I Think I have a Support Problem
Originally published May 2015.Hi. My name is Ariel, and from the amount of times I've had to talk to customer support, you might think that I have a support problem. I'm not addicted to customer support. I've talked to a dozen people last month about my issues, but I'm fairly certain was the twelve-step program for internet addiction/connection. No, I'm just caught in a flash flood of annoyances that come with being an adult.
This stormy atmosphere that has caused me to use an AA Analogy is, in reality, just a series of inconveniences. I'm simply referring to how many little issues I've had to deal with in the past few months that an adult has to endure at some point or another in their life, as well as the numerous times I've had to talk to a customer service representative. You may have already read about the fiasco that was my internet installation experience and how I had to go through a dozen people to get it resolved. I have a small addendum to that story for you today, in addition to the various other issues I've been handling in regard to my apartment and my credit card.
All of these issues may be relatively common to people, though, I have to admit, it's more annoying that I have to deal with them all within a short time span of each other. The most annoying thing, however, is how much I feel like I'm doing the majority of the legwork for them. Not to sound like the typical indignant, self-righteous customer, but when I talk to customer service, I really don't want to be the one doing the majority of the work. I have my day job, I do it, then I give a company money for their products and they pay their agents to do their job. The job of customer service agents is to investigate the issue and do their best to determine and provide a solution. The best, it feels, has waned in recent years as more effort is placed into trying to make a sale midway through the conversation than actually resolving the reason I'm calling you in the first place.
Before we continue with this tale, I have a quick piece of advice for companies:
Don't try to sell me something when I'm trying to get you to fix the first problem! I wouldn't be contacting customer support, UNLESS there is a fucking problem in the first place!
This only adds to my frustration when I feel like I'm doing someone else's job. I shouldn't have to do my own day job and then half the work of the customer service agent when I have a problem. I don't want to do the legwork, the investigation, and then call you up just so you can click a button and say "problem solved"--or not click the button and say you did because you're a worthless agent. Obviously, the definition of the customer service rep's job has changed recently from assistance to salesman with button powers.
A History of Compliance
I didn't always find myself on the phone or chatting with an agent online about something. Maybe it comes with getting older: as a right of passage into my 30s, I must converse with a dozen customer service reps a month before I can claim my spear and join the hunt. I hope that when I get my spear I can use it on the lazy reps whom I have to convince to do their job as I understood it.
I said this already in my Internet Odyssey story, but I was once a customer service representative. I've been there. I know how shitty the job is. It's boring. It's frustrating. It's stressful. There are people whom you can't please, no matter how hard you try. There are people who are too dumb to please and add to the frustration as well. Somewhere in the middle are the people with genuine issues that need help. Quite frequently, however, the agents simply can't help these nice people because of company policies or other arbitrary reasons, and their temperament changes from nice to unpleasant. These are sympathetic scenarios that the average customer service rep will encounter, as I have, so long as they actually try to do their job.
As a customer, I do my best to stay informed and not make customer service the first place to go. I don't want to have to talk to them, especially now that they have to try to sell me shit in the process. I do my best to stay patient and pleasant with them, regardless of how infuriated I might be. I don't want to scream at the person for something they didn't do or hold no responsibility for. Yet, I still feel like if you don't push them, then your story has to become tragic before they even consider getting off their ass to help you. I can't blame them for feeling underpaid, but my sympathy has begun to dry up with my recent interactions.
It's the double-edged sword of being a former CS rep. I know how shitty it was, so I'm sympathetic to the person not wanting to try very hard to help me, but as a customer service agent, I also sucked it up and still tried to help people as much as I could, regardless of the person's current attitude. I tried harder when the person was nicer to me, so as a customer, I try to be nice for the same reason. So far, this hasn't seemed to resolve the issues much faster. So, before I get into my new experiences, here is my call to arms for CS reps out there:
If you want customers to be nice and stay nice while talking to you and make your job more pleasant (despite your wages), you have to do your best to help them. If you don't try hard enough, the nice customers become less nice and you perpetuate the myth/fact that you gotta get loud, mean, and angry in order to get your way as a customer.
I have plenty more to say, but let's just get onto the stories already.
Can I get an Inconvenience Discount?
So, I finally got internet installed in my apartment. Two weeks later, I got my second bill from my ISP. What do you think was on it? If you guessed the charges for all those technician visits, YOU'RE RIGHT! Well, maybe they were just charging me for one, which makes the price tag even more ridiculous. Before we get into the details, however, let's back up a little bit.
I looked at my bill and saw this little miscellaneous section on the right. There was an additional $100 added to my bill with an acronym identifying it and then $50 taken off with another acronym identifying it. There was also the $18 I had removed from when I had talked to one of the billing agents online. There was even another $10 removed just because of how little internet was used over the month (go figure it would be so little). Yet if you can do math, you'll see that even with these deductions, I was still paying extra for something.
I called them up to ask what the acronyms meant and what I was being charged for. This of course meant I had to listen to their stupid phone robot once again. When I finally talked to the less-than-enthusiastic billing agent, she informed me that the $100 was for the technician visits and the $50 taken off was for the inconvenience. However, if you're like me, you expect the inconvenience to negate the cost, not just give a discount. As I sat there pondering what she had explained, she asked if there was anything else, didn't wait for a reply before running through her rhetoric, and hung up.
So I went on to their website and did the live chat thing. This rep seemed more enthusiastic, based on their word choice, at least. I informed her that I wanted to reduce the cost of my bill. She asked that she be allowed to look over all of my "collected information" for a few moments to better assist me. I complied. When she typed her message back to me, she said: "Our records show that the issue was resolved on April 24, after a technician was sent out."
No shit. I laughed and quickly replied: "That is correct. However, the initial failure I experienced in service was on April 4th. This issue was not resolved until 20 days later and after 4 different groups of technicians had come out. I don't know if the extra $100 is for each visit, but I do know that I had to take 3 days off of work each time the technician could not resolve my issue. Considering the time and the inconvenience it has cost me, I would like to see if there is any way we can reduce the cost further."
No response. The screen was empty for a short while before she finally responded, "The most I can take off is an additional $20." I agreed because I knew this was likely going to be the best I could get before threatening to go to another service, which I didn't want to do considering how long it took to get service in the first place.
So, if you recall the math problem: 100 -50 -10 -18 -20 = 2. I paid $2 extra this month for my inconvenience. What a Deal!
What's Eating You?
While this internet fiasco was going on, there was another issue that I encountered midway through the month of April. The apartment I moved into had just been renovated this past year. When moving into such places, you have certain expectations. When I first saw the apartment, I noticed a small pile of sawdust by the back door and assumed that it was just dust from someone drilling holes in the frame. After all, I'm not a contractor so I didn't think much of why someone would do that other than it's a recently renovated apartment.
The day after I signed the lease, I scrubbed the floors, dusted the cabinets, and vacuumed up the sawdust. A week later, I saw a little pile forming again. Uh-oh. Of course, upon closer inspection, I saw that it wasn't sawdust, but little round pellets of wood. It was the excrement of termites. I poked at the small hole in the frame and it opened up further. I then took some compressed air, turned the canister upside down, and blasted the hole. When I turned it right-side up again and sprayed regular air, an avalanche of frozen termites fell out onto the floor. Since I was in the middle of resolving my internet woes, I mentioned the termite issue to the repairs department of my property management while I was asking about what I needed to do to get the internet installed. She told me they would consult their contractor.
The next day, I happened to see one of our contractors at the property and asked him about it. He hadn't heard anything about termites and told me to send an email because they may have forgotten. He couldn't do anything for me that day, however, because "he wasn't assigned to it." An arbitrary excuse, but I'm willing to bet it's for the purpose of expense tracking.
So more time passed. I sent a text message to my property manager about it in addition to my internet issues, but there was no response to it. In all honesty, I was more nagging about getting internet, because everyone knows that an internet connection is more important than the structural stability of your apartment complex.
After researching various avenues of taking care of termites on my newly established internet connection, I decided to email the repairs department. I included a picture I had taken of the frozen vermin avalanche. I received a response in a couple of hours, informing me that they would contact their "termite specialist" and get back to me. That was last week. I have not heard back thus far.
What does this mean for me, the tenant? If my apartment does not collapse on me so long as I'm living there, it's not my problem. I've tried 3 different times to alert them to the issue and even included pictures. With the digital paper trail to prove that I did my part as the tenant, I couldn't care less at this point. If they're not going to put in the effort to resolve it, why should I? I doubt I'll stay there longer than my lease at this point with all the headaches it's brought me, and hopefully, the termites won't be able to eat through too much in that time if I can kill some of them off myself. The advantage of renting is that it's not my building that's going to get eaten away from the inside out.
Take My Money So it's Not My Problem!
While we're on the subject of my apartment and its management, or lack thereof, I have another story!
There are certain advantages to being a tenant. For instance, you don't really have to care much about what happens to the apartment or house beyond what damage may be deducted from your security deposit, or issues like termites once you've contacted your landlord. Plenty of disadvantages exist, however, the quality of your appliances, like a crappy dryer for instance. The main disadvantage is the fact that you have to give money up at the beginning of every month for the ability to continue living somewhere without any hope of eventually owning the property--the exception to this scenario is a rent-to-own home, but we won't get into that. If you don't mind giving up money every month for the independence of non-ownership, it's not the worst situation. It can be a rocky one though if the owners do not get your rent for the month.
I have two options in how to pay rent for my apartment. I can either pay online at the property management website and pay via credit/debit card, or I can pay by dropping a check off in a mail slot in the laundry room of the building, which is locked with a keycode. Rent is due by the third day of the month at 5 PM. After that time, late fees will ensue.
When I went to the website, I was not confident enough in their security measures to use my credit card and possibly compromise my card number (which wouldn't mean much lately, as it turns out). So I decided to err on the "safe" side and put my monthly check in the mailbox in the locked laundry room.
The first month I lived there, I dropped the check off on the first of April. I looked at my bank statement later that week and saw that the check was deposited on the 6th. The next day I saw a notice on my door, as well as every other door on my floor that all appeared to say the same thing. The notice simply said when rent was due every month. I'm not sure if it was meant as a warning or what, but I knew this couldn't apply to me because I dropped it off on time. I assumed that it must have been a bad apple and they felt like they should remind everyone at the same time, including the nonexistent resident next to me, for some reason, because there was a notice on the door to the empty unit as well. This detail made me wonder if the person posting the notices knew who was late, or if they just decided to put in on every door and assume that the message would be received. Regardless, if payment was late on anyone's part it was not on mine.
On May 1st, I went into the laundry room on my way to my car in the morning and dropped off the check. On May 12, I checked my bank account and saw that the check had not been deposited. Considering the fact that the last time I deposited my check, it was cashed on the 6th, I figured something was wrong. I sent a message to my property manager asking her if there was a reason my check had not been deposited yet. She responded immediately by asking what my unit and address were. After I told her the details, I waited for a response. She did not send one. In fact, I would not hear back from my property management until later that day.
The response from my property management was not what I expected at all, however, because it apparently was not a "response" as far as they were concerned. On my way home I received a phone call from the woman who had helped me during my internet crisis. She left a voicemail informing me that they had left a notice on my door that day, and she politely asked where the rent money was. After all, she was concerned about the fact that it was now the 12th of May and I had not paid them yet.
How strange! The tone and questions indicated that they had not been properly informed by my property manager that I was confused about the situation as well. What a coincidence that they would notice the same day as I that something was amiss with my payment! Once again, this could not be my fault, as I did my part and paid my rent on time. When I returned home, I strolled into my laundry room. I looked in the mail slot and could clearly see two envelopes in there. I did not drop my check off in an envelope, but considering it was the middle of the month, it seemed unlikely that these were all late checks. Not to mention, this mail slot was not supposed to be used for anything else. I was willing to bet my check was buried among the envelopes.
I immediately called back the woman, but she did not respond and her voicemail was full. Go figure. So, I sent her an email, since I still had it saved after the internet fiasco, informing her of my confusion about the issue, as well as the fact that there were envelopes in the slot that had not been picked up. Shortly thereafter, she called me back, and we chatted and shared our confused stories. We laughed. We cried. She told me that they had left a notice on my door on the 7th of May, which I informed her that I had never seen. She told me that "the guy" said he had gone by and dropped off the notices when he picked up the checks. I told her my side of the story and offered to verify if my check was still in the mailbox.
With my slender hands, and a little luck, my suspicions were confirmed. I was able to pry my check from the box. I told her they needed to come pick up, not just mine, but the others as well. I didn't bother to ask who else may have been "late," but from the tone in her voice, it sounded like she was quite frustrated. Unfortunately for her, this was not a simple case of a bad tenant, but a shitty employee who not only didn't do his job but may have lied about getting it done as well. I placed the check back in the mail slot and went to my room.
Later that evening, while I was sitting on the couch watching Ninja Warrior, I suddenly received a call from a local but unrecognizable number. When I answered, he informed me his name was John and that he was here to pick up the checks. "Great!" I said, "Why are you calling me?"
He said, "I don't know the password to the laundry room to pick up the checks, can you let me in?" I wasn't sure I could raise a solitary eyebrow any higher than I was already doing when I heard that line. How the hell do you have so many incompetent individuals in a single, small company? This company has multiple offices and multiple homes in the Bay Area, so this isn't their first rodeo. Yet I've had numerous problems living at my new home that are directly related to their incompetence and laziness.
In John's case, I'd say he likely had the wrong address the whole time, except for the fact that the check from last month indicates that he was able to access the rent last month. So did he forget the code and just lie about picking up the checks and posting the late notices, assuming that no one would be so old-fashioned as to use checks and just pay them through the website? Or was he not the one who picked up the checks last time? Whether he was just a lazy liar, or it was his first month and he had been posting late notices on the wrong person's door, I didn't really care at this point. I just wanted to make sure that this would not be my problem anymore.
I helped him on his merry way and saw that my check had been deposited the next day. I could not see who deposited it, but I have yet to hear anything else on that matter from them, so I can only assume that John was who he said he was. I wish I could say this was the only issue I've had this month where I felt obligated to notify the other party that they had not taken my money.
To my knowledge, it is my responsibility to pay the water bill. It is not my responsibility to transfer the water bill to my name, however. There are multiple water providers in my area and my property management have a specific one that they use for our apartment building, so I didn't even know who the water provider is or who to contact. When I signed the lease, the property manager told me that I only had to talk to the ISP and PG&E about my other utilities and that they would take care of the rest by transferring my name over for the water bill. I saw her again a few days later and asked again in person just to make sure I had heard her right and that I didn't have to do anything about that.
On May 18th I decided to email her asking if my name had indeed been transferred and if I would ever receive a bill about it. I have yet to hear back from her, but I received the bill only just this afternoon, with only 2 weeks to pay it before a late charge. This wouldn't be much of an issue, if not for the timing of the last story I'm going to tell today, but we'll get to that later. The point is, much like the termite issue and rent issue, I have done my part. If they do not respond, it's not my problem. In some ways, I feel like I've done more than my part and that I'm doing some of their part, which leaves me with numerous questions:
Why are there termites in a recently renovated apartment?
Was it not fumigated or even checked beforehand?
Isn't the pest thing a reason to look at renovated places?
Why am I the one the guy calls when he can't collect the rent?
Why do I have to ask about where my bills are so I can pay them?
Why do I have to ask about why my check for rent has not been deposited?
Identity Theft
So the most recent issue that I've been alluding to this whole time is the most surprising and drastic of the bunch. At some point in the past few months, someone got a hold of my credit card number. While the most surprising, it's not the most upsetting because luck was on my side, for the most part, in this situation.
The same day I decided to pay for my credit card bill, there was a new charge on my account that I couldn't account for. It was an even charge of $60 for the Playstation Store. I have been a customer of this store in the past. Unfortunately for the thief, I knew that I had not purchased anything from them for months, and I knew that any purchases made at that store sent a confirmation email, of which I received none. Unfortunately for me, it meant it was time for me to interact with more customer service representatives.
I clicked on "Chat with an agent" offer that had popped up in the center of my screen while I stared at the unauthorized charge. I had to wait for a mere 10 seconds before an agent replied. I informed him that I did not authorize this charge. He asked if I had ever purchased from the Playstation Store before. I said I had. He then told me that I needed to talk to the vendor.
Obviously, this guy did not care or assume that this was something done of my own volition by mistake. Regardless, I decided to contact Sony and hopefully get the info I need to ensure that I could get these charges removed and the account closed. I went to their website, but couldn't access it at my location, and their site was hardly optimized for mobile phones. So, I couldn't do a web chat. I tried calling their offices but would have to wait several hours before their phone agents got in. After a couple of hours of waiting, I called them and was immediately put on hold for 20 minutes before talking to an agent. They asked me very generic questions that I wasn't sure were even necessary, but they nonetheless came to the stunning conclusion that: I had made no recent purchases. Really? Who would have guessed considering I was calling about purchases that I did not authorize?
After clearing up the issue, they gave me a confirmation number to provide to my credit card company if necessary. So, of course, I had to contact my credit card company again. I logged back into the website, clicked the chat with agent link on the side of my screen, and told them nothing new from the first guy, except for the fact that I had already spoken to the vendor. The number they gave me mattered little, as the agent never asked for it. Instead, he offered to remove the charge and place the account under investigation. I agreed.
Now, when someone says they'll place an account under investigation, you might assume that the account is then placed on hold. But in case you haven't been paying attention during my customer service adventures, I've come to be quite skeptical of the capabilities of the people who have "helped" me. I decided the next day to check my account to see if it had been locked. Wouldn't you know it, the credit card was still active and our anonymous thief was still adding more than $60 credits to their Playstation account. It seemed like the thief was likely planning on charging my card here or there and hoping I wouldn't notice, but they also decided to do it over the course of a very short amount of time, so they got impatient as well. This added up to only a total of 180 bucks, instead of just going hog wild all at once.
Obviously, I was concerned about why the credit card was still active and contacted their agents again. The chat agent gave me a phone number for their fraud detection department. I talked to the person for a total of 15 minutes, asked the questions I needed, and got her to close the account and discard the charges. Of course, I didn't trust that this was completely taken care of so I checked later in the day to see if I could still make a purchase with the card. My faith was restored to find that, indeed my card had been locked.
The Big Question
I don't have to pay the fraudulent charges on my credit card and my account has been secured. I've gotten my water bill even though I had to ask and wait for it. I've paid for my rent with no additional charge even though there was a stress-filled day of passive-aggressive accusations concerning who was at fault for the rent not being paid on time. I managed to reduce the extra charges on my internet bill to a mere additional $2. The overall result is that I have come out on top, for the most part, each time. Why then am I so irritated? Why then do I feel like I've lost in some way?
All of this brings up the same big question that I've mentioned before, which has only gotten bigger in my mind every time I've had to interact with customer service these past couple of months: Why do I have to do so much work to get customer service agents to help me? The company in which I am employed is dedicated to developing software that makes agents more effective and the customer experience smoother overall. However, all the knowledge base articles, offers for assistance, and customer relationship management means nothing if the agents are lazy, apathetic, and incompetent. For every member of customer service I encountered who helped me, I encountered five more who made my experience longer and more difficult.
As a former member of a customer service department, I understand that there is little to motivate you to help someone other than goodwill, because it sure isn't the paycheck. It's difficult to want to solve a customer's problem for any reason other than to just make them go away, but even the nicest customer may boil with rage and lash out at an unfortunate soul after encountering so many apathetic, lazy, and incompetent agents. I can only assume I'm experiencing a taste of my own medicine (though I don't think I was the worst agent in my past), but I'm not sure how many more agent encounters I can endure before I lose my temper.
My name is Ariel, and I have a problem with support.