[ucm_edge]

For me the worst is you talk to someone at a company, be it phone or support chat, and it becomes clear the person wants to help but the policies of the company prevent their customer support people from doing anything meaningful. The support person has no power, may not even be employed by the company in question, etc.

Then you get the salt in the wound customer satisfaction survey of "Did X resolve your issue today?", "Was X polite to you?", etc. If you score the person low you can cost them the job. If you score the high, the company celebrates high customer satisfaction.

You almost never see the question "Did the company put our support person in a position to help you successfully?"

The most blatant offender I ran into recently was Verizon has made a number of things like updating your autopay method app/website only. You can call Verizon customer support and talk to a human and all they can do is tell you they literally cannot take your credit card and you need the app. Because someone at Verizon decided their humans can take one time payments but not update autopay.

[tkuraku]

I had this exact issue with at&t. They weren't honoring a promotion that we signed up for. I talked to the support people and they verbally told me that they agreed with my assessment of the situation. It took taking at&t to small claims court to reach someone with any ability to help me. The situation was quickly resolved after they received the summons to court.

[michaelmrose]

In my not so humble opinion the bigger problem is the inherent complexity and opacity of billing. If buying your communication and entertainment services were similar in complexity to buying your groceries few people would have issues to resolve. If you want apples and beans the price is apples + beans and nobody pays 15c an Apple today and $7 an apple next month.

The current model makes money due to lack of options and attrition where fewer people are willing to threaten to switch the 4th time or jump ship every year. Some pay more than reasonable others jump through hoops like trained seals. It's not the best model for anyone.

Support dollars are better spent on actual problems instead of such self inflicted wounds as billing complexity.

[fxtentacle]

In my experience, the best option is usually to print your issues onto professional-looking paper and send a registered letter to their legal contact.

Lawyers are the only people that are still allowed to make decisions in modern corporations.

[posguy]

The baby bells, especially Verizon lean heavily on automation and self serve tooling, its how they keep shedding employees year after year despite increasing revenue.

Verizon on the Wireless side has so little bloat compared to AT&T from what I saw.

[orf]

Why would you give credit card information over the phone to anyone? I’m not in the US but that sounds crazy.

[Jensson]

Not more crazy than giving it at the restaurant or store. They can easily memorize or take a picture the last secret digits and the system has written down the rest.

The whole system builds on trust and humans are pretty trustworthy. Bots are much less trustworthy, since untrustworthy humans can leverage bots or spam to contact millions of people each.

[orf]

> Not more crazy than giving it at the restaurant or store

But why would you let your card leave your sight? I don’t understand.

The waiter brings over a payment terminal or you go over to it, then you tap or insert your card. When could they take a picture? How would they even use the details without your PIN number? The whole system isn’t built on trust because that would be stupid when it comes to money.

Or are you saying the trust element is that they are not using a terminal that somehow clones your card and pin?

[hansvm]

> why would you let your card leave your sight?

That's the status quo for how those transactions work in the US.

> When could they take a picture, how could they even use the details without our PIN, the whole system isn't buit with trust because that woudl be stupid when it comes to money

The average person with no training can remember 8 uniformly random digits, and an hour of training bumps that up to 20 -- more than enough to recall a credit card and its PIN, even ignoring the immense amount of redundant information in how those are constructed. Plus nearly invisible video feeds are a reality. Plus pass-through broken credit card capture systems are a cheap reality, and one that claims untold billions of dollars at US gas stations, and many multiples of that amount at european ATMs. Any system that depends on the secrecy of those digits is fundamentally broken, and our payment system does, so it's fundamentally broken. The only reason it doesn't appear that way is that most people don't try to exploit it, and most of the rest leave enough breadcrumbs that after enough 10s of millions of fraud they can be arrested. The remaining few percent of fraud is baked into the prices you see and the taxes you pay.

[orf]

I wasn’t aware that this was the situation in the US.

> and one that claims untold billions of dollars at US gas stations, and many multiples of that amount at european ATMs

I’m interested in why you think this - from everything I can find US card fraud rates are at a minimum 10x compared to the EU.

The way the US makes payments seems very insecure/backwards, with a lack of chip and pin, relying on signatures and even using cheques still.

A 10x reduction in fraud by using basic measures other countries have adopted seems sensible.

Decrying them because there is no perfect system and “anyone can remember a pin” is a call to keep the status quo and the fraud that comes with it.

[is_true]

Google does this. They even tell you that they cannot help you because but you get a lot of empathy

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Respect the user (without supporting the user) ™

[sacnoradhq]

Which part of Google? Google is run like 450 half-assed companies.

[is_true]

I've experienced this with My Business and AdWords.

[mint2]

UPS phone support might as well be a chat bot for all they are allowed to do.

Also Rescheduling a package is is a nightmare. Its like they intentionally tried to make the delivery estimates and updates as unhelpful and bad as possible to mess with you.

[sacnoradhq]

To be fair, most things are out of reach of the central retail customer service line.

Many special-case requests have to be handled locally, and it's often spitting into a hurricane trying to get someone there to pickup the phone.

[sacnoradhq]

The biz consulting jargon would be "empowerment."