The decline of customer service in four recent examples: part 3

Perhaps people are familiar with this one.  I had just arrived back in the country at a place other than the one I'd left from.  I needed to get a modem quickly, but not so quickly as to make me want to take the time to drive to Best Buy, and risk Covid etc.  I went on Amazon late in the afternoon on Friday and the modem I needed popped right up for less than $80, with delivery (with Prime) set for Sunday.  I figured that meant I would have it up and running Monday morning, so I could work that week from home.  But as soon as I ordered it, it changed the expected delivery date to sometime before 10 pm on Monday. 

Ok, not great, but at least I'd be up and running by Tuesday.

On Monday around 5 pm I got a notice that the modem had been delivered, and that it had been left with the "mail room."  I was a little concerned, since my building doesn't have a mailroom, so I went down to the front desk.  It had not arrived.

I called Amazon customer service -- which, to its credit, was relatively quick at the 206 number.  But the person I got told me this happens often -- the item is indicated as delivered even though it really isn't.  They told me to wait to see if it came later in the day and to call them if it didn't.  It didn't, so I called them.  

They were able to confirm that it had been delivered to the wrong place, and the guy even sounded like he had a sense of where it went -- to a nearby building -- but he refused to give me any hints as to where it might be.  In the end, he agreed to send out a replacement order, which would arrive sometime before the end of the day Wednesday.  I begged him to try to get it to me sometime Tuesday, so I wouldn't lose two full days of work, but he said the system wouldn't let him.

So that's what happened, and instead of being up and running on Monday or Tuesday, I was finally up and running on Thursday.

Perhaps not the worst experience ever (see above), but still not great, and I'm including it because it's another example (see Apple example) of a WRAITH making it impossible for a customer service representative to set things right.  In the old days, I'm pretty sure even Amazon could have figured out a way to get me the modem by the end of the next day.  They have fulfillment centers everywhere and the modem was a very common item and a best seller.  But the system simply didn't give a damn about my work needs, and did not give the customer service representative the ability to make things better for me.

So Amazon is on the way downhill too, although it's still the only game in town for quick delivery, and one might just say the odds caught up to me this time.

The Decline of Customer Service Part 2 of 4: Apple password reset

Ok, this one is somewhat interesting too.  Like the Amazon experience described next, Apple's customer service employees are essentially constrained by algorithms that ultimately don't enable them to provide any kind of useful customer service.

Here's what happened.  Like an idiot, I put an iPad in my luggage on a recent flight from Germany to the US.  And predictably, it disappeared, along with who knows what else.  Years ago I lost some cameras that way on a flight to Egypt, and after a good deal of work, was actually compensated for them.  But times have apparently changed.  

But that's not even the point.  Before reporting the theft to Lufthansa, I wanted to locate the iPad to confirm that it really was still in Germany, and also against any chance that it was still in my possession.  So my idea was to do the "find my phone" feature on icloud and see if I could locate her iPad. But the problem is that it was my mother's iPad, and none of us could quite remember her apple ID.

We tried guessing her password two or three times, but recognizing that too many attempts might cause the account to be locked, I looked into the forgot password options.  Most of the options required access to your iPhone, which we didn't have, because we had left it in another state.  So I opted for a procedure where Apple's instructions indicated that you could in some cases reset your Apple ID password from a trusted friend's phone.  Since my mother trusts me, we used my phone.

But at the end of that process, Apple informed me that it was sending a confirmation message to my mother's phone, which, as I've said above, was in another state.

I tried a couple of times and that's what happened each time.  As noted above, the website indicates this works "in some cases."  But it didn't tell me why it didn't work in my case.  Nor did it tell me why, after taking me through the process of attempting to reset the password using MY phone, it sent to confirmation to HER phone, when the whole reason for going through the process of using my "trusted" phone was that we did not have access to her phone.

I then called Apple Customer service.  I got through relatively quickly to an African American woman.  Yes, I could tell by her voice.  She was very nice and seemed competent, and easier to understand than the non-native speakers that many other companies employ, but I'm guessing she was not particularly expert in this process, because I spent an hour with her on the phone, going through the exact same process (trying to reset it using my phone) and failing in exactly the same way.  She then told me that there was a way to reset it by providing further identifying information, such as a credit card, and that normally takes a day.  She told me Apple would get back to me within a day on that.

And sure enough, Apple sent an email to my mother the next day.  I had expected it to come to my email (to which the representative had sent two emails, which included the case number), so when I first called them two days later I thought that they had let me down on that.  But the new customer service rep (also an African American woman) said they had in fact sent the email, and it occurred to me to check my mother's email and there it was.  Here's what it said:

An account recovery request was made for your Apple ID.

Dear xxxx,

An account recovery request for your Apple ID (evamdkrause@gmail.com) was made from the web near Rockville, MD on September 19, 2021 at 12:39:05 PM EDT. The contact phone number provided was +1 xxxxxxxx.

You will receive a text or a phone call at this number when your account is ready to recover on October 10, 2021 at 12:39:05 PM EDT. For updated status information or to provide additional information to help recover your account, visit https://iforgot.apple.com

If you didn’t make this request or do not recognize the information presented above, you should cancel account recovery immediately to keep your account secure.

Apple Support

So it was going to take a little more than the day that the first customer rep had hypothesized.  October 10 was (and still is) 21 days from when I made the request, on Sept. 19.

I expressed astonishment to the new customer service rep that it would take Apple that long to deal with this situation.  My mother was in the room with me and I offered to put her on the phone and do whatever it took to prove her identity.  But the rep said there was nothing she could do.  I tried to get her to explain WHY, in this computer age, Apple needed 21 days to confirm that I was who I said I was and that I was authorized to change my mother's password.  But she had clearly had no idea. 

I asked to speak to a supervisor, and was passed on to a perfectly nice man named Billy, who said he had been doing this for Apple for a few years, and this is just how the algorithm works sometimes.  Nobody knows what it's doing.  He guessed that given the length of time it had provided for the reset, that meant that I had probably gotten locked out after guessing the password incorrectly too many times.  As above, that's clearly not what happened (I only tried 2 or t3 times, and it didn't lock the account when I did).  But he didn't have any other ideas.

I asked him whether Apple itself could figure out where the iPad was -- it seemed to me that somebody at Apple must be able to fairly easily figure out the location of the iPad.  He didn't know for sure, but he indicated that it didn't matter -- Apple values the privacy of its customers so much that it would not give that information out until the account had been verified, which would take those 21 days.

So once again, the WRAITH (Wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hive; see my other posts on Alt-QAnon for details) has created an environment wherein even if its customer service representatives wanted to be helpful, they couldn't be.

 

The decline of customer service in four recent examples: Part 1 -- Burger King

1. "Customers like you"

On a recent road trip with my 88-year old mother, we stopped at a Burger king, with the hope of ordering a few of their cheesy tots, which are basically tater tots filled with cheese.  Something one could get sick of (and sick from) pretty quickly, but they were still new to us -- and counted as vegetarian food -- so that was our decision.  

The drive-thru sign didn't specifically advertise them, but it did advertise the jalapeno cheddar bites, which looked good too.  We specifically asked if they had the cheesy tots, and the girl said yes.  We ordered one order of those, plus one order of jalapeno cheddar bites.  It came to a little over $4.00, and we drove through and paid happily.  The girl told us to drive the car a bit up and they would bring them to our car, since they had only just started being cooked.

That sounded good too -- they would be fresh.

But after about five minutes the girl came out with a bag, which contained two orders of mozzarella sticks.  In contradiction to her earlier representation that the tots and bites just needed to be cooked, she now told us that they simply didn't have either of the tots or the bites.  She wondered whether we would accept mozzarella sticks instead.  Now, mozzarella sticks have been around for a while, and while it's possible that I once liked them, I have been thoroughly grossed out by them for some time.  So I said no thank you, please just give me a refund.  The girl went in to process the refund but then came back out after a while with her manager, who said we would need the credit card to do it.  I gave the manager the credit card.  Then began another long wait.  At least five minutes with no updates.  At this point all we wanted was our credit card back so we could drive away and find food somewhere else.  

Eventually the girl walked by our car to deliver something to another customer who was parked in the parking lot.   Since our car was off, and I couldn't open the window, I opened the door to and tried to get her attention by speaking to her, but she simply ignored me.  I slammed the door which made her jump a little but she walked right on.  I tried to get her attention on the way back, but she was strictly avoiding eye contact, so I yelled - instinctively -- LOOK AT ME.  She didn't, and went through the door which closed behind her.  I got out of the car to go through the door but it was a one-way door which had locked behind her.  

After another multi-minute wait, the manager came back with the credit card, plus 4 dollars and change.  she explained that they couldn't process the refund to the credit card after all; all they could do was give us cash.  Which of course would have been fine in the first place.  

I have not been that furious for years.  I didn't yell at her but I could barely contain myself in trying to extract an apology from her.  I told her that my mother was 88 years old and we had been driving for 8 hours and that it unacceptable for us to be have to wait there for 20 minutes after first being told we'd get our food etc.  She responded quite coolly that she had been working there since 730 am that day (which was about 13 hours previous) protecting her staff from "customers like you."  

Sort of interesting.  I'm guessing very few people drive up to Burger King with the intent of being a frustrated and angry customer.  But this particular Burger King (in Northern Virginia) clearly had its own way of creating such customers.  Rather than thinking of ways to avoid creating frustrated and angry customers in the first place, this manager seemed to view her job as protecting her employees from the customers that their horrible customer service culture had created.

To be clear, the problems here were:

• Telling us they had both cheesy tots and jalapeno bites when they didn't
• Telling us that we had to wait while the non-existent cheesy tots and jalapeno bites were cooking.
• After making us wait 5 minutes for nothing, trying to give us mozzarella sticks instead.  
• A better approach would have been to come out and offer us something else off the menu rather than the take-it-or-leave-it mozzarella stick approach.
• Telling us they needed our credit card for a refund, when it turned out they couldn't process the refund on the credit card.
• Holding on to the credit card for at least 5 minutes.
• Walking right past my car without giving me an update on where my credit card was and when I'd get it back.
• Not making eye contact and ignoring my pleas for information.
• Telling me that I was a bad "customer" (in saying she had to protect her people from "customers like you").

If race matters, my mother and I are white, the order-taking girl was white, and the manager was brown.

I called the Burger King complaint line and was on hold for at least 15 minutes of our continuing drive, which might give you a sense of how many complaints they are getting or how little they care about the complaints they get.

I finally reached someone and was able to describe the place and what had happened.  She made some of the right sounds, although she didn't really seem all that engaged -- more like she was reading from a script.  She told me I'd get a gift certificate for having taken the time to call.  Not restitution or an apology or anything like that; just a thank you from them to me for taking the time to give them feedback.  In response to my questions, she said they would contact the store and find out what went on.  She even said I could call back and that someone might be able to give me an update.  But I never called back; just couldn't stand the idea of waiting another 15 minutes just to talk to someone, and I didn't have an incident number or anything like that.  I did get a 5 dollar gift certificate.

Although this was literally the worst customer service experience I've ever had, it actually didn't completely surprise me coming from Burger King.  For this trip, Burger King had become our go-to place because they have Impossible Whoppers and we are vegetarians.  They even had a deal where you could buy one and get the other for $1, or else buy two meals impossible whopper meals for $10.  But we did that because of the impossible whoppers, not the customer service.  Another bonus was that the drive-throughs and the stores were usually mostly empty -- perhaps that should have been a sign.

I think this was our about our fourth Burger King stop on a two day road trip -- on a previous one there had been no Impossible Burgers (and no apology) and on another no coffee, and also no apology.  In talking to others, this is about par for the course for Burger King.  Interestingly, I don't recall ever having anything like this kind of experience at a McDonalds,., which I still occasionally go to for a salad, or fries, or a shake.  I guess that's the difference that Hamburger University makes.