Comments on: Nonsense Customer Support

By: Adam Kalsey

Adam Kalsey — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

It comes from having a script they follow. Companies don’t bother to staff their first level of customer service with people who are able and empowered to think on their own. Instead, they get a list of possible responses keyed of keywords in your email and they spit those back.

Really, why would you expect the people who touch customers every single day to have the initiative and drive to provide quality service to people who have concerns and problems?

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, I had a very similar experience with Yahoo recently. I sent a second message asking them to reread my first message and got a second completely off-topic response. So I gave up. then a day later Yahoo sent me a query about how my experience was using their Help system. I responded to that in polite but fairly strongly-worded terms and have not heard back. I guess they figure they got what they wanted.

By: mary

mary — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

They have their answers ready to cut and paste from an excel so they can be in and out of the issue with ease.Although it doesn’t quite happen like that and all they end up doing is pushing people away. I am interested to know what that error was that was…I love the extremely basic answers they supply. One would think if you are smart enough to set up your page you have a vague understanding of how the html works…

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Stan,

I used to think like you. Then our phones started ringing nonstop with really stupid questions and hundreds of e-mails from @aol.com started pouring in, so we put our ‘expert’ customer service folks behind a set of more entry level customer service reps and gave the entry level reps scripted e-mails for first-line response. It’s all about the $$$ and there is so much spam, so many poorly written, vague e-mails and frankly so many people that barely know how to use a computer you have to do this to stay profitable. The idiots are ruining it for the rest of us. A while back a lady tried to place a phone order with her walmart credit card, when we told her we didn’t accept WalMart cards, she tried her Shell gas card. She seriously didn’t get it. Enough said.