[macNchz]

Having been on both sides of this—working behind a counter and answering phones at various jobs long ago, and being someone who often surprises family and friends with my ability to extract good outcomes from customer service—I think it’s somewhat of a misconception that being as unpleasant as possible is actually effective at getting results.

I fully understand that the godawful CS mazes many companies set up wind up pushing people in that direction, and that it feels like the only option, but I believe quite strongly that being patient and polite but persistent winds up being much more effective than being unpleasant.

As a small case in point: I worked summers in a tiny ice cream shop, most of the time solo. The shop had a small bathroom for employees only—it was through a food prep area where customers were not allowed by health code. I had some leeway to let people back there as it was pretty low-risk, and I would in the evenings when no other businesses were open, or if a little kid was having an emergency. People who were unpleasant from the get-go when placing their order, however, were simply told we had no bathroom at all. People who started shouting when I told them I wasn’t supposed to let people back there (not uncommon!) and suggested a nearby business were never granted exceptions.

[amluto]

As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.

So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.

[citizenpaul]

>none of the options are helpful

Yeah. I got locked out of my capital one account for a "fraud alert" last week. When I tried to login a message said "Call Number XXX" When I called that number I had to go through an endless phone tree and not single option was about fraud alerts or being locked out of accounts. I had to keep going through a forced chute of errors before after about 30 min I finally was able to speak to someone.

Even when I finally got a human they seemed confused about what happened and I had to be transferred several times.

Why would you put a phone number that does not even as a sub option address the issue?

[rolandog]

Because there is no legal obligation that sets a minimum measurable quality and availability of service; this allows for companies to automate away customer support and place an AI chat muppet just because they can.

[SpaceNoodled]

Because they don't give a shit about you, they just want to hold on to your money.

[vlovich123]

Well also phone numbers cost money & that kind of "customer excellence" is not incentivized by anyone at the company.

[TeMPOraL]

Most importantly though, because it's theoretically possible to address the fraud issue through the number they given, eventually, this ticks some regulatory compliance box about giving your customers recourse, and compliance is all that matters to the company - as lack of it would cost them actual money. Individual customers? On the margin, they're less than pocket change.

[palmotea]

> As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.

It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.

Detecting swears just seems over-compliated.

[TeMPOraL]

> It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.

Depends on the system and country.

Over here in Poland, I've had or witness several encounters with "artificial intelligence assistants" over the past ~5 years[0], that would ignore you hitting 0, and respond to "talk to an agent" with some variant of "I understand you want to talk to an agent, but before I connect you, perhaps there is something I could help you with?", repeatedly. Swearing, or at least getting recognizably annoyed, tends to eventually cut through that.

--

[0] - Also, annoyingly, for the past 2 years we had cheap LLMs that would be better to handle this than whatever shit they still deploy. Even today, hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line would yield infinitely more helpful bot than whatever garbage they're still deploying. Alas, the bots aren't meant to be helpful.

[AStonesThrow]

With my Medicaid insurance carrier, long ago their automated system quit recognizing my member number, whether I recited it carefully, or typed it on the keypad. It would steadfastly pretend not to understand me. And I believe that this was somehow deliberately configured in their system, perhaps as an anti-fraud measure or perhaps just to spite/stymie me from frequently calling in. And it certainly would slow me down, especially when I was in a public place and valiantly trying to get something done by reaching out to them (their services included arranging rideshares/taxis, and so it was not unusual for them to fuck that up, thereby prompting me to call in and try to unfuck my ride home from the dreary, awful, vampiric medical clinic where they'd dumped me.)

So I have become accustomed to feeding it gibberish. I will type-in or recite nonsense numbers. It always takes 3 tries, 3 identical failures, before it routes me to a human anyways (the gatekeeping is simply an attempt at automatic authentication before the manual, human auth kicks in.) The most efficient way to get beyond that gatekeeping is by triggering unambiguous failures to authenticate.

And it is kind of funny; I don't know what is supplied to the humans' screens, but they are sometimes perplexed when they receive my call and I've just finished spouting gibberish to their ignorant robot bitch.

[setr]

There’s generally no repercussions to bullying robots — or being nice to one. Aggressively direct, if not outright unsympathetically cruel, is probably the best approach in all scenarios

[pixl97]

5 years from now

"ChatGPT has detected you are being hostile to bots. A drone has been dispatched to your location"

[notaurus]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

[liamwire]

Or, alternatively, it slowly undermines you over years, causing you to fall behind your peers and society as they reap the benefits of AI unencumbered by the impotent rage it cannot express directly.

[LorenPechtel]

Yeah, far too many systems try to cover every case in the menu and deny access to a human--but never have I seen one that actually covered anything like every case. They cover the easy stuff and you have to get hostile with the robot over anything else.

Or our local pharmacy--it has it's own number but if you actually need a human you're dumped into the general phone tree and have to go back to the pharmacy and persuade the robot to let you through to a human. And the designers never put things in the menu for the stuff that needs a human.

[cjbgkagh]

Another one is to say random words and they’ll think you have a disability, but be careful saying random words will mess with your head a bit.

Perhaps prepare by pre-generating a list of random words to read.

[Ocha]

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing in 2 hours.

You can have assholes on both sides and set up is already adversarial from the get-go

[whstl]

I once lost a flight home (I was overseas) because the website of a company said there was a connecting bus between the airports I should take. The bus wasn’t there. I naturally lost the flight and had a very heated discussion with the clerk who was insisting that the website I was showing wasn’t theirs because I found it via Google (it had the same domain).

It was solved when I found the same information in the email sent by them.

Suddenly the clerk was apologetic and pretended she misunderstood the situation.

There are definitely capital-A assholes in both sides, with people willing to lie through the teeth to someone stranded in a foreign country just to avoid some minor inconvenience.

[t_luke]

I’ve had the same experience on a flight. They said the plane was overweight and we couldnt travel. The person I was travelling with became extremely difficult. Then magically, it wasn’t overweight any more.

[ornornor]

TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts.

And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved.

I’ll never fly TK again and tell anyone whenever this came up. Look reviews up for yourself online, hundreds of people report being stranded, abused, and disrespected in IST by TK the way we were.

[TeMPOraL]

Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else.

It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile phones or Internet, and thus, on average, for every lost customer that switches to a competitor, they gain one that switched from a competitor.

[rstuart4133]

> It's the case with telcos.

Here in Australia the government owns the last mile (the government org is called the NBN), but you have to buy your connection off them through a retailer.

Our biggest retailers predate that arrangement. They are exactly as you describe. They are expensive. Their customer service is complete crap, echoing all the complaints you see here. The small ones the NBN enabled are the reverse: cheaper, and the customer service ranges from OK to brilliant. Brilliant invariably costs more, so you get what you pay for.

So your theory is wrong, or at least the equilibrium you paint is incomplete. I can give you a clue on how a large dominant ISP can survive in a highly competitive market: their advertising saturates the airwaves. They use their higher prices, lack of service and scale efficiencies to pay for it.

It doesn't work so well on me. I suspect like most people here I will happily do a couple hours of research on prices and forums before making a purchase. The continued existance of these big ISP's can be explained by one thing: most people don't put that effort in.

Putting in the effort only works if there are alternatives if course, and this is where there is a glaring difference between Australia and the USA: whereas everybody in Australia gets to choose from literally hundreds of ISP's (most tiny), I regularly see complaints from Americans they get no or very few choices. That's because Australia governments go out of there way to engineer competitive markets. ISP's are just example. You see similar efforts in water, banking, insurance - lots of places. In the case of the NBN it was extraordinarily heavy handed. After years of existing telcos refusing to upgrade the copper network without being given a monopoly the government owned NBN was created to overbuilt it with fibre, rendering the old copper network worthless.

I doubt the USA's worship of "free markets" would permit such behaviour, which I suspect is the real reason you are stuck with shitty customer service. There is no point providing good customer service if there is no competition, and if there competition the usual approach in the USA seems to be Peter Thiel's: eliminate it.

[dostick]

Its never ends to surprise how Australian public is brainwashed by own government. It’s opposite in Australia, a monopoly of network providers with variety of “competitive” ISPs that have exactly same prices and services. And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else. Any network issues they forward to network provider.

[rstuart4133]

> And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else.

For anybody reading this and thinking it looks reasonable, one outcome of having all these ISP is net neutrality isn't a problem in Australia.

ISP's used to often offer discounted services for certain traffic, like Netflix or traffic that originated in Australia. "Used to" because landline traffic is so cheap now I haven't seen a data limited landline plan in a long while. Charging differently depending on where bytes came from wasn't a problem precisely because there are so many ISP's to chose from. If you didn't like one, move to another. Download limits are still a thing on mobile data plans, so you still occasionally see it happen there.

Also, the NBN isn't technically a monopoly. Anyone is free to pay a third party to run fiber to their house. The NBN is a practical monopoly because it's very expensive to run a new fibre through kilometres of suburban footpaths, and it makes absolutely no sense when the NBN already has fibre in those footpaths and will supply any house beside it with a 1Gbps connection. However, it does make sense for business to run their own fibre because they usually aren't in the burb's (so it's cheap'ish) and don't want to share a line (privacy and predictable latencies), so they often do pay for parties a third part like VOCUS to run fibre to them.

Finally, even though the NBN is a practical monopoly on landline for households, there are competing technologies like 5G and starlink which everyone is free to use. In fact I'm using 5G right at home because I'm waiting for fibre. The reason they don't use it is these competing technologies are slower, have higher latencies, and are more expensive.

I'm not sure who is the brainwashed one here - the Australian public quite correctly understands the vast bulk of Australians have lots of choice on what to internet connection options they have available to them.

[yerushalayim]

Not accurate. Factually, some are much worse than others. A few are good to great. Lumping them all together as "garbage" is unjust and is totally counterproductive. Why even try when your efforts are unappreciated?

[netsharc]

Sounds like AirBnB support, hired to be as big as delaying fuckwits as possible so the company has to pay out as little compensation as possible.

[biotinker]

We had a very unpleasant experience with AirBnB support when we stayed in a house that it turned out was infested by bats, which we discovered when we awoke to bats in the bedroom.

For anyone unaware, bat bites are so small they are not detectable, and sleeping in the same room as one is sufficient to be considered a rabies exposure.

When we reported this to the local health department while dropping off a captured bat for rabies testing, they said that previous guests had also made similar complaints about the same house.

So despite numerous guests complaining about rabies exposures, AirBnB went back and forth for nearly 6 months afterwards before finally granting a refund.

[sokoloff]

I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with AirBnB, but I did have one place that I checked into in Vegas in July with the water shutoff. Support initially suggested that I stay there anyway, since it was only one night. I laughed and politely declined that “resolution” to my case and they eventually relented to refund my money.