What passes for customer service. T-Mobie. Mint Mobile. Tax Act. Turbo tax.

[3Hotdogs]

These are companies with which I have had poor customer service experience.

Several phone calls with people who spoke with accents that were unintelligible. In once case, nothing but live chat that went nowhere except straight up my ass.


I have sympathy for someone trying to earn money by being part of customer service. I have no sympathy for a company that farms out customer service to people who are not capable of taking care of problems.

Anyone else have the same or similar experience?

Rant over.

[Achilleaze]

1. Xfinity chat is a slow road to nowhere

What a confusing, mess their websites are...designed to confuse and frustrate.

[cloudbase]

2. I have had nothing but very good service from T-Mobile,

both in person and over the phone.

I haven't used any of the other products on your list, so can't comment.
Vital Record (Lexis-Nexus) sucks.

[3Hotdogs]

4. T-Mob -- luck of the draw. After 10 minutes, I disconnected from T-Mob and redialed.

Second call got me to someone who corrected the problem in about 4 minutes.

Off the list, Turbo Tax and Mint Mobile are the worse.

I "threw away" $45 on Mint Mobile. Then they email to ask if I want to "auto renew."

[unblock]

3. Customer service has declined gradually over the course of decades

It's generally dreadful these days. Extremely long hold times. Annoyingly difficult phone trees which often make it not obvious how to get to a human. And when you do get a human, they're trained to stick to a script, so if your problem doesn't fit a common, previously solved issue, you're screwed.

Businesses have determined that customer service just isn't a profit center, and there's not enough competition for them to lose business with horrendous customer service. So here we are.

[Pinback]

5. Not to mention that the script often includes a mention of "upsell" options. (nt)

[lpbk2713]

6. Ring Doorbell.

After having to call them twice before I will only call again if it's a dire emergency.

[DBoon]

7. AT&T is the worst

[CurtEastPoint]

8. I had a positive experience with Delta's chat last evening. Checking my upcoming trip

... flight was changed and my seats were not visible and I couldn't select seats! Panic time.
Got on a chat and was helped within minutes. That person took it as far as she could then transferred the chat to a specialist and in 10 minutes I had a confirmation with seat numbers!

[slightlv]

9. I consider this to be bigoted, but in today's customer service world,

it's become a truism. If the accent is middle eastern or slavic, it's more than likely a scam or a spam. It's one of the ways I sort my many, many phone calls. Customer service is a misnomer AFAIC. It's non-existent. Unless I'm standing in front of a person is trying to help me, I'm not getting helped.

All these companies who outsource their customer service to cheap overseas companies are doing themselves a hell of a disservice. As soon as I find out, I find another company with whom to do service, where I can. Some times it works, and I let the offending company I'm leaving know why I'm leaving. If they try to give me a song and dance about not being able to find workers, I tell them to pay workers a living wage and give them decent benefits and they'll have better luck. Stop exploiting poor workers in other countries. Meanwhile, I'm outta here. Often times, it doesn't work. And sometimes, I find myself in worse shape than if I'd stayed and sucked it up. You just live and learn. But you try to use your dollars intelligently and where they'll do the best in line with you own philosophy.

Me... I'm a Luddite who'll still not use a self checkout because I feel if I shop in a store, they OWE it to me to check me out. They also don't get to use my time and energy to increase their bottom line without giving me something in return. And they sure haven't decreased their prices! Plus, they've decreased the number of workers. I'd rather they increase the number of workers who need the jobs.