Cellphone wrangling
I spent hours today – literally hours – on the phone, attempting to cancel a certain cellphone service I have been paying for and wasn’t using. I’m not going to spend hours writing about it, only to bore myself and you silly with the details. I merely have a question: why do they purposely make it so hard to reach a human being?
It’s a rhetorical question, though, because I believe I know the answer. It’s both cost-saving to have everything automated, and an effort to discourage you and make you give up trying to drop something. The prompts made it relatively easy to add something, but dropping something was simply not an option.
I finally accomplished the task, however.
I think. We’ll see when the next bill either comes or doesn’t come.
And if you do reach a real human they are located in India or somewhere and you can barely understand them and they clearly have no idea where you even are.
Just to provide a bit of good cheer 🙂 :
Several years ago someone talked us into swapping our AT&T Uverse service for Dish. Which was weird because AT&T had just bought Dish. It was going to be cheaper. Yeah right–you can guess how that goes. It was a two-year contract and by the end of the first year we had decided to cancel it.
I kept putting that off and putting that off. When I finally did it, I had a remarkable surprise. IT WASN”T THAT BAD! I sat down with my phone with something to read, ready for long periods being on hold. It didn’t take that long to get to a person, and when I did she was pleasant. She offered me some incentives for me to keep it. I politely refused. She politely said “ok” and cancelled it.
So they’re not *all* that bad. Some have apparently realized that even if you’re losing a customer there’s nothing to be gained by making them hate you.
Another related topic is product quality.
They are so busy making the product Woke, sustainability-friendly and (unwanted) feature-rich (along with making the whole corporation Woke, ESG and full of unneeded departments) that products are noticeably less good.
They break more often.
More expensive to diagnose and repair.
And just flat-out die earlier than they used to.
It’s not just Customer Service that has degraded.
Good luck. I went through this 2 years ago when I wanted to drop my grown children off my plan and switch my own phone to a different service. The previous provider still charged me for several months, because they claim my new service provider didn’t send them paperwork on the phones I didn’t carry over to the new service because I no longer wanted those lines/numbers/phones at all.
Then, there is spending far too many minutes in what I like to call “music hell,” as you listen to endless repeats of banal, horrible, boring, saccharine elevator music which–to add insult to injury–is usually broken up, skips, or is filled with static.
Rotten pseudo Jazz, saccharine “It’s A Small World After All” type music, and nauseating electronic versions of “Pachelbel ‘s Canon” just don’t cut it.
This has got to be deliberate and, I’m sure, makes a lot of people just get disgusted, hang up, and give up trying to contact what is, all too often, anything but “customer service.”
Then, of course, there are the cursed labarinthine “phone trees,” in whose evil spell choosing the wrong number puts you all the way back to the beginning–over and over again.
P.S.–Finally, we come to the recent wrinkle in phone trees in which, after you make your choice, they never actually connect you to somebody but just say “goodby,” and hang up on you.
yes they do, in english or spanish or any other language, obtuse is their objective,
i think a large part of it, was they don’t train the staff properly, I was working with united health, I had three weeks before they put me on a live phone,
It’s a form of purgatory. There is no way to wait in silence, multi-tasking on something productive, until a representative is available – you’re either subjected to terrible music, usually in terrible fuzzy fidelity, or even worse, getting bombarded by an endless hell of advertisements, since you’re the world’s best captive audience, waiting to resolve a problem that is costing you money. And as already mentioned, when you finally do get a representative, you might discover it’s somebody in Second-Language-English-Stan, whose comprehension of the language severely limits the conversation, and who has no authority to fix your problem anyway.
The more progressive companies offer a call-back. Others offer a chat alternative, although this is even worse: you get stuck with poor English comprehension and a person that is handling 10 different customers at the same time, cycling around them every 5 minutes or so. So you get to wait.
The worst thing are the robots. They want you to talk with robots. They want you to answer the robot’s questions. I find this deeply insulting, misanthropic, demeaning, and frustrating. I refuse to do it. When faced with this, I speak unintelligible gibberish making it sound like a language, and this often confuses the computer and gets me to a representative, I think quicker.
This website used to work pretty well but I haven’t tried it recently:
https://www.dialahuman.com/
I was paying $15 a month for something I wasn’t using, I went online to cancel, it was fairly simple but they wanted to charge me $64 to do it. So I ‘lost’ my credit card which was canceled and got a new one!
Yes having various credit cards for online purchases works quite well. If u can’t stop a bill, oh I lost my card, new number makes it all go away.
Aggie:
Be careful what you wish for. Quite a few times, when I’m on hold in the queue with that awful music playing, the music suddenly stops. Silence. Then you are left wondering what THAT means. Should you stay on the line? Are you still in the queue? Quite a few times I’ve stayed on the line for a long long time and finally hung up because no one ever comes, not even a robot.
They have many ways to drive people crazy.
It doesn’t get better when you get a human.
I had occasion to cancel my phone service once and move to a different provider. Once I made my way through the phone tree, hold music, etc, I found myself at the other end of the line from a fellow human being. I explain the reason for my cancellation (I moved to an area without their service).
Human: well, we can offer you a year of free international roaming.
Grunt: I don’t have service now, and I’m 400 miles from the border. How does that help me? They pay you to ask me that, don’t they?
We went around and around some more, including the rep’s disbelief that they did not cover the entire United States (spoiler: there’s still places in Texas where even FM radio doesn’t reach). So I had to wait for him to pull up a map and confirm what the red “x” on my phone already told me.
I did eventually prevail.
The people who design these systems all think they work great for the consumer. They can show you charts and metrics about how these systems are loved and are more efficient.
They come from the same schools and neighborhoods that produced the people who run the schools, government and most corporate HR departments.
What more can I say? This is the world today.
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In the not-a-happy-concidence department, I went through exactly the same thing yesterday: trying to cancel an internet service I no longer needed or wanted. I first went into the local office and told them I wanted to cancel. They said I had to do that by phone, and after a five minute search, they finally found the number to call.
I called that and got a recording giving me several options: start a new service, add a line — you get the idea: everything except cancel service.
I finally got a human by clicking the “start a new Service” option. That human sounded helpful, but wasn’t able to help. To her credit, she transferred my call to another human.
This one wanted a number I did not have. She finally did tell me how to find an alternate identifying number, then asked why I wanted to cancel. I explained that I found a cheaper provider. That stumped her. and she spent another couple of minutes with that excruciating drivel about “how else may I help you today?”
Why does someone not recognize that cancellation of service should not be an invitation for some other type of service? And yes, all of this was conducted with people who had an accent that required a lot of repetition. Grrr.
It is increasingly the case with many companies that a customer service telephone number is almost impossible to find.
They often have only a “Chat” option, which I find extremely frustrating, since it’s way too slow, it’s not in sync, and you are always dealing with the last question when you have moved onto the next part of your problem.
When given a choice between several different options, I find that if you want to have a better chance of getting an actual live person, you should choose the “sign up for or upgrade” option, because they always seem to have someone promptly answering that phone since it makes them money.
Whatever change you make, ALWAYS follow up with a snail-mail letter, detailing just when and on what you talked to the company, and the agreement you had made with them about cancelling, and what it cost (hopefully, nothing).
Paper mail beats rockhead reps.
Check for more than one month. My experience, at least with commercial accounts, is that phone companies take things off the bill for a couple of months and then they show back up “accidentally”.
Martin–
I believe I read somewhere back a few years ago that, each monthly billing cycle, some telephone companies will take all of the charges that have somehow become separated from the people who are actually responsible for them, and spread them out among all of their customer’s bills, figuring that hardly any customers actually wade through their often complex multi-page bills–containing all sorts of taxes, fees, and charges–notice, and complain to get the charges they didn’t make removed.
Back when I was in college in the early 1970s, I worked for a man running a janitorial company. We operated in the evenings, all over the city. Back then voice mail did not exist, no computers, no cell phones. He refused to use an answering machine, but spent the money for an answering service. He said that people do not want to talk to a machine, they want to talk to a live person. I think this trend to computerized phone answering systems is one of the dumbest things American business has done in my lifetime. It may be cheaper, but it is costing dearly in customer relations.
Why? So you will give up and continue paying.
A couple of years ago, someone hacked my cellphone service and bought several thousand dollars of new cellphones and services. I think it was an inside job, probably a store employee. It took 6 months and hours on hold to finally get the charges cancelled. I eventually quit the provider and went to another.
I may be “old fashioned”, but I still get paper copies of bills from the companies so I can review the bill. I don’t want to spend my ink, paper and time to print out the invoice. Reading the invoice online can result in missing something.
My local paper was bought out by USA Today and the service went downhill fast. It was amazing how fast the stop of the paper (physical as well as online access) occurred. They didn’t act that fast when I had missing papers. I still check out the website since I usually get three free articles a day. But there are very few local & state articles available.
I recently used customer service lines at a big box hardware store and my phone company. For both, I had issues with the service from (I’d bet it was) India. In one example, the line from India had a lot of static, though that was the case for only 1 of about 5 calls. I often had trouble understanding the English of the customer service rep. (As I have plenty of experience with ESL speakers both in the US, and from working overseas, it isn’t that I am unaccustomed to ESL speakers.) One of the service reps could have made his English a lot more comprehensible if he had only 1) spoken not in a soft voice but in a clear, loud voice and 2) not spoken so rapidly. Did he get no coaching?
The phone service rep was absolutely useless in answering my tech support question- as was the phone’s PDF manual that I had downloaded.
A further point about reacting to ESL speakers: if I called because I was annoyed about previous poor customer service, I found the ESL accent even more irritating.
Some three decades ago, my brother was the liaison between management and the programmers in setting up a bank’s automated phone system. I have jokingly told him that when he dies and St. Peter is deciding whether to let him in or not, his work on that automated phone system is going to keep him out of Heaven.
But one positive story with customer service calls. Several years ago I stopped my AT&T landline and Internet. Like F, I first tried a local office, and got told I needed to make a phone call instead. I got no hardsell from the service rep on either keeping my plan or transferring to another one of their plans. I replied that I could no longer afford it. That was that. Would you like to use our TV plan? No thank you. That was that.
When I returned from a trip, I found out that my landline hadn’t been cut off, a week after I had told them to do so. AT&T quickly remedied that situation, and didn’t charge me for the week of unwanted phone service.
Gringo:
Fast speech is definitely part of the problem and makes the accents even harder to understand. I’ve noticed fast speech and lack of articulation is a problem even in understanding the native English speakers, too.
Cell phone customer service seems to be downright malevolent.
Most banks offer the ability to see your subscriptions and to block payment of them via your bank. This can be done on the bank’s website.
When the payment doesn’t go through, you will get some notifications from the service that you need to update your payment information. Decline to do so.
Even if you still want the service, but want to modify it, now you are in the driver’s seat.