I feel like in the customer space you have less leverage and it's more of a headache to simply not pay or get a refund (in this case).
Then again evicting a person is hard enough. I have no idea how hard it is to evict a company.
Buy something with your credit card and if it's garbage, you just tell your credit card to hold payment.
When the product has a low price and many customers, then if the product works for most people. Things are fine :)
A Bluetooth headset that works with your phone works for most people.
Here's the summary:
1. Notice my Internet speed was especially shitty on Sunday.
2. Run speed test (laughably slow), post to Twitter, tag Comcast.
3. Comcast replies, blaming my wifi and device.
4. Post more speed tests from other devices, within inches of my router. Post speed tests during off hours showing how the speed recovers.
5. Comcast still blames my wifi. How this explains why I get full speeds at 5AM I have no idea.
6. Run speed test (graphed and logged) from a wired PC, send to Comcast.
7. Comcast techs immediately "notice some issues" with my home connection. Why they didn't see this on step 2? No idea.
8. Technician comes, replaces some connections but nothing obvious, we geek out, he's an awesome guy and basically explains that my town got shafted with too few "nodes". He explains in his town, the user to node ratio is much better. His last advice is for me to get a "combo" router/modem from Comcast, instead of my leased modem and third-party (new) router. His explains this might help a tiny bit but has no other advice for me (other than move to his town - hilarious)
This final setp would involve me taking my modem (Internet down the whole time) to my local Comcast office (during work hours), and hopefully getting a combo router/modem with no issues.
I would then need to setup new combo device, and then graph and log my connection speed on Sunday and engage support again. At this point, there would be nothing they could do for me because I will have already exhausted all options. A new combo router/modem will not improve my speeds of 2 Kbps during peak hours so this is where I gave up!
I was doing a course, and had to access a Jupyter Notebook that was residing in a different server. When clicking the URL, the page will appear with a loading circle, and would die out after around 5 minutes (I measured it).
I was using my laptop (W7 + Chrome) but have a server also running Debian, with Forefox as browser. Tested in both places before accesing the chat.
I put as much into in the chat before hand.
A person shows up, tells me to "clean cookies and cache".
Tell her about the different test (This was never acknowledged, BTW).
Tells me "must be your connection".
"OK, let me test with my G4 phone"
"That kind of connections can be what is giving you problems, try ADSL"
OK, this is getting funny now.
Tells me to test a different url that she sends me over the chat.
"OK, not working here, let me test in firefox"
"We advise to only use Chrome, our apps might not work in other browsers" (THEIR page stated otherwise, and it was not a browser problem)
Told her nothing works: Tested Chrome on W7 over G4, Firefox in Debian over ADSL, nothing.
"Coursera cannot take responsibility about the content, we can only support the apps" ???
So, I was having a chat with a support tech that couldn't tell one thing form the other, as it was obviously the server (Had tried other notebooks from the same course)
Finally, asked to raise this to 2nd level. Told me not to ask opther people to download the notebook for me, as in that case if I submitted my work this would be taken as if it worked.
A couple of hours later, I notice a "forceRefresh" parameter in the url, changed it's value, app starts working.
As a side note, based in my experience support people are not prepared to deal with people with a certain technical level on the customer end.
Bad idea. However, you shouldn't be leasing a modem. Buy them outright. Breaks even in a few months.
This has been true for at least the last 5 years running.
Were you buying the cheapest supported modem? Your modem was probably deprecated when you bought it.
Also, at least for Comcast, the fact that they don't support your modem doesn't mean it won't work. It just means they won't be pushing updates and if you call in with a problem they'll tell you to first replace the modem.
They don't seem bothered by the frequency ("is normal..")
Everything else connected to that part of the house seems normal.
The cable junction point out in the yard is usually under water... they replaced all that too, but said that's normal for this neighborhood (we're adjacent to wetlands). How that bombs out the modem inside the house continues to be a mystery.
I'm probably here for one or two more replacements, and I'll move to another part of my city.
With all of them I either had a customer service rep on the phone within minutes and a replacement shipped to me free of charge without argument, or was able to easily return/exchange an item well past any reasonable return period, in some cases without receipt. On products that were years to over a decade old. Heck, Prana is shipping me a new pair of pants when all I requested was a replacement button to sew on myself.
There are companies that provide good customer service and we should reward them with our business. But this service costs those companies money and your average consumer, I reckon, looks only at price.
I will also try to buy from places who are known for treating their employees like human beings, REI for example.
I did find this snippet, which at least indicates that Americans more often take advantage of return policies. However, I understand that this doesn't directly discuss the differences in policies:
"In the US, an estimated 8–10% of in-store sales is returned whereas online sales may result in 25–40% returns. [...] In Asia and Europe, less than 5 percent of purchases are returned." https://psmag.com/magazine/underwear-of-uncertain-origin
More anecdotes in that article, and countless other anecdotes are trivial to find online:
> U.S. retailers pride themselves on their generous return policies. At Costco, I can buy a barbecue grill, cook on it all summer, then return it in the fall for a full refund. (Which is not to say that I would.) Or take the proverbial television bought for Super Bowl Sunday, then returned. The days leading up to professional football’s championship game see a huge spike in TV sales. And just as reliably, the days after the game see a spike in TVs returned to the store.
That's after the UK took a step or two down in consumer protection in adopting the EU regulations.
Where we do less well, particularly among the younger generation, is a belief that 30 day return windows and other such fairy tales actually mean anything legally speaking. I think that might be thanks to reading so many US perspectives online.
It doesn't help that the majority of 'US customer service' isn't actually located in the USA but outsourced overseas. The Philipines handles a lot of T-Mobile and Verizon's customer service calls.
They have strict rules to make sure customers don't find out about this. To the point where employees will be fired if they're found speaking their dialect near any phones.
Jabra is Danish.
This encapsulates what is most wrong and abhorrent about US customer service. This methodology is employed by thousands of companies, it is ingrained in the culture of their customer service reps. It is a "Never Back Down" attitude. They will consistently string a desperate customer along, through a maze of reps and procedures, knowing that the customer is more likely to burn out and give up before realizing that the road they are being led down does not result in resolution of the issue.
There are companies that do not engage in such behavior, yet they are primarily B2B rather than consumer facing, and usually in regard to items that are being purchased in the dollar range of tens and hundreds of thousands.