If complaint depts actually existed and were intended to be helpful, the current relationship with customers would be better.
A ton of the negativity these days comes from knowing you are always talking to an ineffectual drone who possesses no power. And often times they also seem to lack any motivation to have any empathy. Due to low pay, shitty policies forced upon them, and being forced to do the support over the phone.
The way everything is structured today is just terrible. And it’s in part because these companies insist on growing to a scale where good support is impossible to provide without major price increases. It’s all fucked.
I had to contact Spotify support recently because they pushed an update which broke their Linux client, had to go through a “live chat” with a useless bot before being put through to a human. That human dumped the error and explanation I gave them into an LLM and just pasted that output to pretend they knew what was happening, then spent an hour ignoring that entirely and asking nonesense questions supposedly to identify the issue which was already clearly identified. Their only recommendation was to post on the community forums (wtf?), unsurprisingly nearly a week later it’s still broken. Last time I had to post on the community forums was two years ago for a regression bug raised two years before then, no attempt has been made to fix that one either but at least that doesn’t literally prevent you from using the service.
Not quite as bad as when I spent months calling my energy company because they tried to fraudulently charge over £2,000 (I forget the exact numbers) to my account after I called about a nonsense bill (turns out they were trying to get me to pay my neighbor’s bill?). They made absolutely no attempt to fix that. Unsurprisingly everything was fixed instantly when they took long enough that I could escalate to a legal issue. They didn’t get fined nearly enough for that one, they’re definitely stealing from other people in the same way.
Before that it was Microsoft, there was some issue with my Windows installation and their solution was to wipe my entire drive including all my data.
In my experience customer service lines aren’t there to help you, they’re there to piss you off as much as possible so you stop using their product or service. I have honestly no idea why companies choose to pay for that but it does explain why they’re happy to use LLMs; they could not care less about actually helping customers.
I suppose I should bring up some positive stories about customer service lines but there really isn’t that many. When I was young Steam support once helped me regain access to an account I’d locked myself out of, that was nice. From what I’ve heard Steam support isn’t great any more either though.
There’s also some blame to put on consumers. A large portion of the complaint queue is Karens who sap the will to live of any worker who has to deal with them.
If complaint depts actually existed and were intended to be helpful, the current relationship with customers would be better.
A ton of the negativity these days comes from knowing you are always talking to an ineffectual drone who possesses no power. And often times they also seem to lack any motivation to have any empathy. Due to low pay, shitty policies forced upon them, and being forced to do the support over the phone.
The way everything is structured today is just terrible. And it’s in part because these companies insist on growing to a scale where good support is impossible to provide without major price increases. It’s all fucked.
I had to contact Spotify support recently because they pushed an update which broke their Linux client, had to go through a “live chat” with a useless bot before being put through to a human. That human dumped the error and explanation I gave them into an LLM and just pasted that output to pretend they knew what was happening, then spent an hour ignoring that entirely and asking nonesense questions supposedly to identify the issue which was already clearly identified. Their only recommendation was to post on the community forums (wtf?), unsurprisingly nearly a week later it’s still broken. Last time I had to post on the community forums was two years ago for a regression bug raised two years before then, no attempt has been made to fix that one either but at least that doesn’t literally prevent you from using the service.
Not quite as bad as when I spent months calling my energy company because they tried to fraudulently charge over £2,000 (I forget the exact numbers) to my account after I called about a nonsense bill (turns out they were trying to get me to pay my neighbor’s bill?). They made absolutely no attempt to fix that. Unsurprisingly everything was fixed instantly when they took long enough that I could escalate to a legal issue. They didn’t get fined nearly enough for that one, they’re definitely stealing from other people in the same way.
Before that it was Microsoft, there was some issue with my Windows installation and their solution was to wipe my entire drive including all my data.
In my experience customer service lines aren’t there to help you, they’re there to piss you off as much as possible so you stop using their product or service. I have honestly no idea why companies choose to pay for that but it does explain why they’re happy to use LLMs; they could not care less about actually helping customers.
I suppose I should bring up some positive stories about customer service lines but there really isn’t that many. When I was young Steam support once helped me regain access to an account I’d locked myself out of, that was nice. From what I’ve heard Steam support isn’t great any more either though.
Are you still using Spotify today?
There’s also some blame to put on consumers. A large portion of the complaint queue is Karens who sap the will to live of any worker who has to deal with them.
Especially in countries where getting something for free by complaining is celebrated.