Phone trees and outsourced operators/customer service representatives! (sales, pay, buying)

[fisheye]

I spent close to two hours yesterday trying to straighten out my mother’s Xmas present to me and my wife. My mother had bought an online copy of our local paper for us for the year. As of the New Year it stopped working. I called to find out what the problem was and after ten minutes of waiting they transferred me to another operator. The had made a mistake of not submitting the amount when applying to my mother’s debit car for authorization. It took repeated calls to the company to straighten out the problem - before they found out what the problem was. They supposedly fixed everything and reinstated our account. It still does not work!

My feeling was that this billing department was not even in the US. I had the same experience almost a year ago with my phone provider. I got so angry that I will never deal again with one of our major phone service companies. I really hate those robotic answering machines; that tell us that our calls are very important and to please stay on the line - if our calls were so important; they would hire more representatives!

This is not good or smart business. Some of these companies look only at their bottom line - with no insight of future sales/repercussions.

[Hemlock140]

It's rare to speak to a customer service person located in the US any more. I recently asked the person on the other end to please transfer me to someone that spoke English I could understand. Worse though, is the online "live person" support where you do chat. I had to do that the other evening. They don't actually type much, but simply click on their screen to send canned responses that often make no sense. For example, I typed that I was extremely frustrated and close to closing my account and the response was something like "Thank you for contacting me. Are you having a nice day?"
The guy transferred me to someone else, I repeated my story, then he transferred me back to the first person who would be better able to help me!

I'm surprised your local paper charges for an online subscription.l We pay for the actual paper still but our online version is free to everyone.

[fisheye]

Originally Posted by Hemlock140

It's rare to speak to a customer service person located in the US any more. I recently asked the person on the other end to please transfer me to someone that spoke English I could understand. Worse though, is the online "live person" support where you do chat. I had to do that the other evening. They don't actually type much, but simply click on their screen to send canned responses that often make no sense. For example, I typed that I was extremely frustrated and close to closing my account and the response was something like "Thank you for contacting me. Are you having a nice day?"
The guy transferred me to someone else, I repeated my story, then he transferred me back to the first person who would be better able to help me!

I'm surprised your local paper charges for an online subscription.l We pay for the actual paper still but our online version is free to everyone.

Our local online is $4.87 per week! It is more expensive than just buying the paper or the paper plus online. That doesn’t make any sense to me. It was also bought out by the Wall Street Journal and that is the first number you try to contact. It all went downhill from there.

Last year Verizon gave me such a hard time that I will never ever deal with them again. I tired to add their high speed internet and ended up dropping the phone. They shipped my router to the wrong address and had started billing me for a service I did not have. Trying to straighten out the whole mess on the phone was a nightmare.

In both cases we were trying to spend more money buying their products and came away with a very bitter taste in our mouth. I don’t know how anybody stays in business that way - it is not the way you treat the customer that is supposedly always right.