[ryandrake]

Last time I had to fight a company's customer support over them owing money to me (admittedly a couple of orders of magnitude less than OP), it was a mix of "It's someone else's fault, call them" and "Computer says no". Customer support is friendly, cheerful, and are trained to at least act sad that customer is having trouble. Lots of "I'm sorry that you are having trouble but I can't..."

Most companies' customer support seems to center around: 1. frustrate the customer with a long phone tree quest, hoping the customer goes away without figuring out and invoking the magic button sequence that takes them to a human, and 2. once the customer reaches a person, shower customer with empathy and politeness but do not solve their problem, hoping they just go away in frustration.

Customer support can generally only do "happy path" things that you can do on the web site yourself. Pay your bill? Sure thing. Read to you your account information? Of course. Fish your account out of purgatory because of a one in a million edge cases causing some sloppy code to divide by zero? No chance in hell. "I'm so sorry you are having that issue, let me please forward you to someone else..."

[londons_explore]

Remember that most companies don't really trust their support employees to behave honestly. There are often thousands of them, and the turnover is high, and the opportunity for an employee to credit $1000 to their mates account and then not show up to work again is rather high.

I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...

[zopa]

Sure, but these are low-paid jobs with no agency. Of course turnover is high. If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.

[techsupporter]

> If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.

This is 100% accurate, in my experience. You even gave the answer in your first sentence:

> these are low-paid jobs with no agency.

If they weren't low-paid jobs with no agency, a lot of trust and retention would follow, almost like magic. (Of course there would still be people who abuse or mess up the intended system; that's why you have internal business controls and vetting.)

A long time ago, I worked overnight customer support for a very large ISP, via an outsourcing company. On the overnight shift, there was no distinction between technical support and billing because call volumes were so much lower. Also because of being on the overnight shift, we had much greater authority to make account adjustments and fixes because the employees who worked directly for the ISP didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night to approve requests. All we needed was a second coworker to sign off. Oh, and we got paid a 25% differential for the shift.

People would actively try to move onto the overnight shift. Our group inside the outsourcing company had the lowest turnover rate by far and was helped by one year our overnight shift had zero turnover. Two of my coworkers even declined being promoted to daytime lead so they could stay working overnights.

Yes, the pay was good even though the hours were not so great, but the autonomy was better. We were treated like adults; we didn't even have a technical support script because no one from the ISP had come to officially train us so we weren't "allowed" to use the script in the knowledge repository. We had access to the billing tools that would tell us why an account was in a certain state and so we could actually fix, or at least tell the customer about, problems instead of offering them a "trouble ticket" and a "one-time credit of $15 for your issue."

It was amazing and I'm often sad that our industry has forgotten that humans are the point of all of this.

[mint2]

You may find this article has an interesting look at how many companies do their phone support. It really explains how the service got to be so awful.

https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...