Kinda surprised there isn't a recent thread about this, but what are some bad customer service experiences people have had lately? My inspiration for this thread today was Verizon Wireless. Background: I've got 6 people in 4 separate households on a family phone plan with Verizon. Kind of annoying in the first place because they don't allow auto-pay from multiple payment sources, so I have to do everyone's payments manually every month myself (two of the four households are oldsters who are terrified of trying to figure out the puzzle that is logging into a website once a month, and I've long since given up trying to get them to do it themselves). So anyway. One of said households is my mother-in-law, who always wants to make a payment arrangement to pay later on in the billing cycle than the rest of us want to pay... she pays like two weeks after the rest of us, on the 6th, rather than today, the 23rd. So normally I just go in, make the other three payments, then make a payment arrangement for her bank account for the 6th. Done. Except, for the first time ever, today their website wouldn't give me the option to pick a future date for my mom-in-law's payment. It had to be today, or I had to just log in again in a couple weeks to do hers separately. Since I don't like the idea of logging in twice as many times per month for no good reason, I decide to contact support. Which was a mistake. So I start a chat on their website about it. The rep clearly isn't good with English, and mostly just types nonsensical statements. Eventually he gets across that my account is now ineligible for future payment arrangements. I ask why, since I have a flawless 10-year payment history with them. What changed? After more dickering around with this useless guy, my chat gets disconnected after about 20 minutes. So I call billing. I explain the problem again. The billing person has no idea why I can't make the arrangements anymore, but says they made the arrangement for the 6th of next month for me. I say okay great, but what changed / how can I avoid this problem next month? She didn't know so she transferred me to their "Finance Department", since she said the Finance Department are the ones who made my account ineligible. Finance Department picks up, I explain the problem again. She comes back and gives an answer to... some question, but not the one I asked. I asked her what she thought the question was that I asked her just a few minutes ago. She goes "ummm... something about your auto-pay?" I slap my forehead and explain again. She says I should talk to Billing. I told her Billing sent me to her. She says Finance can't help and she doesn't know why my account is now ineligible for payment arrangements. I ask to speak to a supervisor. In the meantime, I get an e-mail stating that the payment arrangement made by Billing in my earlier call was made FOR TODAY (not the 6th), and they had charged me a $7 "agent assistance fee" since I didn't use their website to do it instead. At this point it's been 45 minutes and I'm very annoyed. I explain the same thing again to the supervisor, who eventually backs out the $7 service fee and cancels my mom-in-law's payment for today, and says he'll have to check with the website team, because he wasn't aware of any changes to the ability to do payment arrangements. All-told, I spent about an hour on the phone with them and accomplished absolutely nothing. On a different customer service front, I also feel like Amazon's customer service has gone down the tubes. Their support used to be AMAZING, and would fix any problem I had immediately. Now? They're no longer knowledgeable, they no longer speak good English, and over the last couple years they've failed to fix their screw-ups of my orders two or three times... even though in the decade or so prior to that, they had NEVER failed to fix a problem. Honestly their customer service was a big justification for sticking with them. I'm seriously considering ditching Prime if they don't shape up.
I'd heard bad things about Xfinity but didn't have any problems with them for a long time. Apparently, though, their billing system is pretty fragile. After Harvey I moved into a rental house and set up a new account because I wanted to have internet at my original house while renovating and at the house I was in for a half-year. That was fine. Then, I moved back home. I had a 12-month contract at the rental house and was month-to-month on the older contract. So, I canceled the older contract and moved the new one. After that, every time I paid them, they'd credit my old, closed account with a payment and then send me a late notice for the new account. To make things a little harder, I couldn't get their online portal to show my new account, only my old one. I spent a long time on the phone with their IT trying to get the online portal to work and never could. But in addition, I would have to call them every other month and explain to them how they credited the wrong account and get the money moved around, cancel the late fees, etc. Every time I called they would instruct me that I was using the wrong account number on my payments and I would have to tell them that, no I checked, and I'm using the right account number. Then they would have to investigate that and conclude from whatever they were looking at that I was using the wrong account number. Only, I wasn't. I'd get everything fixed, but it was 20-30 minutes every time going through the same thing with the CSR that I did 2 months prior. We never did fix their problem. After doing that for the better part of a year, I decided to break my cardinal rule and pay a recurring bill with an automatic charge to my credit card. I hate doing that, but haven't had to call them since.
I NEVER call anyone when I have an issue. You're calling some rep making minimum wage that couldn't give a flip about your or your problem and probably won't even be working there a week from now. Their biggest priority is getting you off the phone. I always do everything I can online and if I can't do that, I will email someone. I'd rather slowly gouge my eye out with a dull pocketknife than spend any time talking to some dotard at a call center. I had a bad experience with SeatGeek just last week. I bought 4 tickets to an Astros game in the lower deck for tomorrow's game. With seatgeek (I didn't know this), you can only pick your section...you can't pick your actual seats. Stupidly, I went ahead with the transaction. There was a disclaimer on the website that said the seats would all be together unless otherwise requested. So when I bought them, I assumed they would all be together. Nope! When they sent the tickets to me, there were 3 in one row and 1 in a row 10 rows up. I tried to cancel the order, but all sales were final. Went to their FAQ section to try and fix it and the only thing it said to do was list the tickets for sale. Which I did, since I don't want to sit in a different row than the rest of my family. The tickets sold, but of course they took out the service charge. So I paid a service charge buying the tickets and another selling them. I made my money back except for the combined total of $70 in service charges. So yeah.....from now on....I'm only using StubHub.
I'm always legit surprised when I have a good customer service experience. It's so rare that when it happens I get skeptical and try to find out what they're really up to.
Any visit to Buffalo Wild Wings (only go out of necessity if other places have long wait times) or MicroCenter.
Man, that's a good one. I feel I've been relatively lucky with my internet service, in that they've generally only screwed up *a little bit*, and I'm sure that's because I'm in one of those rare areas that has two major providers (AT&T and Spectrum, formerly Time Warner... I'm with TW/Spectrum). When I moved from an apartment to the house I bought, I emphasized many times that I wanted my service moved as-is from my apartment, meaning just internet: no cable, no phone. Well of course they showed up with a cable box, and I said uh-uh, go away with that, I said I don't want that, just internet. Then they charge me for cable because they say I still have the box. And I have to explain to them that no, they tried to give me the box but I refused it, as I only wanted internet. Eventually it got sorted out, but only after I was forced to drive to their store to talk to them in person.
That reminds me of the other dimension of my problem with them after my little house switcheroo -- they said I owed them $200 for their unreturned router, except I was using my own and not theirs. I did eventually manage to get a CSR to make that go away. Really, the problems I've had with them are not their customer service people (though they haven't all been great) but with their IT systems.
Dealing with AT&T internet/tv was really bad. DirecTV went south fast after AT&T acquired them so I ended up leaving them too. I've had better service with Comcast Xfinity.
Don't discount the time you spent writing this post. Also the time spent reading my reply. I highly recommend not replying to this because it would more time. Because I would surely reply to making your read that. There is no telling how long the process would continue.
Don't deal with people you don't know. eta: I got royally jobbed by TMobile 15 years or so ago, swore I'd never do business with them again and I'll go to my grave that way. Also about that time, I spent 6 months getting my money back from BoA after my check card got ripped off. My dad was even an O&G Exec with them and he couldn't get them to help me. All he said was "this bank does not give a **** about the average consumer, all you are is a source of fee income."
I hate going to the ATT or even calling because dumb asses at the store and automated system on the phone. I tried the on-line chat. It was automated as well. But I found out if you type Thinking bout canceling your service why should I stay? You will get past the automated stuff and get a real person very quick. I did not try this on the phone but did say operator and it did not help.
Cable/Internet/Phone providers are the worst. Its like they intentionally make their CS shitty so no one tries to get anything resolved. When I moved from TN back to TX, I cancelled my cable internet service. No big deal. Three months later I get an overdue bill at my TX address for 3 months of service. When I called Comcast, they said that someone had called them to discontinue my service cancellation a week after I put in my cancellation request, so the account was left open. I had to explain to three different people that 1) no it wasn't me 2) no one else (should have) had access to do that and 3) there would be no reason to leave it open because I physically didn't live there anymore. After an hour, I told them to look up my old TN address. They confirmed that someone else lived there (and had Comcast service) and that that person's service start date was a week after my cancellation date. They finally wiped the overdue bill AND gave me the refund for my prorated bill. Freaking buncha morons.
Nah, because this part is ClutchFans therapy. It helps cancel out the customer service time. Man, just like JV above, this stirs another memory of my transition from the apartment to my house. I let the local gas & electric know I'm moving addresses, and call them as I head out the door on my last day as instructed, so they can send me the final bill. They successfully add my new address to my account dashboard, bill me for my last (partial) month, and send me a closure notice for the previous address. They even have a display in the dashboard that says the account for the previous address is closed, and I can't make any more payments on it. I think "hey, these guys seem to have their s*** together". Yeah well, then they send me a bill for the previous address several weeks later, lol. To their credit, their customer service actually cleared it up super quick... took the CSR like 30 seconds to look at my account and be like "so we're saying you need to pay a bill and simultaneously not letting you pay it because we closed the account? Yeah, we're awesome like that. Give me like 2 minutes to fix this." And he did. So it ended up being more funny than aggravating, thankfully.
Every time I have service with ATT or Comcast and I need to call them - for any reason - I lead with "I'm calling to cancel my service".
I avoid ATT however a couple times I have had to deal with them, it has been painful and very inconvenient. Each time reminds me why I should never do business with them. Every since Charter took over Brighthouse, the customer service has become completely garbage. It seems the bigger the company, the worse the customer service.
Best Buy customer service can suck it. Ordered a sound bar for my dad on Best Buy for black friday. Get the wrong model delivered to my house. Call customer service and they say I need to return it in the store. Go to store and they can't accept it because its not from their store. While at Best Buy, I call customer service again and they repeat the same thing. Tell manager at store I literally have y'alls customer service on the phone and they say to bring it to you. Best Buy manager asks for phone and then tells the customer service rep they can not take the return. On the phone with customer service and they somehow won't let me reship it back to them and is still insists that the store should take the return. So I'm at best buy with a wrong soundbar that no one wants. That was a fun 3 hours.
I don't get a discount for T-Mobile through my work like I do for Verizon. And, we have a better international calling plan grandfathered, and my wife who switched from T-Mobile says the reception is definitely better with Verizon than T-Mobile in our area.
