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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9523791" data-attributes="member: 18">I think there's a general breakdown here and the people caught in the middle are both customer service staff, and customers who actually need help and aren't just time-wasters or the like.What I've seen is that customer service are being increasingly used almost as "human shields" by businesses who are behaving pretty abominably and increasingly realizing that they can get away with it, and what really demonstrates this is that customer service people seem to have less and less and less power to actually fix any problems or really in any way help the customer beyond pressing buttons for them that the customer could have pressed anyway.Combine this with other bad policies, cheapness, skirting the edge of the law, and particularly increasing low-quality automation that actually wastes the time of customers, and we're kind of seeing companies just slamming customers they've made angry into customer service people who they've given no power to help said angry customers. And this wears down the customer service people too as they keep having to tell customers they can't help, and aren't allowed to say "It's because this company is run by wankers who don't want to help you".And the companies that do actually offer good customer service and empower their people suffer because there are so many bad actors in this space. Sometimes you run across a company who are just incredibly helpful, but their trappings are the same as the larger number of companies who are just trying to avoid doing anything at all (least of all fixing a problem that might cost them money to fix), so it's very unexpected.On top of all this, sometimes you kind of do have to give the right person a slightly hard time in order to get a proper resolution. That doesn't mean being nasty or whatever, but for example, I had to spend 3 hours on the phone to convince a company to give me back £200, and 45 minutes of that was grinding down/no-selling someone I knew could solve the problem, but who was trying to convince me that going from 50mbps to literally 2mbps (cable to primitive DSL) wasn't a downgrade and was totally fine. But you have to work out when that's possible and when not, and many of the companies involved have policies for the customer service people to obfuscate what they're actually empowered to do.(My biggest current frustration here is that countless companies insist a chat window or some kind of form is the best and quickest way to get help, but in practice, they don't actually do anything unless you phone them! My main ISP is like this - the will do anything to make you use their form, but if you do, all you get is endless holding emails saying they need two business days to respond. Phone them? Engineer round next day!)</blockquote>

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