The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible.
The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.
Having been on both sides of this—working behind a counter and answering phones at various jobs long ago, and being someone who often surprises family and friends with my ability to extract good outcomes from customer service—I think it’s somewhat of a misconception that being as unpleasant as possible is actually effective at getting results.
I fully understand that the godawful CS mazes many companies set up wind up pushing people in that direction, and that it feels like the only option, but I believe quite strongly that being patient and polite but persistent winds up being much more effective than being unpleasant.
As a small case in point: I worked summers in a tiny ice cream shop, most of the time solo. The shop had a small bathroom for employees only—it was through a food prep area where customers were not allowed by health code. I had some leeway to let people back there as it was pretty low-risk, and I would in the evenings when no other businesses were open, or if a little kid was having an emergency. People who were unpleasant from the get-go when placing their order, however, were simply told we had no bathroom at all. People who started shouting when I told them I wasn’t supposed to let people back there (not uncommon!) and suggested a nearby business were never granted exceptions.
As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.
So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.
Yeah. I got locked out of my capital one account for a "fraud alert" last week. When I tried to login a message said "Call Number XXX" When I called that number I had to go through an endless phone tree and not single option was about fraud alerts or being locked out of accounts. I had to keep going through a forced chute of errors before after about 30 min I finally was able to speak to someone.
Even when I finally got a human they seemed confused about what happened and I had to be transferred several times.
Why would you put a phone number that does not even as a sub option address the issue?
Because there is no legal obligation that sets a minimum measurable quality and availability of service; this allows for companies to automate away customer support and place an AI chat muppet just because they can.
Most importantly though, because it's theoretically possible to address the fraud issue through the number they given, eventually, this ticks some regulatory compliance box about giving your customers recourse, and compliance is all that matters to the company - as lack of it would cost them actual money. Individual customers? On the margin, they're less than pocket change.
> As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.
It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.
> It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.
Depends on the system and country.
Over here in Poland, I've had or witness several encounters with "artificial intelligence assistants" over the past ~5 years[0], that would ignore you hitting 0, and respond to "talk to an agent" with some variant of "I understand you want to talk to an agent, but before I connect you, perhaps there is something I could help you with?", repeatedly. Swearing, or at least getting recognizably annoyed, tends to eventually cut through that.
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[0] - Also, annoyingly, for the past 2 years we had cheap LLMs that would be better to handle this than whatever shit they still deploy. Even today, hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line would yield infinitely more helpful bot than whatever garbage they're still deploying. Alas, the bots aren't meant to be helpful.
With my Medicaid insurance carrier, long ago their automated system quit recognizing my member number, whether I recited it carefully, or typed it on the keypad. It would steadfastly pretend not to understand me. And I believe that this was somehow deliberately configured in their system, perhaps as an anti-fraud measure or perhaps just to spite/stymie me from frequently calling in. And it certainly would slow me down, especially when I was in a public place and valiantly trying to get something done by reaching out to them (their services included arranging rideshares/taxis, and so it was not unusual for them to fuck that up, thereby prompting me to call in and try to unfuck my ride home from the dreary, awful, vampiric medical clinic where they'd dumped me.)
So I have become accustomed to feeding it gibberish. I will type-in or recite nonsense numbers. It always takes 3 tries, 3 identical failures, before it routes me to a human anyways (the gatekeeping is simply an attempt at automatic authentication before the manual, human auth kicks in.) The most efficient way to get beyond that gatekeeping is by triggering unambiguous failures to authenticate.
And it is kind of funny; I don't know what is supplied to the humans' screens, but they are sometimes perplexed when they receive my call and I've just finished spouting gibberish to their ignorant robot bitch.
There’s generally no repercussions to bullying robots — or being nice to one. Aggressively direct, if not outright unsympathetically cruel, is probably the best approach in all scenarios
Or, alternatively, it slowly undermines you over years, causing you to fall behind your peers and society as they reap the benefits of AI unencumbered by the impotent rage it cannot express directly.
Yeah, far too many systems try to cover every case in the menu and deny access to a human--but never have I seen one that actually covered anything like every case. They cover the easy stuff and you have to get hostile with the robot over anything else.
Or our local pharmacy--it has it's own number but if you actually need a human you're dumped into the general phone tree and have to go back to the pharmacy and persuade the robot to let you through to a human. And the designers never put things in the menu for the stuff that needs a human.
I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing in 2 hours.
You can have assholes on both sides and set up is already adversarial from the get-go
I once lost a flight home (I was overseas) because the website of a company said there was a connecting bus between the airports I should take. The bus wasn’t there. I naturally lost the flight and had a very heated discussion with the clerk who was insisting that the website I was showing wasn’t theirs because I found it via Google (it had the same domain).
It was solved when I found the same information in the email sent by them.
Suddenly the clerk was apologetic and pretended she misunderstood the situation.
There are definitely capital-A assholes in both sides, with people willing to lie through the teeth to someone stranded in a foreign country just to avoid some minor inconvenience.
I’ve had the same experience on a flight. They said the plane was overweight and we couldnt travel. The person I was travelling with became extremely difficult. Then magically, it wasn’t overweight any more.
TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts.
And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved.
I’ll never fly TK again and tell anyone whenever this came up. Look reviews up for yourself online, hundreds of people report being stranded, abused, and disrespected in IST by TK the way we were.
Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else.
It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile phones or Internet, and thus, on average, for every lost customer that switches to a competitor, they gain one that switched from a competitor.
Here in Australia the government owns the last mile (the government org is called the NBN), but you have to buy your connection off them through a retailer.
Our biggest retailers predate that arrangement. They are exactly as you describe. They are expensive. Their customer service is complete crap, echoing all the complaints you see here. The small ones the NBN enabled are the reverse: cheaper, and the customer service ranges from OK to brilliant. Brilliant invariably costs more, so you get what you pay for.
So your theory is wrong, or at least the equilibrium you paint is incomplete. I can give you a clue on how a large dominant ISP can survive in a highly competitive market: their advertising saturates the airwaves. They use their higher prices, lack of service and scale efficiencies to pay for it.
It doesn't work so well on me. I suspect like most people here I will happily do a couple hours of research on prices and forums before making a purchase. The continued existance of these big ISP's can be explained by one thing: most people don't put that effort in.
Putting in the effort only works if there are alternatives if course, and this is where there is a glaring difference between Australia and the USA: whereas everybody in Australia gets to choose from literally hundreds of ISP's (most tiny), I regularly see complaints from Americans they get no or very few choices. That's because Australia governments go out of there way to engineer competitive markets. ISP's are just example. You see similar efforts in water, banking, insurance - lots of places. In the case of the NBN it was extraordinarily heavy handed. After years of existing telcos refusing to upgrade the copper network without being given a monopoly the government owned NBN was created to overbuilt it with fibre, rendering the old copper network worthless.
I doubt the USA's worship of "free markets" would permit such behaviour, which I suspect is the real reason you are stuck with shitty customer service. There is no point providing good customer service if there is no competition, and if there competition the usual approach in the USA seems to be Peter Thiel's: eliminate it.
Its never ends to surprise how Australian public is brainwashed by own government.
It’s opposite in Australia, a monopoly of network providers with variety of “competitive” ISPs that have exactly same prices and services. And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else. Any network issues they forward to network provider.
> And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else.
For anybody reading this and thinking it looks reasonable, one outcome of having all these ISP is net neutrality isn't a problem in Australia.
ISP's used to often offer discounted services for certain traffic, like Netflix or traffic that originated in Australia. "Used to" because landline traffic is so cheap now I haven't seen a data limited landline plan in a long while. Charging differently depending on where bytes came from wasn't a problem precisely because there are so many ISP's to chose from. If you didn't like one, move to another. Download limits are still a thing on mobile data plans, so you still occasionally see it happen there.
Also, the NBN isn't technically a monopoly. Anyone is free to pay a third party to run fiber to their house. The NBN is a practical monopoly because it's very expensive to run a new fibre through kilometres of suburban footpaths, and it makes absolutely no sense when the NBN already has fibre in those footpaths and will supply any house beside it with a 1Gbps connection. However, it does make sense for business to run their own fibre because they usually aren't in the burb's (so it's cheap'ish) and don't want to share a line (privacy and predictable latencies), so they often do pay for parties a third part like VOCUS to run fibre to them.
Finally, even though the NBN is a practical monopoly on landline for households, there are competing technologies like 5G and starlink which everyone is free to use. In fact I'm using 5G right at home because I'm waiting for fibre. The reason they don't use it is these competing technologies are slower, have higher latencies, and are more expensive.
I'm not sure who is the brainwashed one here - the Australian public quite correctly understands the vast bulk of Australians have lots of choice on what to internet connection options they have available to them.
Not accurate. Factually, some are much worse than others. A few are good to great. Lumping them all together as "garbage" is unjust and is totally counterproductive. Why even try when your efforts are unappreciated?
We had a very unpleasant experience with AirBnB support when we stayed in a house that it turned out was infested by bats, which we discovered when we awoke to bats in the bedroom.
For anyone unaware, bat bites are so small they are not detectable, and sleeping in the same room as one is sufficient to be considered a rabies exposure.
When we reported this to the local health department while dropping off a captured bat for rabies testing, they said that previous guests had also made similar complaints about the same house.
So despite numerous guests complaining about rabies exposures, AirBnB went back and forth for nearly 6 months afterwards before finally granting a refund.
I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with AirBnB, but I did have one place that I checked into in Vegas in July with the water shutoff. Support initially suggested that I stay there anyway, since it was only one night. I laughed and politely declined that “resolution” to my case and they eventually relented to refund my money.
Yes unfortunately I've observed this in some support systems.
The best way is to thread the needle between being extremely personally polite to the other human on the line, but going through the required machinations on their runbook to trigger an escalation.
That is - you don't really have to behave unpleasant (raise voice, swear, be impolite, threaten) but you should just refuse to get off the line, demand escalation, and importantly emphasize with their predicament in needing to escalate you. Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".
I had a cellphone provider send me a $3000 bill because someone apparently was able to open 5 lines & new devices in my name/address. I went through the first few steps of their runbook including going to police department, getting report filed, and providing them the report number. They then tried to demand further work from me and I escalated.
At that point I turned it around - what evidence do you have that I opened this line. Show me the store security footage of me buying the phones, show me the scan of my drivers license, show me my social security number? Tim, are you saying I can just go to the store with your name & address and open 5 lines in your name? Being able to point out the asymmetry of evidence, unreasonableness of their demands, and putting the support staff in my shoes.. they relented and cleared the case.
> Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".
"We" phrasing is an empathy hack for CS, because it lets you continue to be nice to the person you're talking to AND be persistent about "our" issue being solved.
It's kind of like judo, especially when faced with an apathetic, resistant, or adversarial rep: "This isn't just my problem. This is our problem. So how can we fix it?"
PS: In the same way that my favorite cancellation reason turns the situation on its head. Don't play the game they've rigged up for you to lose. "Why are you cancelling?" -> "Personal reasons." There's literally no counter-response.
Alternatively, just lie about the cancellation reason. *"Why are you cancelling your Comcast internet service?" Answer: "I am moving to the Solomon islands, where there is no Comcast service or business for 1000 miles in any direction (at least)."
Situations like this make me incredibly grateful for the various industry ombudsmen we have in Australia. Often it’s only a case of submitting the initial complaint to the provider, having it be acknowledged, and advising them that they’ve not resolved the problem. It’s not uncommon for the mere mention of the name of the ombudsman’s office to get the problem magically escalated and resolved by an on-shore team very quickly.
Doordash tier 1 is so extreme that they terminate conversations unilaterally. One of the worst trashy customer services I've ever seen. Then you yell in the email and you get the right response from a "manager". Waste of everyone's time
I ask for something, when they say they can’t do that. I say the magic words “Maybe your manager can do it?” You just don’t accept the possibility of your request not being fulfilled, say they are contractually obliged to do, even if you’re not sure, if all else fails reverse the charges on your card. Threatening small claims court works well. I now do that on the on the second email, do I look like a fool? Yes. Do I have a lot of time to investigate your platform's org structure and capabilities when I have dozens of companies like this I deal with daily? No.
Before threatening small claims court (known to be a PITA for the plaintiff), I'll tell them that if they can't resolve it, then they should send me an email telling me so, which I'll forward to my credit card company so they can reverse the charges. Then I'll remind them that that's bad for the business because it increases their transaction fees and ask (again) if there's any way to just refund me. This works for me like 90% of the time.
If you behave unpleasant enough I'll go out of my way to make sure your behavior does not pay off. I will note your abrasive behavior in the ticket or might even mark your mail as spam. On telephone our line will suddenly experience technical difficulties. And throughout I will remain as friendly and patient as ever.
I will warn superiors about you, so once you escalate they already have a colorful 3D image of your wonderful personality in mind. Whether that 100% is in your favor, you can guess.
Play asshole games? Win asshole prices.
Behave like a decent person with empathy instead, press the right buttons and I might even skip some of the company rules for you. Many people in support do not give a single damn if they lose their job over you and you might just be worth it.
These are not sfter-the-fact shower thoughts, these are actually lived experiences from the trenches and I know how other people in those roles think.
Persistence pays off, being an asshole not so much
Never worked in customer support huh? Sometimes the first thing you ever hear from a person is them cursing at you. Some people don't even greet you and act downright uncivilized, yelling, aggressive, assuming you not magically only know their problem without them telling you, no you also somehow caused it, on purpose, because you're evil. They haven't even given you a passing chance of helping them.
As someone who grew up in the EU I believe that human dignity is an fundamental right, and that treating a person in a support role with basic manners is in the spirit of that right.
I see, but this is unfortunately the rational behavior in many cases, as being nice will get you a sorry and a goodbye.
I have worked in places where customers expected some kind of service provided and the nastier behavior got rewarded the most.
While for some this behavior come naturally, I think there is also an element of conditioning to this behavior.
Also, people are not calling because evertyhing is great. Some level of frustration and anger must be expected in such a job. But my impressions is most companies don't train their workers to handle such scenarios.
You've clearly never worked customer support. A very disproportionate number of people who call in to customer support are totally and utterly unreasonable. That's why it's such a pain to interact with customer support as a reasonable human: The systems aren't designed for you, they're designed for the abusers who represent something like 20% of the phone calls and 80% of the work.
From my side it feels like customer support systems are designed purely to trap customers in the system so they are unable to cancel.
In my last day in South America I spent about two hours cancelling my cable and even though I was very soft spoken and super patient (I was playing Mario Kart on mute so not really uncomfortable), but the customer support person actually CRIED to me because she would “miss her quota” if I cancelled.
I had no means of paying anymore (I cancelled my bank account the day before and was about to move to another country) so there was nothing I couldn’t really help her, so I fail to see how I deserve the treatment from the company.
Easily adressible by law. In the EU canceling must be possible by at least the same means as signing up, so if you can sign up via click, you need to be able to cancel via click.
Depends. Started in CS and I would go out of my way to help nice people. Assholes were dealt with nicely but I’d follow the rules to the T. That was before CS was hamstrung.
I was once on the phone with a cell phone company customer support rep who was clearly as dis-empowered as it's possible for a worker to be. He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me, so I used my normal tactic of just refusing to give up - I was friendly enough but refused to end the call. He was refusing to escalate my call, but couldn't help me himself.
20 or 25 minutes in I realized that wasn't going to work, so I asked if they had a protocol to escalate in an abusive situation. He said "ummm....". I said, "hey, you're doing a great job, and I hope the rest of your day goes better, and I hope you know you're not a motherfucker, you motherfucker."
I think (hope?) he stifled a laugh and said "I'm afraid I'll have to escalate this call to my manager, sir."
Plenty of big companies found a workaround. The "forever on hold" routine where they don't hang up, you will eventually. This works perfectly for toll free numbers (so you can't claim you had to pay for the call) and provides just the right amount of plausible deniability (took longer than expected to find an answer, it was an accident, etc.).
I have my suspicions that in some cases this also prevents the survey going out to the customer. All the more reason to abuse it.
Is it even possible to keep someone "on hold" forever? My experience (in Poland) was that it'll take at most 20-30 minutes before something somewhere timeouts and the call gets disconnected.
I've been on hold for 4+ hours when dealing with the California government. The only timeout there is at the end of the business day, when it will automatically hang up.
Try calling the assurance maladie in France :) I gave up after about 80 minutes of their little silly jingle while the agent was allegedly looking for the answer to my problem.
Back before the days that you could do almost everything over internet but cell phones still existed I had to go to a business to do some transactions on a pretty regular basis. Unfortunately they also were required to answer calls during all that and it was very interruptive. Eventually I realized they had only two lines so I'd call in and ask to be put on hold, then ask the guy behind the counter for his cell and call in and ask to be put on hold again.
>An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.
A lot of people do this unwittingly, so it's a good article to read.
The converse is to this is many companies demand it. If you're not an asshole, you're simply going to get ignored.
I have seen this as well, watching customer support issues get escalated to engineering. Many times, engineering tries to blow off the issue. It was fascinating to me how quickly an issue got escalated to numerous engineering managers, directors, leads, etc when the customer threaten to cancel their contract.
I was even more blown away when the whole thing becomes old, forgotten news the moment the customer stopped threatening to cancel the contract, even if the underlying problem remains.
This really reinforces the lesson that the main power structures of the world does not listen to "reason" - it only responds to incentives, whether they're airlines or ginormous tech companies.
Hacker News has also repeatedly noticed the same thing whenever a big tech customer issue hits the top of Hacker News, and the comments point out that the only way that customer got help was when it got enough attention to cause a reputation risk to the big tech company.
This has become the norm in customer service. That is why a taboo has been invoked by companies against being a "Karen". That's how they get you. The ugliest thing you can be today is a customer who knows they're right and won't roll over.
The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.