Why is it that Customer Service / Technical Support has gotten to be such a pain in the ass?
I had an issue with my watch connected to my cellular plan. I tried to resolve it and realized I was out of my depth. Going in, I wasn’t frustrated just curious and was hoping for a little clarity and assistance.
During the course of the troubleshooting I ended up speaking with 9 different customer service/technical support people. Three of the calls dropped during troubleshooting, only one of these people called me back. None of them had a fucking clue. Overall, I spent 4 hours on the phone and was worse off than when I started.
For clarity, this cellular company touts that their customer service is US based.
Every single person I spoke with asked for my name, my zip code, my pin, and a callback number. It’s crazy that after I’ve gotten hold of someone that every time they transferred me to a new person I had to give the authentication crap again.
I look at it as once I’m in the system, they’re transferring me internally and from my perspective I’m on the same damn call.
After the 6th or 7th transfer, repeating the whole story, and having to authenticate gets really tedious!
When I was answering phone calls in a tech support department, I’d solve the problem or I’d stay on the line to hand a person off to someone who could. What passes for “service” in call centers these days is really crappy.
The last call I was on Thursday night, I’d finally gotten to a person who seemed like he might have had a clue and we’d reset my watch to factory defaults AGAIN. Then he put me on hold to check something, and the call dropped.
In the case of a smart watch, that leaves the customer with their device more broken than when they started. He never called me back and oh, their customer service department closed shortly after the call dropped.
I completed the setup of my watch to return it to functional, then went about my evening. The problem I’d called about was still present.
When I called the company the next morning, I went through the whole authentication bit, and explained the problem again then asked to speak with someone who was higher up in the hierarchy who had a lot of experience because the problem was apparently a difficult one that the “normal” troubleshooting steps didn’t resolve.
The woman I was talking to refused my request. Then demanded that I call them back on another phone, other than my only cell phone.
Uhh excuse me?
She said with more than a bit of attitude that I needed to go tie up a friend’s phone line to accomplish troubleshooting and refused to assist me further.
If you’ve read any of this blog, you know that was exactly the wrong thing to say to me.
When it became clear that she wasn’t going to budge. And was giving me attitude about it. I countered with, “Okay, then transfer me to someone that can give me a transfer PIN.”
[Transfer PIN numbers are used when you’re changing cellphone carriers and you’re taking your phone number with you.]
She hung up.
OH HELL NO!
What could have been a major hiccup, possibly even a recoverable one, was now nuclear.
I called back, got another person, outside technical support, and made my intentions clear then explained why. I was nice. Well as nice as I could be given the situation. I suggested that she make a note of the account and forward it to their sales/marketing department, because this is how you lose customers.
She gave me the PIN. I walked the dog, came home, showered, and drove to the local T-Mobile store.
Don’t get me wrong, T-Mobile’s phone Customer / Technical support is terrible. They’re all in India, none of them know anything other than what their little scripts tell them to do. But unbelievably, my former carrier’s Customer / Technical support was worse!
The hell of all of this is that during the evening after I’d had the call drop the last time on Thursday night, I was poking around in the settings of the phone & watch and had discovered an anomaly.
I wanted to talk to a person experienced in phone number provisioning and e-sim deployment because I thought I’d found the problem and we could have resolved the issue. However I wanted to verify the theory before touching or deleting the anomaly and potentially making the problem worse.
In my naive way, I thought perhaps by talking to one of their higher level people who had actual knowledge, we could solve my problem. While making sure all the rest of their technical support people could have the knowledge incorporated into their scripts allowing them to solve similar issues for others in the future.
Silly me! I thought companies still wanted continuous improvement.
Anyway, I walked into the T-Mobile retail store. One hour later, after some laughs and honestly fun, I was back with T-Mobile and my phone & watch are working flawlessly.
I didn’t opt for the newest T-Mobile plans that have all the bells and whistles. I don’t have Hulu, or Netflix, through them, and I don’t have HD video streaming over cellular, or their new satellite service.
I’ve got what I need. Basic communications on both the phone & watch and enough data to handle my meager needs. Granted it’s more expensive, but if I have a problem I can walk into a store and have at least some hope of having an issue resolved. Or I can let them deal with their customer service while I have a cup of coffee.
An added perk is that I can get a new phone using Apple Pay’s zero % financing if I want to.
I guess, if all technical support is going to be shit, and all their reps are going to stick to troubleshooting scripts and never actually think outside the box, then we’re pretty much on our own.
On the one hand going as cheap as possible has merit. On the other hand if you want to have the ability to have face time instead of having calls dropped while you’re trying to solve a problem, and overall better cellular service then maybe it’s reasonable to pay a little more.
A year & a half ago T-Mobile really pissed me off. It was enough to make me flush them after 13 years or so. I went to another carrier and they were fine until I needed assistance.
Maybe the new paradigm is when something breaks, don’t call customer service.
Instead just change companies.