Man, I sound like I’m in my 50s.

I even considered not buying products anymore. Then five minutes later, I got hungry. Oh, and needed to get dressed. Oh, and needed to drive somewhere.

Sunnuva…

I got a new TV in January because it was bonus time, Christmas, and my birthday. I go to CC, and they have 0% financing for 2 years on stuff when you sign up and use their Chase card. Seems fine enough. I figure I can stretch $1900 over 19 months and barely mind. Well, the part that they don’t tell you is that any payments you send in come first and foremost for your 0% financing purchase, and not any of your following charges. So it rolls to about April, and I’m wondering why there’s finance charges… oh yeah, because I’m not paying for my purchases that HAVE an APR attached to them, how foolish of me. I called their support, asked if there was a way to specify how much went to pay off the different purchases, and they said no.

So long story short, I no longer use that card, the TV is paid off, and CC can go screw.

Great post! I feel for you. Couple thoughts:

1) I believe there is a pendulum swing to all this, and how much further it will go in the one direction of cheapening service, before it comes back, I can’t say. I see signs of some companies “getting it”, while many of their competitors aren’t watching, and continue to plod along – eventually they too will wake up.

2) While many companies are still going down the cost cutting / outsourcing (in so many ways) road, where traditional call center support means only frustration, they are investing in new ideas. One of those new ideas is social media – they are tuning in to people waging war on their reputations in blogs and forums. Of course you know this. Why not test out AT&T and work on some more specific blog posts, and counter post in various places to drive yourself up the list. They may spend more to “fix” your situation in that venue than they will by empowering “grandma” on the front lines in the call center?

3) I’m afraid we, American’s are bringing much of this on ourselves. While you may not do these things, I’ll just generalize for convenience. We tend to buy at “Wal Mart” and by that, I mean that we shop for the best price on something, expect wherever we buy it, to provide great service. Sure, based on what profit margin? Suppliers that have cut cost in manufacturing and development, are shipping things that don’t last or are missing parts – not deliberately, but because there is nobody left to make sure they don’t. The certaintity of shipped revenue trumps the possibility of disasterous failure rates in the field everyone time. Manufacturers don’t want to eat the returns, so they are tightening the returns caps on the distributors – and the distributors (Toys R Us) sure don’t want to take the hit, so they stop you at the front door and say to call the manufacturer. The manufacturer, doesn’t want to keep dead inventory, and wants to move onto making next years hot item, be it tickle me elmo, or whatever people will line up for. They, have outsourced customer service, and have no parts to send you. Why? Because everyone wants more for less. Wall Street demands growth – so companies that are in mature markets, cut expense, one of the only certain short term levers they have. Why, so their stock will continue to go up, their execs can make more, and hopefully the employees can get a salary bump or keep their jobs. In turn, those employees buy products, and they want more products for less money. We all want more for less. The more we buy, the more growth their is, and everything keeps on going round. This cyclic expansion comes at a cost, I think we are selling out the service underpinings to enable us to sell more of what people want for less.

I think eventually this will change. I think we are heading toward a services economy, and when service becomes the product, the focus will change.

The kind of work that you are doing in a small company, may well be the counter current. I hope you, and other’s in your position may help be the champions of change.

Thanks again for the great post, and oportunity to join the discussion.

Heck, being in the support business I can tell you it is fairly difficult to find somebody technically competent who is also “user friendly”. Even if you do, eventually all the calls and how stupid management can be (usually management decides to change something that generates even more calls) really wears on them till eventually they are not friendly at all.

The huge retail and restaurant chains have completely left customer service out of the mix. I think they figure if they come to a town and run all the local “mom and pop” competitors out of business with lower prices, you’ll have no choice but to continue doing business with them whether they provide service or not. Unfortunately, they’ve been successful doing so.

And I’ve been down a very similar road with AT&T myself. You’re lucky you got to talk to someone who speaks English…