to get off Amazon as well even if it means driving to Fry’s or Microcenter and paying more.

I will also try to buy from places who are known for treating their employees like human beings, REI for example.

[robk]

It's far far worse in Europe ESPECIALLY if offshored to a low GDP country.

[carlob]

But in Europe we have stronger customer protection laws: if something doesn't work as advertised you have 1-3 years (depending on the country) to bring it back to whoever sold it to you. Then it's their problem to deal with the manufacturer.

[vinay427]

In practice, it's far less effective than what most Americans enjoy. Return policies are usually abysmal in most of Europe, to begin with, and long term support is only technically better because of more regulations on warranties. In practice, American firms are far more lenient with their policies and credit cards alone provide more protections than most all of the EU regulations seek to implement.

[rb666]

This is just anecdotal nonsense, what factual sources do you have for this as it is completely contrary to my experience.

[vinay427]

It is definitely anecdotal. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'll try to find some relevant data, though I'm not sure how easy that will be. Slightly more helpful are maybe looking up policies for most credit cards, which now let you return virtually any item within 90 days for any reason, extend warranties to a total of 2-4 years, cover accidental damage to items including breakage and theft for 90 days after purchase, and offer historical price matching for 60-90 days or sometimes even longer. These policies are extremely difficult to come by where I live (not in the US), and I've had a far more difficult time returning items that really should be returnable (dry pasta or something very shelf-stable) than I did in the States.

I did find this snippet, which at least indicates that Americans more often take advantage of return policies. However, I understand that this doesn't directly discuss the differences in policies:

"In the US, an estimated 8–10% of in-store sales is returned whereas online sales may result in 25–40% returns. [...] In Asia and Europe, less than 5 percent of purchases are returned." https://psmag.com/magazine/underwear-of-uncertain-origin

More anecdotes in that article, and countless other anecdotes are trivial to find online:

> U.S. retailers pride themselves on their generous return policies. At Costco, I can buy a barbecue grill, cook on it all summer, then return it in the fall for a full refund. (Which is not to say that I would.) Or take the proverbial television bought for Super Bowl Sunday, then returned. The days leading up to professional football’s championship game see a huge spike in TV sales. And just as reliably, the days after the game see a spike in TVs returned to the store.

[NeedMoreTea]

It is so much easier to get a refund in Europe if being stonewalled on support. The legal liability rests with the retailer (Certainly in the UK, I think it's EU wide), and there are the concepts of "merchantable quality" and "expected life" that vary depending on the product and cost. Plenty of case law establishing those as quite high bars. If they ever get problematic quote the magic words of the title of the Act. Refund usually agreed, even at 6 or 12 months, sometimes much longer.

That's after the UK took a step or two down in consumer protection in adopting the EU regulations.

Where we do less well, particularly among the younger generation, is a belief that 30 day return windows and other such fairy tales actually mean anything legally speaking. I think that might be thanks to reading so many US perspectives online.

[llampx]

You're saying that you are able to return stuff more easily than in the US? Or that there is more of a customer support culture in Europe? I have lived in the US and currently live in Germany, this is demonstrably false.

[llampx]

I live in Europe and do like the idea of having a 2 year warranty by default for many things, but I dread the idea of actually using it. Customer service in Europe has a long way to go before it matches the US. There are many things that are better in the US, and many that are better in Europe.

[emerongi]

I went to a warranty provider of a well-known tech company, was turned down, then sent an e-mail to the "global warranty support" or whatever. Some Russian basically told me to go fuck myself. It was kind of funny (the response fit the "stereotypical Russian" image), but I'm never buying products from that company ever again.

[llampx]

Name and shame.

[grawprog]

>This encapsulates what is most wrong and abhorrent about US customer service.

It doesn't help that the majority of 'US customer service' isn't actually located in the USA but outsourced overseas. The Philipines handles a lot of T-Mobile and Verizon's customer service calls.

They have strict rules to make sure customers don't find out about this. To the point where employees will be fired if they're found speaking their dialect near any phones.

[tantalor]

> US customer service

Jabra is Danish.

[mikestew]

Danish or not, it looks like the author dealt with North America support, a division likely build by people who have worked at other North America support divisions, and despite what corporate HQ says, will fall into North American support habits. 'cuz Danish or not, they still have numbers to meet.

[cududa]

Jabras customer support is in Germany