[wNjdbfm]

Tangentially related: My wife worked in customer service for a few years remotely and would regularly vent to me about it. One of the interesting things that she said is that we are training an annoyingly large subset of customers that if they just make themselves annoying enough they get free stuff. Eventually the company decides to reward their craziness by caving to their demands and creating a weird incentive dynamic which repeats. Obviously I can’t give specifics but she said the % of her day spent on people in that category grew steadily over the years she was in that line of work. Anyone else in that area experience similar?

[wNjdbfm]

I thought of an example of my own so I don’t accidentally throw my wife under the bus accidentally. I was on a flight and it was cancelled for some reason after we had boarded. We all had to go to the customer service desk to make new arrangements and whatnot. The dude in front of me didn’t like the solution they provided (if I recall it was a night in an airport hotel and a flight out next day). He started yelling, berating the customer service person, generally being an ass, and they ended up giving him airline miles and an upgrade in the future in addition to he initial offer. Being next in line and having overhead everything I said “I’d like the offer you gave him”. They said “no”. So I guess at that point I can either accept the initial offer or start yelling like the other guy did until they give me the good offer. The incentive in this system is to act like an ass. Pretty unfortunate.

[underlipton]

I've been on the other end, as a rideshare driver whose app frequently malfunctions/customers rescind tips/etc. When anything other than, "Get order, pick up, drop off, get paid," happens, you call customer service. They bounce you around, you ask for a supervisor, voice your original complaint AND how you had to deal with being bounced around and put on hold, etc. The supervisor issues some sort of reparation (sometimes less than what was originally lost, occasionally more). It's a bandage over the broken processes that the company can't be assed to fixed, because the alternative is drivers becoming so fed up that they quit driving, and suddenly you don't have a business anymore.

I suspect that the cause is further up the chain, and possibly even out of corporate's ability to fix. Maybe they can't afford a process rewrite. Maybe such an endeavor is futile because even the best interfaces will never cleanly program your customer base to approach your service as you intend for them to, and you simply NEED human-facing humans to smooth out the wrinkles. Maybe the entire business model is faulty and there's no point in trying to fix it versus just riding things out until collapse. Considering how widespread the problem is, there probably just needs to be a general rebalancing of expectations and perceived value. In some cases, rip off the bandage and perform the surgery. In others, maybe fire your UX team and invest in CS, because another n redesigns just simply isn't going to fix the problem as well as having a knowledgeable contact available would.