A real physical letter isn’t always going to get forwarded, and even if the CEO’s secy does do that, there’s always the BoD, Executive Commitee and so forth. Even for the CEO- the buck doesn’t stop there. Enough fuss and the shareholders will vote out a bad or unresponsive BoD or Officers. There’s nothing you can do about that, no matter how powerful you think a mighty tier 2 CSR is. :rolleyes:
Heeeeee. Maybe it’s just because it’s super late, but this talk of contacting the board of directors of a company to complain because you’re pissed off at tier 1 tech support, and having the board of directors actually voted out because of this nonsense, is making me seriously crack up.
You don’t understand! If you won’t let me talk to your supervisor, then I…I… I will write a letter! A real letter! With a stamp! A stamp, do you hear me!
You guys kill me, seriously.
He thinks he’s Hans Blix, sending a strongly worded letter to the BoD…
And if that gets no response, the next one will use a larger, more menacing font.
“If you ever make two arguments in a post, everyone will immediately latch on to the less interesting of the pair to the exclusion of the one you wanted a response to the most. This is not affected by subsequent posts of yours focusing on the more interesting argument.” – Internet Law
How many companies have policy dictating how employees should (not) respond to people saying bad things about the company on the Internet? It’s been nearly 15 years at this point since everyone has had to acknowledge the existence of the Internet; you’d think a company would have to outline something if only to prevent a douchey CSR (I know, I know, but in theory they must exist) from acting like a giant unwashed douchenozzle on behalf of the company as a whole.
I’m right there with you.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
A real physical letter isn’t always going to get forwarded, and even if the CEO’s secy does do that, there’s always the BoD, Executive Commitee and so forth. Even for the CEO- the buck doesn’t stop there. Enough fuss and the shareholders will vote out a bad or unresponsive BoD or Officers. There’s nothing you can do about that, no matter how powerful you think a mighty tier 2 CSR is.
[/QUOTE]
Great, if your issue is so vitally important to warrant the attention of a Board of Directors, then go for it. Write a letter if it makes you feel better. Imagine the Board of Directors sitting down and reading it aloud during a shareholder meeting.
Now, remember that you are one of hundreds of thousands (or perhaps an order of magnitude more, depending on how big this company is) of customers who have earth-shattering issues they DEMAND! results for.
The CEO does not care about your problem. The Board of Directors does not care about your problem, unless it’s of such grave importance as to threaten the profitability of the entire company. The CEO’s secretary does not care about your problem. To be perfectly frank, in a corporate empire with that many customers, the Board of Directors would probably much rather pool together their pocket change to pay your outstanding bill than spend thirty seconds reading your well written letter. It’s cold, it’s heartless, but it’s the sad truth. That’s why there’s a team of people who do such things for them. There’s nothing you can do about that, no matter how powerful you think a mighty single customer is.
In today’s world? Any major company has a handle on social networking and resolving Internet complaints. Most of them will probably reply to you faster than had you waited on hold on the phone. Do you think the Board of Directors are the ones fielding those tweets or something?
Interesting. Do you know any details?
The context is something like, say, this: Gaming company does something bad, gamers boycott (do not buy game), gaming company changes plan. I know, that trick never works. Obviously, getting pissed off at one aspect of a company is utterly unlike getting pissed off at another aspect of a company so my example is as bogus as I am ugly, but humor a dullard and explain why the Board would need to be fielding tweets for something like this to have an impact.
I’m sure ours does. I’m pretty sure my last company did. You generally cannot present yourself as a representative of your company on the internet (no matter what job you do) if you’re not charged with speaking on your company’s behalf.
Like I say, same for any job. When I worked Armored for Loomis, I would get in trouble if I got on the internet and tried to speak on my company’s behalf. When I did IT for my consulting firm back in the day, they would likewise take a dim view of me presenting myself as any kind of official rep for them.
Spewing bad things about a company on the internet rarely has good consequences. If it is a legitimate complaint presented in a polite manner, it may draw their attention and get the issue resolved on your behalf. If you’re just spewing venom and bullshit, very few companies are going to bother with you, because you are not only not following any legitimate path of resolution, you are actively intending harm to the company. If you’re completely insane and demanding that Microsoft put an end to their attempts at hacking into your dreams, then it is likely that your story is going to be passed around for entertainment purposes in the industry, but otherwise ignored.
Chimera: That is a very reasonable response.
Well, Nzinga’s saying that if you ask for one, you will never get one. That is, apparently, the policy.
Such as…? I’ve used Twitter a few times to get the attention of ERCs of companies I needed simple fixes from, but didn’t want to sit on the phone with. Where I work now, we have a social media team that monitors Twitter, Facebook, etc. for mentions of us, and contacts customers directly to resolve problems. I don’t know any major player in our industry who doesn’t have the same.
There’s a big difference between a group of people having the same issue with a company, and you having a problem with your bill. Or with your box. Or with your order. Or with your refund. Surely you understand the difference between a game company, which MUST focus on pleasing its customers, mass boycott and you having an issue with your order.
Under some circumstances with some companies, yes that is the policy.
You ask for my supervisor, I say no. Because there is no level above me and my boss doesn’t take calls. But if you want to get past the first rank guy, then yes, ask for a supervisor and you will get me.
At other companies, you can keep asking for supervisors to your heart’s content and they’ll just keep passing you off from one person to the other until you get tired of it or you get disconnected. It is more than likely at some point that in some companies you are just being passed in a circle to maintain the illusion that you can keep escalating, and it is also possible that you may get escalated to someone on the director level at some companies at which point they will refuse any further escalation attempts.
Honestly, if you’re demanding something and aren’t getting it from any level of the company, it is very probably time to step back and re-evaluate what you are demanding from them. Like I’ve said in other threads, if you come at me screaming that you don’t give a rat’s ass about our warranty, you expect us to fix your 10 year old computer for free, you should not be surprised when everyone in our company says no. No amount of escalation is going to change that answer, because you are not being reasonable. Threats, profanity and the like are only going to make it more likely that I will hang up on you, and I can assure you that at no point will I or any other CSR be fired for doing so, or for refusing to repair your computer for free.
I guess the point came about because of some people’s assertion in this thread that if they were not getting what they wanted, it was because we CSRs didn’t know how to do our jobs and they had every right to keep escalating all the way to the CEO. As we have repeated, that doesn’t happen pretty much anywhere, and most certainly not in the places we work.
Then we got side tracked into the “strongly worded letter to the Board of Directors” nonsense. Sure, go ahead and write a letter to the BoD of AT&T or Comcast. See where that gets you.
Hell. If you really want to go for broke, try what one guy did with me.
Nine months out of warranty, admits that he damaged his computer and that’s why it doesn’t work any more.
“I don’t care what your warranty says, I demand a new one”
(note, not just repaired, a NEW one)
Me: Not happening
“Now you’re insulting me. So I demand the latest model for free.”
Me: Not going to happen.
“Oh yeah? No I not only demand the latest model for free, but you’re going to give me $500 for my time and trouble because you insulted me!”
Me: Still not going to happen
“OH YEAH? WELL NOW YOU’RE GOING TO GIVE ME ALL OF THAT AND I’M GOING TO GET YOU FIRED FOR INSULTING ME!”
Me: <click>
I checked back later. He never got the thing repaired that I could see.
But that is the kind of unreasonable behavior that CSRs, especially those who take supervisor calls, deal with every day. So when people in this thread start insinuating that we don’t know how to do our jobs because we don’t satisfy these kinds of demands, then I can only believe that the people saying such things in this thread are just as irrational and unreasonable, at which point their opinion ceases to have any meaning.
OK, that bolded there was precisely the kind of detail I was asking for.
I suppose I could take this in two directions: Either I focus on how people were pooh-poohing the whole concept of escalating beyond the CSR level ever by any means ever, or I focus on estimating the likelihood of only one person having a given problem with a company assuming the person with the problem isn’t actually insane.
Honestly, I like the Reddit method of dispute resolution: If the person going to Reddit is crazy, or trying to over-inflate a non-issue, said person gets ignored or shouted down, whichever is funnier. On the other hand, if the person has a real issue, it’s likely others dealing with that company have had it and, at the very least, make a thread visible to Google to warn others about it.
This is strawman crap of the highest order. Nobody in this thread has complained about not getting service after a warranty has expired or has demanded any else totally unreasonable like a free replacement for a ten year old computer. Why don’t you actually address the issue of “Customer No-Service” that is deliberately designed to hinder and discourage customers from getting the service they deserve? If this isn’t what happens at your particular company, then yay and whoopdedoo for you, but it does happen frequently at other companies, and it is a real problem.
Time to pull out my much hated Dopism - Try reading for comprehension.
I have addressed that, and specifically named two companies who do that and why.
That’s right. Different companies have different policies for different reasons. Sorry, that is just a fact. If you get the kind of company that the agent refuses to put a super on, despite your threats, chances are good that you have found a company with a policy you don’t agree with. It’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean you can’t ask for a super. It doesn’t mean you can’t tell the internet about it. It doesn’t mean you can’t take your business elsewhere. It just means you are never getting a super at my desk. In over 5 years it has happened exactly never.
But, I can’t stress this enough, I will do everything in my power to either resolve your issue myself, or do what the cold automated system would have told you to do, had I not been sitting there catching routed calls…“Please visit our website”
I realize I am starting to repeat myself, but I think it bears repeating: Very often, the CS rep you have reached is there because someone in the company thought, “Hey, having a customer stuck in automated hell, only to end up at the website is pretty shitty. Let’s route some of these calls to a warm body”
How would any of these people have survived in the age before the internet and telephone support?
“Hubley, whip off a letter to the XYZ corporation asking how we use their confounded doohickey! Then send it off by our fastest courier! I want an answer by the end of Summer!”
There’s nothing I can do about that - you will just have to wait until we get it fixed. Call back Monday or Tuesday.
Regards,
Shodan
I doubt that the systems are set up to hinder and discourage. They just end up that way because the systems get so massive and fucked up over time.
I used to work in management at a call center and I saw this first hand. Now, we were an outsourced center - clients hired us to take care of business. This is important. You could scream up and down that you were our customer and didn’t we care about losing business and et cetera, but the thing is – you weren’t our customer. You were our customer’s customer. Now, granted, we didn’t want to piss you off unnecessarily, but if we had a choice between:
A) following the written policy expressly spelled out by our client in our contract
and
B) retaining your business
Guess which one we picked every time?
Now fortunately, on the main contract I worked, the client was generally pretty flexible. It was an infomercial product that had one of those recurring shipment deals. If someone got the second shipment and was mad, no problem, full refund (including shipping) on their word that they’d return the product. Often, however, we’d get this call:
“Well I’ve been getting these packages for awhile but I thought it was free and now I checked my statement and I’ve been billed nine times!!!”
(Nine times, every two months…)
And absolutely we are not taking all of those packages back. Generally the return policy was 60 days but we could authorize up to 6 months. Past that, absolutely not. The client would not authorize any returns past 6 months, period. Supervisor, manager, whoever. 6 month hard limit on our contract. We COULD NOT authorize past that time. The absolute best thing we could do was forward the case to the client, which we had better have a DAMN good reason for. A damn good reason is not “I thought I’d keep getting free product indefinitely and only check my bank statements every two years.”
The reason that companies have to put in limits is because of ridiculous people who want ridiculous things. I had all kinds of things demanded of me. I had a doctor who demanded to talk to the CEO right then to pay him for his time that he spent reading the website because he didn’t like our pricing. I had a woman who had like 18 overdraft charges over a two-month period and wanted us to pay for all of them because she had ordered something from us and forgot about it, then didn’t check her bank statements for months. I had people who bought our products at garage sales and threatened to get me fired if I didn’t refund them at full price despite not having any orders on file for them. I had a guy who demanded free product because his “friend was mad” for a mysterious reason, then changed his story to “you should send this to support me because I live in the Holy Land”. Working as a CSR, you see this madness not occasionally, but every damn day.
Now, the CSR has no real incentive to protect the company’s money. I saw one account where the person was so persuasive and emotionally manipulative that she’d gotten around a thousand dollars of free product, despite never actually buying anything from us… ever. So policies get made that cover 98% of people, the power to deal with weird situations gets taken away, and the remaining 2% who have a weird issue are fucked. Sure, the problems could get solved by the company investing a lot more money in hiring better customer service staff, but realistically, you’re not going to pay another $100 for your computer to pay for that – you’re going to buy from a competitor instead.
Fortunately, these days I work as a technical support manager in a tiny office, and there are no written policies. I go by my best judgement and have sweeping refund powers so it’s generally not a problem - you’re unhappy for a reason we can’t fix, we just refund you. 99.9999% of the time, this is fine. Once in awhile I will get a brazen moron who has created a massive disaster of their own design and who will threaten, scream, and wail at me, try to get me fired, etc. No matter how you try, you can’t please everybody.
Have you ever noticed that the people who threaten to bring the Wrath of the Law down on you are also the people who insist that there’s nothing on the screen?