[lancewiggs]

While the main thrust of the story is concerning, what really makes me feel ill are the scripted responses. The service agents are just picking responses from a list and hitting send. They appear to have no ability to apply thought to the process, and no authority to delegate up. I'm sure the staff are smart and frustrated, and I'm reasonably sure that they are constrained by their systems and processes. But how good would it be if the very first agent was able to actually address the question. My suggested answer would be "yes, this does seem very low, but that's what we are told - 95% of people use less than 2gb per month. It seems a little ridiculous. I can switch you to the 3gb plan of you like - it's cheaper as well (my guess). " No matter what the response it's time to stop this cruel and unusual punishment of both CS staff and customers.

[seanp2k2]

All that sounds great and I agree with you 100%...however, since they're a public company, their first priority is to maximize profits, and that is exactly what they're doing here. Since USA citizens are so lazy that they let telco lobbyist groups write the laws and don't riot over them when they're passed by bought politicians, we have to deal with idiotic support as described above.

This is also the reason that the sales drones at Best Buy just read the product packaging when you ask them a question about it. Unskilled labor is cheap, and these days, almost all level 1 support is unskilled (think across industries, not just IT; IT still has some great lvl1 support if you look hard enough.)

[nitrogen]

I think it is unreasonable to expect the masses to "riot over" any issue that doesn't go their way. After all, the various industry associations didn't have to start any riots, blackout any web sites, or send hundreds of thousands of messages to get their laws passed. There must be a better way.

[JonWood]

Is causing your customers to think you're ripping them of, and making them look elsewhere for service actually maximising profit though?

Given the cost of acquiring a customer they should be bending over backwards to keep existing customers.

[ilmare]

Yes, since they know customers have nowhere else to go.