The Sad State of Customer Service

"Customer Service" has become newspeak – now meaning the opposite

Photo by Hannes Wolf on Unsplash

Recently, I was told, through the tracking information from Poste Italiene, that a package was available for me to pick up at “Swedish Post Office, Sweden (EE)” – and with a link to an empty page that should have shown a map.

Well, I am in Sweden, and I was expecting the package from Italy, but where exactly was I supposed to go to pick it up? Also, there are no post offices in Sweden, they have all been closed. Instead, gas stations, supermarkets, and various other small and big shops handle the post expeditions.

So, I wrote to Poste Italiene, who to my surprise offered both a phone number and an email address through which they could be contacted “if you need assistance”.

You guessed it. Of course they didn’t provide assistance. Instead, they spent two days before getting back with a “f*ck off” email, more precisely written as “In riferimento alla sua richiesta per la spedizione n. xx La invitiamo a rivolgersi al merchant” (“With reference to your request regarding shipment no. xx, we ask you to contact the merchant.”).

So, they were not going to help me. They had provided useless information and didn’t want to tell me what to do with it.

This is quite typical, and besides the very common long delays, often making it pointless to even continue the discussion when finally a reply appears, the most typical reply from just about any customer support these days is the equivalent of “f*ck off”.

Customer Service is not going to help with anything anymore. It is not about providing service to the customers, as one would assume from the name, it is now solely to fulfill the legal obligations to expedite warranty issues. And this is done in a calculated way that is all about saving money.

Also recently, I got a reply from an Amazon merchant. They had sent me the wrong product as a result of their product description being wrong. It was a book with four CDs, or, that was the plan. They had described it as such. But I got a book in a smaller format with only one CD. In that book it was described that there was a bigger version as well – which, of course, was the one I thought I had bought.

I wrote then to the merchant to tell that they had delivered the wrong book, and that I would like the correct one – did they have one?, I asked. A bit later, I found another announcement from them on Amazon with that other book. The headline was the same, promising a book and four CDs, but this time the details in the product description were more in line with the headline and I guessed that it could be the correct one this time, so I ordered it.

I then wrote another message like “I just wrote to you not long ago, but I would like to add that I’ve now found your other listing and ordered one of those. I just hope it is the correct book this time. You should take a look at the product descriptions and headlines to ensure that they are correct”.

After some days, I got two replies from them – not coordinated, so they hadn’t noticed that my two requests were about the same topic. Both replies contained the exact same message (translated by me from Swedish):

Thank you for your message!

We are very sorry that you have received the wrong item. We apologize.

Thank you for contacting us. It helps us to improve our service.

Unfortunately, we cannot exchange the item. However, you will of course receive a full refund of the purchase price including shipping costs. In order to create as little additional work for you as possible, we would like to inform you that you do not need to return the item.

Are you still interested in your desired item? If so, we look forward to your new order.

Obviously, they had not read my messages, as this reply wasn’t answering anything. In a sense, it was friendly and offering a compensation, but it didn’t reflect on my thoughts or needs. Basically, they said, politely, “you’ll get your money back, now f*ck off”.

On top of that, a long standard message from Amazon telling, among other things, that if I don’t want messages like these, I can “select them away” (but no info on how to do that).

All in all, a lot of nothing. I wouldn’t call that service. To some extent, it can be considered problem-solving, but as none of the involved seem to care about what actually was the problem, it hardly qualifies for this term either.

About Amazon, I think I have mentioned before how they opened a Swedish website as an affiliate of the German one, making lots of products from the German site available also for Swedes – everything machine translated.

That translation was a complete disaster, with products often being unrecognizable due to the weird translations of everything.

There was some talking about this in the public, and many found it funny to put some of the most idiotic translations on social media. Amazon responded by telling on the website that they would be happy to hear if anyone found a wrong translation, so that they could fix it.

Well, I wrote to them with suggestions, and I am sure that others did that too, but still today, several years later, nothing has been corrected.

That’s another example of that kind of “Customer Service” that isn’t what it claims to be. It is just a marketing trick to make people remember that Amazon does care about the correct translations, even though they don’t. They just hope that this fake memory survives.

Very many products are wrongly described on Amazon, with headlines, descriptions, pictures, and fact boxes telling different stories. Often, you simply cannot know what you are ordering. But if Amazon had a functioning customer service, you could have asked them, and then they would check and get back to you. But that’s not possible, because they have obviously outsourced Customer Service to some people who have no access to the actual products in the shop. These people know as little as you do.

I could continue with more examples, where especially webshops and carrier/courier services are the worst, but supplemented by very many other miserable implementations of customer service automations of various kinds. Carrier services tend to offer tracking services plus send emails and texts, but all of this may not be coordinated, can tell different stories, and there is nobody to get in touch with to find out what is up and down in all this. Webshops may have a support option, but it will most often reject your request, no matter what it is – or pay you back your money. That one thing seems to work reasonable well. Everything else not.

Of course, AI has entered the scene here as well, making it difficult – or impossible – to get in touch with a real human, Instead you’ll be dragged through various FAQs before finally offered a chat – with a chatbot. This thing most often cannot help with anything at all, it is just a way of telling you “f*ck off”, making you give up and stop expecting any service to be provided.

Where is this going to end?

I personally am fed up with the carrier services, that become worse all the time, and there are webshops that I have stopped using because they keep reducing their service level – with longer delivery times, more difficult ordering processes, no interest in helping out if anything goes wrong.

Many digitalized public service functions cannot be bypassed, unfortunately, so if I ask for a time for a consultation with the doctor, using the online system for that, I may not ever hear from them. No matter what I tried to explain that I needed their help with or advice about, they may not even read it. Various authorities require me to send them documents that I should get from other authorities through the websites of those, but if nothing is ever being sent to me, I cannot forward it (and why on Earth do I need to be the delivery boy between two authorities in the first place?).

Some software vendors (the larger, the worse) have made the ordering process for licenses so complicated, that it sometimes doesn’t work anymore. When buying a Power BI license from Microsoft, it wasn’t possible to know what it would cost until the invoice would appear, which would be much later than the time of ordering. In this case, I managed, somehow, to get in touch with a support function that actually could see and do things, but even this quite reasonable question about the price, they couldn’t answer.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I really find that the world has moved into a wrong direction with regard to customer service. Often, there isn’t any at all, or it has been reduced (by headcounts) to a level where it takes forever to get a reply. And often, the supporters are not equipped with the needed information about products, procedures, or anything else, and they don’t have access to vital systems, so they can’t actually do anything at all.

Having worked with customer support myself, I know how requests or suggestions from customers often end up in a never-read inbox somewhere, and the supporters are aware of that but are not allowed to tell the customers.

Nobody wants to provide service anymore. Nobody cares about customers.

That’s the sad situation right now. Nothing looks like it’s getting better.