So, why don’t they adopt a ticket based or chat based (in practice, probably more of a mix of the two) written communication online for people who are sufficiently technically competent to use it, which is probably the majority of serious customers involved? That way there would have been no doubt about statements made by the customer and claims/promises made by the various customer support personnel involved with the case.
There’s the rub. For utilites, often most folks are compentent enough to resolve the issue over the phone (and yes, there are lots of tracking/ticket mechanisms on the utility side internally).
However, the folks that have the “loudest” complaints are often not technically competent enough to use what you are describing. It is not uncommon for utilities to receive hand written notes over lined notebook paper with arrows and scribblings over bills.
I agree that when feasible, it should be used. But ultimately in the long run, cost (read as profit) is the arbitrator of what systems get implemented. If most of your service calls can be administered over phone and you’ll always need a way to deal with written correspondence, then you probably don’t need to buck up the dollars for an online chat tool.
I would also like to add that the various misunderstandings between Paypal and the user could have still happened even with online chat. Clearly, the support person on the other end of the phone (versus on the other end of an online chat) was under the belief that this Green dot prepaid card was an acceptable way to quickly transfer money to the Paypal account, when their own security department flagged it as a money laundering risk. As numerous other threads in The Pit and elsewhere on this site have pointed out, customer service people are seldom the best and brightest people out there. This person may have also been new, or was providing an anecdote of how he/she loads their own Paypal debit card. I suspect the issue is less about the method the person was using and more about the fact the money was being withdrawn in Bucharest, which is probably an area with a lot of known credit card fraud/money laundering.
That said, I would agree that Paypal should at least have an option of online chat. I’ve been using them since the earliest days of eBay and have never had a problem (beyond their escalating fees). Does eBay even let you use personal/cashier’s checks/money orders as an option these days?
is it not the company’s responsibility to stand by the word of its representatives and to train them to say things that are basically true? Or, at least, not penalize other innocent parties for the mistakes of these representatives? If Paypal fails to provide both its employees and the public sufficiently clear explanations of what is ok and what is not and if their employee makes a claim/promise to this guy, then shouldn’t they respect it instead of calling the customer’s action that is based on this claim a repeated and aggravated violation? Perhaps with a good written trail it would have been easier to demand reexamination of this particular case.
Perhaps you’ve had a different experience code_grey, but a suggestion by a random tech support person does not set up a binding contract and guarantee of anything between the company and the customer in my experience.
In fact, I would argue every timeshare business specifically leverages this excuse to avoid having to deliver on their ridiculous prizes. Several years ago before the economy tanked, I remember getting a call that promised if my wife and I went to a time share spiel at a complex near Disneyland that we could choose among their numerous prizes. Every “free trip” based prize had a catch to it (usually Sunday through Thursday stays only, and you had to pay airfare to get there). One exception, however, was a 3 day, 2 night stay at the Disneyland hotel with tickets for Disneyland included which could be used any day, not just Sunday through Thursday. I even asked her to confirm that and she did. I got her name and operator number, which she happily gave me. We live in San Diego, so we would drive to this (avoiding the airfare part) and we were otherwise headed to LA for the day when they wanted us to hear the spiel, so we thought “why not?”. Even if they had tons of blackout dates, we would have made it work.
So we show up for the presentation, which takes 2 hours and is very high pressure, but we obviously weren’t buying. Then when it comes time to get our ‘prize’, magically, we are told it is Sunday through Thursday only, and we are supposed to pay for everything up front, and then we get reimbursed less some very small (large) deductions for various fees after 6-8 weeks. I raised high holy Hell giving them the operator name and number, telling them it was to be used any day, and there was no mention of these new required conditions that they suddenly added on. They gave me the “sorry if Jennie misinformed you, as she was probably new. I guess you don’t want this valuable prize. See ya.” Only after I sent a threatening letter to them saying I would refer this to the Better Business Bureau and Attorney General for fraud was I bribed with $200 in Claim Jumper gift cards to make me go away.
Customer support is viewed (rightly or wrongly) by most comanies as a barely necessary evil which they want to accomplish as cheaply as possible.
Their management’s main goal is to have you leave them alone while not getting quite angry enough to stop being their customer. The more the company doesn’t have competition, the less it needs to care about customer service.
Try getting Google on the phone. Can’t be done. Paypal is all but a monoply in its area. Which is one of the reasons I don’t deal with them.
Yes, companies *ought *to care about being fine upstanding law-abiding and thoroughly moral citizens first, making a high quality end to end product & customer experience second, and making a profit third. But that’s not how a 21st century corporation works.
And having these financially powerful behemoths behaving like sociopaths or psychopaths rather than citizens is producing some adverse side effects for the real live human citizens that live amongst them. Inadequate or indifferent customer service is one of those side effects.
As a counterexample, Dell has online chat support which works extremely well. I always use it if possible, as it has several advantages over phone support:
[ul]
[li]It eliminates problems with understanding various accents.[/li][li]The interface displays your position in the queue, so you know roughly how long you’ll be waiting to talk to someone.[/li][li]You can type out a summary of your problem ahead of time and then paste it into the window once a rep joins the session.[/li][li]Dell automatically emails you a copy of the entire chat session, including the rep’s name and any dispatch numbers.[/li][/ul]
It would certainly be nice if other companies adopted the practice.