I ordered some circuit boards from Seeedstudio (good and cheap board fab, btw). I paid extra for DHL to get them quicker.

I submitted my boards to Seeed (Shenzhen) October 10. On Oct 16, said they were shipped to DHL. Awesome. Told DHL via their webapp and text messaging that "I do not need signature. Drop at doorstep". 10 boards were a whopping $5. Guaranteed delivery by 19'th, cause thats what I paid extra for.

So what does the fucknut idiot delivery driver do? "Did not deliver because no signature". I was fucking furious. I called their support line, and "we'll try to deliver tomorrow" ~~~ for WHAT? The idiot to say AGAIN that no signature, did not deliver? Uh huh, tell them to get their ass back right now and drop it off. Their claim was "They can only ask". BTW, their systems noted both my previous "I dont need signature" authorization, along with the text message responses saying the same.

Well, it turns out that Twitter is good for other things, like complaining loudly. So I reached out to the 4 contacts linked to DHL, and included my package#. I got one of their US VP's on there. Wouldn'tya know, they had the authority to tell the idiot driver to get back and deliver.

Who knows when I would have gotten my boards. But I certainly know how to bypass 'consumer firewalls'. I brought Seeed into it as well, by mentioning them with DHL. Evidently, squeezing the B2B may have worked, I really don't know.

Many calls to the call centre and 2 days later I had enough. No amount of asking to speak to a manager or anyone I spoke to managed to resolve the situation. I found the email address of the CEO of UPS on https://www.ceoemail.com/ and proceeded to write him an email explaining the issue, the effort I have made to try to resolve it as well as the incompetence and inability of the staff to resolve the problem. Note this email was very professional and stuck to the facts, the only emotional bit maybe being me highlighting that I honestly expected better from a company such as UPS.

I did not expect anything to happen honestly. However 15 minutes later I received a reply from him saying it will get taken care of. 20 minutes later the manager of the distribution centre that caused the problem gave me a phone call apologising. 2 hours later a driver came to pick up the parcel and refund me the money I paid in error. I received 2 more calls from the distribution manager and that person provided their personal contact number in case I ever have any issues again.

I personally do not like going the social media route by default. I would only consider it if I have exhausted all other options and am honestly left with no other choice which seems to be the situation you were in and that is completely understandable. Maybe give the CEO email option a try next time as I believe your success was due to someone high up being forced to recognise your issue. If that then fails I would hit the social media option for sure.

I try to avoid buying physical stuff in the internet now, way too much stress.

IIRC DHL is especially prone to this. I think the drivers try to catch up time or whatever.

But I also have a DHL driver doing the opposite: you stay at home all day and nobody rings; then you notice that the parcel is marked as delivered on the website. What? You get outside and you see the parcel was thrown in your yard over the wall/fence/portal. You go back to DHL website and you download the receipt, to discover a beautiful fake signature of yours forged by the driver.

So he just didn't bother to ring the doorbell to save 20 seconds. He saves 20 seconds and you lose several hours waiting for him...

Also, in this subcontracting company, the drivers have very bad equipment, they do not have winter tyres (and we are talking about a mountain area...), they do not have enough large enough vans, so the drivers try to ditch as many parcels as possible in any 'possible' way because otherwise they have no room for pickups...

The driver even showed up one day with a regular compact car... He had to come back.

IN cases like that, I would have a very hard ethical time in pushing that issue of fraud onto the driver. To be honest, I haven't done that... but the thought would definitely cross my mind.

And we were not only pressed for time. We were paid by delivered parcel. Nothing else counted.

And we had to deliver the packets that were not successfully delivered to the central logistics station by 6pm.

So if we didn't perform we were f..ed.

How long ago was that? Maybe the service has gotten worse because the pay/reward system has gotten worse.

Depending on carrier, this has hellish consequences for customers who end up having to file loss/damage claims against the carrier. Your signature attests that you received it and it's intact, so when the signature is forged attesting to such, any claims filed are summarily denied.

(Consumers usually get their money back from the shipper as a matter of customer service, but the shipper still eats the loss.)

When you call dhl you only get lame exuses. "Maybe you doorbell isn't working?" Sure, DHL, sure.

Royal Mail delivered a £560 multimeter to the wrong address and to a signature which wasn't mine. Never saw it again. That took a nightmare battle from hell to get sorted.

It's pretty hard to get back to a seller and try to explain him the delivery company he is using is potentially scamming, especially as it only affects me (the receiver), not the shipper.

Which makes me feel bad for the drivers, really. I'm gonna guess that they have some very tough schedules.

Keep an eye out for them, if you can.

1. request a delivery at work, let the receptionists at your office sign for the package and very politely thank them each time (and don't do this too often)

2. place the order to be delivered at your home address, knowing that you won't be there and that you'll have to pick up the "you were out..." slip, and duck out of work and cross town later in the week to the post-office sometime during opening hours and suffer the queues there.

The reason I use the word "awkward" is that I feel like I'm misusing some facilities no matter what I do (expecting a receptionist to handle my packages, or making a postman bring a package all the way to my flat and then all the way back home and fill out forms etc).

These temp lockers are such a great idea.

Everyone in my office does this, although we don't have a dedicated receptionist and the job normally falls to the office manager instead. It doesn't even cross my mind as a misuse of company resources. Is this something that would be considered inappropriate in other places?

It could be that this is all fine and I'm overthinking it - so maybe take what I"m saying with a pinch of salt :-)

The problem though is that most of the time I can not choose the delivery company, and I've only seen La Poste having the lockers.

Just flash the barcode from the email, and it opens the appropriate locker. It even lets you open multiple ones with a single barcode if you received multiple packages the same day.

So :

* small company where everyone takes care of (his own) deliveries: OK.

* smallish company company where there is a receptionist: OK because it does not happen too often.

* middle-sized company: not OK.

* large company with a dedicated mail/parcel/delivery service: I guess it depends on formal work agreements.

Room 40 was a bench behind the warehouse reception.

Of course, there are potential pitfalls here - say, assuming your colleagues to be honest, for instance - but to the best of my knowledge, we never lost a parcel in years. (Which is more than could be said for anything entering the murky depths of our ERP system...)

I have found ordering from B&M's via their websites and picking the thing up at the store bypasses this whole problem.

And anyway you may not want everyone to know what you are buying.

When your package is damaged, some will even offer to add a note to your delivery, without you asking, in case there's a problem later.

I order very regularly from Amazon, and I think I have never had a single problem receiving packages this way, and it's pretty easy to find one on your way from work or somewhere that suits you. Some of them are even open on Sunday, depending on what their main business is, very convenient ...

We are planning a trip soon to investigate our insight.

This shitty company is the worst delivery one I know but for some reason Amazon France uses it to deliver to me (west of Paris).

I either get a "we were there" note when I was home, or nothing.

I complained to Amazon but it is maybe time to get it to social keyword with a #DropThatShittyCompany or something.

Isn't the point of the signature to protect them? You can't just say "I don't need a signature, I promise not to sue you." and expect them to just be ok with that, or have I got the wrong end of the stick here?

Of course, the tradeoff is that if your package gets stolen, they're no longer responsible for it, which is why I've never actually done this.

But in my case/story, it was $5 set of PCBs I had fabricated. Shipping was $20 for what amounted to an ePacket. I took the chance of having someone steal them (unlikely) to tell them to just drop it off at my dorrstep (in reality, a screened in porch).

United States Postal Service allows drop offs without signatures and dropping off at neighbors. I constantly request that my packages are not mailed by UPS.

I'm taking it that the friendly postal person knew it wasn't one of the 'every other Wednesdays'.

For what it's worth, I have ordered many online items (100+) over the last several years, and every one has been left on my doorstep by USPS or UPS. The only time I have had a package stolen was during a summer I spent in a notably dangerous area. The rest of the orders were safely delivered, in my case to a college-town apartment or a suburban family home.

I see them walking past my window, from the front of the building to the back, all the time.

So they must have some flexibility...

Most people don't have hostile neighbours.

I take packages for all my 10 neighbors, they are happy with it, but we live in a civilised city and all our delivery drivers are extremely competent and nice

I went to college in Minneapolis and I knew all my neighbors and most of the homeless people. When I visit my friends in the suburbs they have no idea who their neighbors are unless there is open hostility. Look at Senator Paul.

I just notice that their is a HUGE bias to bash cities all the time. When you live in a city you actually get to know and live with a wide diversity of people, hence the normal more liberal bias. My father inlaw almost dies inside anytime he visits us and can't ever say anything positive about the city (They live in the country in West Virginia and he is a successful contractor). He thinks everyone is on drugs and lives off of $45,000 for the Government. No one knows how much the working poor works these days and West Virginia's drug problem is 10x that of my city. It's just a anti-city bias.

Haggard credited Holloway as a co-writer, entitling him to half the royalties for the song, which amounted to around half a million dollars for Holloway."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_City_(Merle_Haggard_song)

Then the person who got the package posted on an internal facebook page: "I've got a package for 304 in 605" and they would be collected.

The system worked perfectly and there were a lot of packages, I guess many potentially worth a lot.

The only 24/7 occupied house is across the road, and it's the local drug-dealing hangout, so that's a nope as they'll either fence the package or try to snort or inject it.

Most of the transient 'residents' wouldn't remember the day of the week, let alone whether they had been gifted a package.

For what it's worth I know at least UPS has a premium service where you can schedule your delivery to a specific time during the day.

So instead I end up with packages left out in the rain, or slung in the snowbank during a blizzard that I don't find until spring comes...

That said, I work from home on iPhone delivery day. Were I a thief, that would be just way too easy, knowing the day of delivery and an approximation of what the package looks like.

I think home package drop off vaults are going to grow in popularity. Getting one at my office to handle late package deliveries was really useful.

Now I need to actively be registered on N social media sites and harass the company in question until such time as they bother to respond, instead of having just had to connect with the company and directly resolve the issue.

"Making mistakes" and malicious compliance of literally driving by and not stopping are 2 very different things. Shows up on their GPS they were "there".

I was at the house, sitting on my screened-in porch when DHL 'updated' to "Sorry you didnt sign". First, I said no sig needed. Then they didn't even bother to stop. I WATCHED THEM DRIVE BY. They didn't do their fucking job.

My mom ordered something for me off Amazon, but typed in the wrong address. I walked to that address and they denied receiving any packages. From their support page, they'll call you and you'll be speaking to someone within 20seconds. They sent a replacement without question and without charging (the item was less than $50). Other times, with other issues, they'll ship you a replacement and ask you to keep the original.

I bought an Apple laptop recently. It shipped with Sierra, but I wanted to start with a clean install of High Sierra. After installing stuff I had a suspicion something wasn't compatible with High Sierra and wanted to downgrade. Frustratingly, they removed the download in the App Store. The first person I talked to on the phone walked me through an Internet Recovery--and knew the difference between installing from the Recovery Partition (which is the OS installed, High Sierra) and Internet Recovery (which installs the OS the hardware shipped with, Sierra). That, and the ability to talk me through a series of screens (including partitioning) over the phone is no easy task. The same person called me back 2 hours later to confirm everything finished installing.

I think for most other larger companies, support is a huge expense with little upside. It's cheaper to waste your time then their's. The most cost effective thing to do is hire a small number of very polite people and give them the power to do nothing.

I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.

I tried to sell a modem which I had previously purchased through Amazon. The modem came both as a bundle and by itself. I listed it correctly as purchasing the modem only, listed it "like new" (when really it was basically new, not removed from the box). It was actually the lowest price you could get it used.

Someone bought it, shipped it to them faster than necessary. About a week later I got a notice from him saying that he wanted a refund because he had thought that he was getting the bundle (not just the modem as it was listed). Why they thought they were getting the bundle like new for that price is beyond me, but whatever. I rejected the refund because it was their mistake and it would have been too much work to be worth it. Sensible, yeah?

They initiated a claim against my account and Amazon withdrew the money (it was actually great timing - overdraft). The claim said the the item condition was wrong (it was not). You are able to contest any claim like that so I took the time to explain what had happened and why the issue wasn't even about the item's condition. I don't know if they just didn't bother reading it or if all responses are handled with robots because I get a very superficial answer that didn't even acknowledge what had happened. I repeated the process in order to try to talk to another person, wrote up another account of what happened (including the new non response), and got the same kind of non-response (you must list items under the correct condition, blah, blah, blah) from a different rep. Basically, they just didn't bother answering me. I'd already wasted way more time than necessary on what I thought was gonna be a little extra cash, so now some dude in Minnesota got my modem for free, and I got an overdraft for my trouble. That's a cool trick.

Got no clue what's going on over there but I'll never sell anything there again if I can avoid it. Worst customer experience ever.

You are not the customer, just a seller. You don’t matter. The “Amazon smile” is for customers only.

The day that I became a lifelong Amazon customer was when I mistakenly ordered a mattress to the wrong address via Prime. I noticed the mistake some 28 hours after placing the order. I nearly said that I called them to tell them about my mistake, but that isn't true. I typed in my number online AND THEY CALLED ME when an operator was available. The operator quickly calmed me down and told it was "nothing to worry about". She cancelled the shipment of the mattress going to the wrong side of the US and placed an order for a replacement within 2 minutes of learning about the problem. On top of that, without being asked, she upgraded my replacement to 1 day shipping FOR FREE so that my order would still arrive by the original delivery date.

Since I screwed up in such a ridiculous way, that I would have fully expected to have gotten slammed with a return shipping fee, a shipping fee for the replacement, and even some kind of BS replacement fee. But Amazon took the bullet and provided me the the best customer service I ever could have hoped for, which prevented me from having to sleep on the ground for even one extra night.

But amazon didn't take the bullet. The seller of the mattress took the bullet.

Amazon didn't lose a penny.

Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.

This explains why individuals selling individual items, or a small number of items, can get so burned too. You need sufficient volume to cover all the inevitable bullets you have to swallow.

Cost of doing business. Reminds me of the book "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars" where Jim Paul describes how someone trading in lumber doesn't cry about 20% of the wood being useless, he knows 20% will be useless and he writes that up under cost of doing business. Just like refunds and customer support are a cost of doing business.

I mean, the worst. Only matched by health insurance companies.

The huge problem with Amazon support is everyone I've ever interacted with (besides that one time I got forwarded to a supervisor) either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support). They also won't or can't spend any significant time on any one customer inquiry, they need to move onto the next.

On the buyers side they understand how to refund an order which they do readily, ship items, say you can keep items that are errors, maybe some account stuff, and that's basically it. If you need them to do anything else that requires them to understand your inquiry it's an uphill battle.

Basically, you get terrible support if your inquiry can't be solved by quickly pressing the "refund" button or the "ship item" button. I guess most buyers usually only need those two buttons though.

I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits (and other issues). If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.

I have a nightmare Amazon seller support story, but I won't go into it for fear of spiking my blood pressure to dangerous levels. It was only resolved by me finally getting forwarded to a supervisor, who, finally, understood English.

I guess most people value money over anything else, but if I take the time to help them correct their inventory problem, it would at least be nice if they fixed it.

I ordered some glassware, very fragile. It was packaged incorrectly, basically shoved in too big of a box with no padding or anything. Or if there was padding it was very, very minimal. It arrived broken, of course. It would have been nothing short of a miracle if glassware survived that packaging.

Told Amazon the item broken due to poor/incorrect packaging. They sent another packaged identically, broken.

Told Amazon, same thing, they sent another packaged identically, broken.

I tried one more time begging them to package it correctly and got another packaged identically, broken.

I just gave up and decided I didn't really need it, got a refund, and continued to drink out of dollar store plastic cups. There was absolutely no getting through to them what they problem was. I ended up feeling defeated with 4 sets of broken glasses.

Another "they don't read anything you write to them" story... Several years ago I sold a memory card via FBA. The buyer returned the card, they said they were returning it because of a defect, they said "card slows down significantly after it gets half full." Amazon's wearhouse receives the return, they mark it as sellable, and then sell it (as new) again!! Clearly its not new, the problem was evident only from using it! The new buyer didn't complain or ask for a refund, thankfully for me, but the card might have been commingled (I don't recall) so another seller might have been dinged if Amazon shipped out the used card to their buyer.

If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?

Hope the next sucker doesn't catch it.

Something something, free market, YOLO.

Because customers don't always tell the truth, as in your perception of truth might be different from my perception of truth, meaning what's considered defective to you might be perfectly acceptable to me and to other customers.

However if your request is a little more specific and doesn't fit neatly in whatever scripts they're using then it's a bit of a mess. I mainly use amazon.fr so I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. In the end I could see that they kept reverting to the script and where a bit lost when I tried to steer things away from it.

I just wanted to complain about a transporter who kept failing to deliver my parcels so it wasn't a big deal but I think it would've been pretty difficult to interact with this (nonetheless very kind) person if I had something a little trickier and more important to figure out with them.

That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.

It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.

As for sellers, yes, it's obvious they're getting screwed.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-i...

GO through the subsection

>Pulling the andon cord

Well I used to. I pretty much quit about six months ago.

In Amazon's defence, this items price was dropping heavily during that period. But I wasnt asking them to give me new price.

Because of this incident plus Amazon taking 4-5 days to just start shipping and the news about fake goods, Amazon is no longer my first preference.

Only if everything goes into the two categories: 1.) send again 2.) reimburse/take back

Everything else doesn't work at all.

I had a phone from Amazon, empty box delivered, they had no way to stop the contract, weeks of pain, my threat getting the police involved solved the problem.

Amazon Logistics didn't deliver important stuff with evening express several times, Amazon did nothing.

One time they tried to deliver an order at 10pm (!). And I had a 10-minute discussion with support who told me it was deliver 10am until they reread the entry and agreed it was 10:07pm - at an office address.

Support stuff lied to me and put lies in their support system.

You "buy" a telephone contract and get the smartphone on top (priced into the contract of course).

Wow, I have a completely different experience. I had been a Prime member up until about 2 years ago when my last 10 out of 10 deliveries arrived late. Since I noticed Amazon wasn't really competitive with other sellers on E-Bay, etc, I only used them when I actually needed something fast. So, moral of the story is I paid more for something to get it sooner, and it still didn't help.

Amazon is generally only competitive on big ticket items that you'd get free shipping on anyway. So I found Prime to be worthless.

I bought a $1300 camera, received a $500 camera. Easy error, easy fix. I wish.

I had to call twice to initiate the return, call twice more to find out why a moth later I had neither a camera nor my money. Turns out the return was silently rejected. Why? “Wrong item returned.” No kidding! Had to call a fifth time to finally get this resolved, but at the end of that call I realized I was paying amazing $100 annually to fix issues that they caused.

But to be fair, it seems like Amazon, are no longer working with Yodel, I have not seen any item I have from bought from Amazon.co.uk to be delivered by Yodel for at least two years.

https://twitter.com/StefMichalak/status/928174251395469317

Standard Dutch mail often leaves undeliverable packages with neighbours, which is great when you live in a good neighbourhood with good neighbours who are home a lot, and perhaps not so great when you don't.

But skipping work for this is stupid and unreasonable.

E.g. when getting warranty repairs for my Thinkpad, dealing with the central Lenovo organisation wasn't great, but once they accepted "customer device has an issue" they pass it off to local service partner, and those (in my experience) deal with issues quite well. And if you don't have on-site support, some repair places take your device and handle the warranty communication for you (and have an established relationship with Lenovo making that easier). Probably not the cheapest possible setup for them though.

Apple

> "A courier claims they called at your house and got no answer, even though you were in and they didn't. You call customer services, but they have no way at all to contact the courier and tell them to go back and try again. Even if they're only two minutes down the road. The system deliberately puts a firewall between the reps and the delivery infrastructure, because any kind of ad-hoc action to resolve customer issues interferes with the logistics planning for the day's deliveries."

If UPS claims they knocked and you didn't answer there's nothing more Apple can do than to tell you to wait for tomorrow.

Their customer service is genuinely great - but the firewall definitely exists between the shipper and the deliverer.

I would believe Apple does the same (there's a sibling thread where UPS said they'd swing back by their house in 15m after missing a delivery of an Apple product--may be a coincidence, though).

I have an aquatintance who works at UPS and loves it. YMMV though.

I think the best CS will call and deal with shipping issues. Crappy companies will have none of that.

I’ve returned a fair amount of things to amazon. I had previously even received actual incorrect products in the packaging of the product I ordered (someone probably returned them to amazon as a scam) and I was able to return them without question. Easy peasy.

When I tried to return a Kindle Paperwhite that froze up every couple hours however that was a different story. I wasn’t allowed to just return it, I had to talk to support.

First call they had me powercycle it and told me to call back if it froze again. It did. I had done this myself to get it unfrozen many times.

Second call they had me factory reset it and call back if it froze again. It did. I had already done this myself.

Third call they ask “is it frozen right now?” It wasn’t. They tell me to call back when it is frozen.

Fourth call, I have it frozen, they ask me what I see and tell me to tap things to which I explain I cannot, it’s frozen! They then have me power cycle it and try to insist that that fixed the issue. I explain no, I have had this happen like 40 times now. I explain the process I’ve been through with support.

Finally they agree to give me a return authorization!

I wouldn't get angry at the rep, it's the managers that pressure this kind of behavior in full force, if it's busy and you are on the phone for more then 4 mins, a manger comes over and stands behind you and tells you what to say to end the call even if it doesn't make sense and guaranties the customer has to call back...

To get the best level of service you have to call when it's not so busy. Never call on a Monday or early in the morning, that's when it's the most busy. Slow times are Wed-Fri 1:30pm to about 6pm then anytime after 10pm. Sundays are a good bet if the place is open, although usually most of the reps that work on the weekend are new/less skilled hence prone to make more mistakes.

The most annoying part is when I deal with someone who makes it hard to deliver to a different address than my home (looking at you, Verizon) but it's always achievable.

They win at ease/speed of delivery and fantastic customer service, and usually price too - which means they own online retail.

The only thing they don't have an edge on is food and used items (although they are trying) and certain things directly from China.

Courier services as you mention though seem to have terrible service across the board. It doesn't matter if they are big or small, this seems to be some sort of hard rule almost.

(I am not affiliated with Overstock)

I agree with all of the above but wanted to underline this. Because it snowballs so much. First call they explain the problem. Second call they explain how they explained the problem to someone before, how instead they understood X and did Y. Third call... and so on. Add to that long waiting times and it compounds even more.

I did work in customer service and while I loved the people I talked to for the most part, it was really obvious that they were so nice to me because I was simply 100% frank, which was unexpected for them. And it was kinda heartbreaking how many thanked me just for listening, and not deflecting any blame, or just pointing to the EULA or whatever, but treating them like a normal person -- even though I really couldn't fix their problem, just agree that it sucks and wish them a nice day and mean it. I always tried but in many cases there was just nothing I could do except tell them all I know, and how sure I am about it. The bar was so incredibly low. When I offered people to call them back to follow up on a problem, they always were surprised when I actually did. Officially, I would have to ask permission for every outbound call, but I simply decided that that would just make it take even longer in total, so I did that once. I just made sure I was there to solve problems not chit chat, and then did what I considered necessary, not what people who didn't even talk with customers thought might be good. And when calling other departments, I also encountered people who said "you know, officially it would be X, but I think I can fix this", and they did. But it was a total crap shoot, sometimes they just made it worse or said they'd do something end then not do anything.

Once I told a coach that if the bread he eats were made as sloppily as he had suggested to me I should handle a specific problem (that is, hand it off in exactly the same way that happened 3 times before, knowing it would resolve nothing but make it someone else's problem), he would be dead in 3 months. He threw a fit and dragged me to my team leader, who had my back - a month later I hear I have a "solution rate" (some customers were asked after the call to rate friendliness etc. and if their problem was solved) of 66%, twice above the average. You might say I had ignored "orders" because I considered them bad, and my results had proven me correct. It didn't change anything about the process, but it did give me leg room if you will. At the end of the day I did the job the way I did it because I thought, if I'm going to be a drone for shitty pay, at least I want to be able to sleep at night, right? The job simply wasn't worth squirming and lying all day when I could try to make a little difference at least to that one person who had to ask me for assistance after some awfully long waiting period. But it ended up being fun and meaningful I wouldn't have imagined beforehand, and if I had just followed official suggestions and marketing materials, it would have turned out so differently, I would have learned nothing and it would have just been this shitty job I once had.

I don't believe it saves money. Maybe in the short term for the one company or a few execs in it or their shareholders, but in aggregate, it's just a waste. Call centers should simply fulfill some standards for the work and then get paid by the hour, not by call. That's all it would take, people who are in this job would mostly prefer being able to make a good job. During breaks we always used to share stories about customers on some freakish odyssey because of fucking $company. I'm sure there's also people who enjoy what little power they have over helpless callers, but if the incentives were aligned properly, they'd be gone before you can say "welcome to X, my name is Y, how can I help you?" :P

Most complaints I heard from customers, aside long waiting times, unfriendly treatment or outright incompetence, were that they didn't get feedback and had no single point of contact. Like, one person at the company who is assigned with following up on that problem until it's fixed. How would that not be flat out better? It takes 30 seconds to try to reach a customer. Just do that until you reach them, or you see something in their file indicating they called on their own and the issue is solved. Have a mechanism in place for sickness, quitting the job etc, done? Why is that hard? How is the current way better in any shape or form? If I've ever seen anything ripe for disruption, it's call centers. Talk about pain.

See http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-... (three part series)

> some sites experience levels of failure demand, that is to say calls generated due to a prior failure to serve, over 50% of the total inbound calls.

Yeah, that sounds familiar. And the worst part is, as call centers get paid for call volume (and quality, but measuring quality except by the most shallow and misguided metrics would cost money to employ additional real people so it's avoided), it's kind of in their best interest to just have customers call over and over again. I always wondered about the kind of mutually parasitic relationship between call centers and companies that outsource to them, maybe that's really the whole problem, maybe it should be done in-house, period. If you have a big house and that makes it hard, boo-hoo. Make a smaller house, or learn to hack hard things.

> Our first anti-pattern is queueing. Call centres essentially all work on the basis of oversubscription and queueing. On the assumption that some percentage of calls will go away, they save on staff by queueing calls. This is not the only way to deal with peaks in demand, though – for example, rather than holding calls, there is no good technical reason why you couldn’t instead have a call-back architecture, scheduling a call back sometime in the future.

I used to fantasize about this. First off, you can't turn off caller ID for this, but that's fair I think. So you call the hotline, it tells you in what place in the queue you are, and that you can either hold the line or get called back when you are very close to being the next in line. You can call anytime to have an update on your queue position and wait, and if you miss the call (since it would be automatic and there would be no person waiting on the other end just yet, no harm in letting it ring for as long as possible), you're back to square one. Why isn't it already done this or a similar way? Surely such systems exist, even if not (yet) widely used?

Why not allow pressing numbers to change the music as you wait? And last, but not least: how hard is it to loop something properly? (I swear, some of that has to be on purpose, sadism is a better fitting explanation than incompetence.)

> Worse, companies are always tempted to impose on you while you wait – playing music on hold (does anybody actually like this?), or worse, nagging you about using the web site. We will see later on that this is especially pointless and stupid.

Well, they really really want you to use the website. For a lot of "they"'s. Not that they can manage to run that well, either, but it's still cheaper and "scales better". I agree it's stupid, I detested it not because of job security but because I hated the lame website and how pointless it was to try to make any suggestions "above my pay grade", but in their mind, there is a point, it's not just filler.

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/politics-of-call...

> But the big issue is management, and I think expectations. People expect the experience to be terrible. People expect the job to be status-reducing and generally horrible. People expect that because it’s a cost-centre, there’s no way to improve it other than flogging the slaves harder.

Yes. I was lucky in that I found a way to not reduce my status, but actually learn a lot about myself and people, but that's generally the pattern I saw.

All the managers at these places are pretty uneducated and if you are working in the tech field, you are working with a bunch of people that know nothing about tech getting paid minimum wage, as anyone with the required skills is going to command a higher wage...

They belittle you by requiring you to ask permission to go to the washroom and to go on a 15 min break, which is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that usually the answer was "no, after your next call, ask me again". So it was normal to never get a break at some of these places. Although when they declined my requests to go to the washroom several times, I just said fuck it and went when I wanted.... and this is in Canada here....

The idea of assigning people to specific cases is one of the only ways to get something done right or at least know all the steps that were actually completed. Sadly most places didn't work that way as they "had" to squeeze in that extra call per hour. I'd regularly get in trouble for calling customers back, which to me is umm doing my job sufficiently.

I've found working for the company directly is much better then working for a 3rd party company. In those cases they care more about level of customer satisfaction. Out of all the major corps I've worked for Telus was adequate and Bell was the horrible.

In the call center, when you call in, our number one goal is to get you off the phone ASAP. Every major corp I've worked for never had a way to tell the status of the delivery via their in house software. In times like this we check the notes to see when the last time you called and just keep telling you to wait longer, say "it's sent" even though we have no way of knowing this, we are told flatout to lie.

The major reason is that delivery is outsourced to another company, who then themselves outsources it again to other drivers who will work for the least amount of money possible. So there is no direct way of contacting them or even knowing which sub company is doing the delivery.

All the managers are concerned about is you taking the next call. I have gotten in trouble multiple times for going out of my way to make sure the customer got everything completed properly. Soon as the customer hangs up your headset automatically takes another call, so you don't have time to fill out extra paper work to get what the customer actually needs completed cause you are told to do that "On your own time" and since you get paid minimum wage you don't give a shit if things get done or not due to the poisoned environment.

Now say a real incident happens where you must call the delivery driver, it CAN be done, just that they never tell the employees that because it takes "too long". Basically you call the 3rd party delivery company and tell them what's up and then it's their job to relay the message (if they even know who is doing the delivery!) So only under special circumstances can that be done.

No one cares about wasted effort or customer satisfaction, as long the hold times are low and they can employ the minimal amount of workers then they are doing there jobs...

Another thing, when you cancel your account and the company owes you money, you tell the customer 6-8 weeks to receive the refund. Now if the customer gets really angry and makes a big deal about it, then there is a little button we click on the screen that mails out the refund to the customer the next day! So why do they do that? because of all the interest they make with your money sitting longer in their bank account. This company had 3 internal accounts that had ~2 Million dollars in each of them, filled with customers money just waiting around to be sent out when the automated timer printed out a batch...

All the corporations I've worked for all operated like this, whether I was paid minimum wage or a decent 20$ an hour. I've only worked at one place where they genuinely cared about the customer, but it was small enough in that you had direct communication to everyone, but that place closed cause customer service costs too much money...

And can you imagine the logistics nightmare of multiple delivery attempts to the same address on the same day? For every courier that says they called when they didn't, there are people who will go shopping and come back at 3pm to see the slip, then call and complain.

I've had it happen to me where I'm sitting 4 feet away from my front door and I go out to find a slip on the door when they never knocked or rang the bell, but it's unreasonable to expect them to turn around and bring it back, just as it's unreasonable to think that maybe I just didn't hear it even though I was right there.