Amazon's standards seem to be slipping

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have been a fan of Amazon for a long time, but I have just come across a particularly bad piece of customer service.

I sent an email to Jeff Bezos about it. Yes, I know he almost certainly doesn’t see them, but it is the ‘buck stops here’ last resort. I didn’t get a reply, so I resent it. Still no reply, so I sent it to the generic customer services. They did reply, but totally ignored my complaint.

My email was:
*I placed an order on May 14th because, as a Prime customer, at the checkout, it said delivery would be 15th May. It has not arrived. I appreciate that this is not your fault, but, in the past, you have resolved issues like this quickly and easily. Not this time.

I had to speak to your customer services three times and receive three emails before this was sorted out. As your call centre is now in the Phillipines, I found all three people very hard to understand. (And, incidentally, the standard of English in the emails is, while comprehensible, somewhat lacking.) While your customer services have been faultless and an example to all other resellers, on this experience, you have sunk the to the level of the worst.

The first time, the operative said that (despite having paid for a next day Prime delivery), I should wait until Wednesday the 20th. I asked to speak to a supervisor, and after ten minutes on hold, I cut off the call.

The second person cut me off within a few minutes.

The third person was obviously reading from the same script as the first, but after I insisted that the 20th was not good enough, she said that she would have to ring me back. She called back about ten minutes later and she had extended my Prime membership by a month.

She then sent me an email that referenced a product I had not ordered. That was followed by another email telling me ignore the first, and that she had reordered my item.

I presume the reason that she had to call me back was because she had to consult with someone to find out what to do. In both cases, there were long gaps in the conversation while the operatives were reading from their script to discover what they should say next. It seemed very unprofessional.

This all took a long time with numerous calls and emails. If this the level of customer service I should now expect, I will not be a happy customer. It is so different to the excellent customer service I have received in the past.*

What is so frustrating is that I can’t seem to get them to acknowledge my complaint. In the past, the one thing you could rely on was a quick and easy resolution to any problems.

2

Sorry, man, that just is terrible. I will pat your back. What was this item that you couldn’t live without?

3

A £5 SD card. I was suffering terribly. Have you ever had to live without a SD card for a day?

But my point is the collapse in Amazon’s normally excellent service, not the temporary lack of a SD card.

Actually if you see the main thrust of my problem as not getting the SD card, maybe Amazon do too. And all that stuff about endless lengthy phone calls and emails just comes across as just extraneous noise.

4

It was supposed to be delivered on Friday. Nobody is in the office Saturday or Sunday. So all this emailing and calling took place yesterday?

Talk about instant gratification.

5

No: Friday evening and Saturday. We get deliveries on Saturdays and Sundays. But are you saying Amazon head office don’t work on weekends - or Mondays for that matter? I thought they are a 24 hour business. They don’t do automatic email acknowledgements? How very 20th century.

6

No, in fact I would not expect Jeff Bezos (or his email screener) to be working on Saturday or Sunday. Even assuming that your two emails to him do bubble to the top of his desk, he’s going to want to have them investigated before he replies.

Now, your description of the customer service you received does sound pretty bad. But ripping Amazon because the CEO is not sitting at his desk on a Saturday morning waiting for your email makes it seem that you think of yourself as a bit . . . special.

7

I am ripping Amazon because of having to deal with an inefficient overseas call centre - something that never used to happen.

The lack of response is just whatever is the opposite of icing on the cake.

8

That email is too long and doesn’t state want you want them to do to fix the problem. They resent the item and extended your Prime membership, which is pretty good service. They lost money on this sale. What do you want them to do that they haven’t already done? They’re not going to reconsider having customer service representatives in the Philippines based on your email. Hell, you didn’t even spell “Philippines” correctly.

9

I am a native English speaker and I’m having a problem understanding your complaint. It seems to be two complaints and I’m not sure which of the two you’re wanting them to address. If I were to parse out what you’ve done, I get this:

  1. You order an SD card. You have Amazon Prime and opted for next day delivery. You omitted if you paid extra for this. You also omitted if they refunded it.

  2. SD card didn’t arrive the next day and you said "I appreciate that this is not your fault". This is confusing. Why is what happened not their fault? Was it a third party vendor? A delivery company error? What?

  3. Then you contacted customer service. I’m guessing that you called three times but then it also mentions three emails. Then it mentions a call back, so that would be four times.

  4. Apparently they resolved your issue by extending your Prime a month. Not sure what the status of the SD card is though.

  5. So then you sent the above email to Jeff Bezos. -No reply.

  6. Sent again to JB-no reply.

  7. Sent to customer service- reply but …well, it wasn’t to your liking. They didn’t resolve more of what you wanted resolved which was… crappy customer service?

That brings us back to your statement:

So what is the **quick and easy resolution **to getting crappy customer service?

And how would you have expected JB to have replied while running a multi-billion dollar worldwide company? This company that back in 2012 made $1964.60 EVERY SECOND. Based on that, how many of those types of emails do you think they actually see?

Personally, I would never think to call Amazon if I had a problem. They’re an online company. Start with an email.

10

I think they did just fine! What are you expecting, a miracle? They are sending you a new one, extended your Prime membership, that sounds like pretty good customer service to me.

Also, I call Amazon if I have a problem, and I get excellent responses. And really, that is all they can do - send me a new one and maybe throw me a bone. They cannot magic it into my hands.

You placed an order on the 14th which was supposed to arrive on the 15th. It did not arrive. It is supposed to come on the 20th. You are not paying shipping, so she could not refund that, but she did extend your membership.

I would stick to complaining about the hold times and stuff like that.

11

You’ll probably also end up with two of the item and they won’t ask for one back.

12

Obviously the website is a 24x7 business and there are people on-call to support the computer systems 24x7. But are there people in the head office on weekends? I very much doubt it. Presumably the head office people normally only work Monday through Friday, much as any other business.

13

I hope this answers your points. I never realised that this is so complicated.

14

Prime for most of the US is free 2 day shipping. Next day shipping is usually a $5 add-on.

15

I seem to be repeating myself a lot here - and if that is because I am not making myself clear enough, I apologise.

There are three issues: 1) the non arrival of my order, which has been replaced and my Prime membership extended by a month - so, great. But I had to get in touch with them to inform them in the first place.

  1. The difficulty in getting the resolution, because the customer service representatives (all three of them), in this case, were not properly equipped or capable to deal with it easily or in a straightforward manner.

  2. Not receiving a response to my emails in a timely manner. It is now four days since sending them. How long is a reasonable time? As I have said, I would have expected at least an automated response. Am I being unreasonable?

16

To be fair, the email is not clear on what your real complaint is. You mix in non-delivery with poor English speaking skills, fair English writing skills, script reading, multiple touches and hold times. The non delivery issue was fixed by a re-order and subscription extention. What’s left, fire all the Filipinos and move the entire operation back to the US or UK? Not gonna happen.

IOW, they fixed your reasonable issue and ignored the rest. Sounds professional to me…

17

Disagree. At the very least a professional response would be a “sorry for your poor experience” form-email. Not acknowledging customers that report complaints is not good.

18

The reason I brought this up is because (having been an Amazon shopper since they opened here in the UK in about 1999) one of the things that has been outstanding about Amazon is their customer service. My experience in this case has not been great. From what I have gathered in this thread, I should accept that that the level of customer service has been downgraded and live with it. A shame, but if so, so be it.

19

As with any of these service complaints, the goal isn’t that Amazon shut down the Philippines operation tomorrow on the OP’s say-so.

His(?) is simply one more vote among many about how their customer service is or isn’t a high-quality service.

I agree that the email reads long and rambly, but ultimately the complaint has almost zero to do with the non-delivery of the item, and everything to do with the poor customer service follow-up. And only by painting a complete picture of the confused Chinese fire drill the OP went through can the PTB see the holistic consequences of their penny-pinching ways.

I think Amazon in particular and online retail in general is learning the same lesson my industry (airlines) has sadly learned:

In an environment of near perfect price competition, the only measure of merit that management can focus on is lowest possible price to the exclusion of all other considerations. While doing this to the maximum stretching-a-point extent permitted by law.

Any concern whatsoever for any ancillary factors in the buying / delivering process will simply result in the baying horde of discount seekers abandoning you wholesale in pursuit of a tiny fraction of a percent cheaper goods elsewhere.
tldr: I sympathize and agree with the OP’s position, but he(?) is spitting into a hurricane.

20

Thank you, LSLGuy, and yes, I know I am spitting in to a hurricane. But enough spits can make a difference.

Downstream (to keep up the watery metaphors) **stpauler **said that Jeff Bezos was turning over (actually, he said making) such a huge amount of money that he couldn’t possibly deal with his customers. It’s a shame that that amount of money hardly every translates into profits. In my experience, bad customer service rarely helps the bottom line.