Much thanks is due to Ryan Harkins for helping to keep this from becoming “Jake Tapper is an Asshole” Tuesday with some thoughtful commentary about why customer service is almost universally terrible. This comes in the wake of my beginning a vendetta against Verizon, which damaged my business, lied, cost me money, wasted my time, raised my blood pressure, and made it all worse by generously offering me eight dollars and change for my trouble.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post “Breaking! Verizon Sucks!”

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My wife and I just encountered a situation with Spectrum, for internet services, and Ameritas, for life insurance. In each case, speaking with a different customer service representative ended up in wildly different stories and results, and in each case has left us angry and considering cancelling and seeking another company.

On the Ameritas front, my wife has a life insurance policy that was issued when she was a baby (I’m not permitted to say how many years ago, but she’s an early Millennial…), and we’ve been dutifully paying the annual premium for years for the $50k whole life policy. The problem is that since the policy is so old, the company apparently has no idea how to handle it anymore. It isn’t available to view through their website. Apparently it can’t be converted to a different policy that is able to be posted online. When discussing what to do moving forward, we’ve been told

• We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date a few years from now
• We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date far in the future
• We haven’t paid all the premiums and need to pay late fees for not paying this last year’s premium
• We don’t have to pay late fees, but we do need to pay the premium (that we’ve already paid)
• We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and are in danger of losing our policy altogether
• We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and our policy is changing into a different, inferior type of policy

On the Spectrum front, back in Ohio, we were told we could put our internet account on hold for up to twelve months while we moved back to Wyoming and searched for a new home. (3 months later, we’ve still not found a new house…)  Just yesterday we were contacted by a Spectrum representative who said we needed to disconnect our services so the new owners of the house in Ohio could connect. This would entail us losing our current pricing because it effectively cancels all our services. Furthermore, this representative had never heard of putting policies on hold, as that was simply not something that Spectrum did. Also, we need to return the modem we’ve been holding onto, because again, what we had been told previously, that the modem was not location dependent, was incorrect, and we better return it quickly or be charge the exorbitant cost of the modem. But we shouldn’t worry, because we should be able to sign back on with Spectrum at new customer rates, which are generally better than current customer rates. Except even new customer rates (which rise after 12 months — strong incentive to stay with the company, right?) were not as nice as the ones we had fought for. This seems to be a fantastic way to treat a customer of 15+ years.

The common thread here, as it seems to me, is that the help hired to manage customer interactions are woefully unprepared for what they encounter. I believe, from my wife’s very brief employment with a call center back in college, that the turnover in customer service is very high. The training is brief, the agents barely know what they are talking about, they are supposed to follow a script, and they are told to avoid sending customers to a supervisor or higher, and even lie about turning customers over to a supervisor, and instead send them to a colleague who is no better credentialed.

To an extent, I can sympathize. Customer service is hard, especially because the majority of calls are going to be from irate customers whose service is not performing properly. Dealing with such negativity drives workers away. Replacing employees always has a cost — retraining, learning curve, etc. Couple that with how expensive even untrained labor has become, it is no wonder that call centers are trying to minimize the amount of time a customer deals with a real-life person. If all the agent is going to do is follow a script, why not just utilize a call tree? But we start to exhaust my sympathy when companies do not follow up and make sure the agents that do handle calls are polite, well-versed in the company polices and practices, and make extensive notes on the account so that future agents can see what has already transpired.

In the most recent conversation with Ameritas, my wife’s agent noted in confusion that there was record of one call and some of the discussion that led my wife to conclude that we still had to pay our annual premium, but no record of the first call in which my wife was led to believe we had become fully vested in our policy. However, this agent was smart enough to realize that the second call was indeed a second call, and so something strange was obviously discussed in the first call, but since a previous agent did not document anything, it was impossible to tell what had been discussed. It seems to me that if the Spectrum agent who promised my wife we could put our account on hold for a $5/month fee had documented that, it would have been harder for this most recent agent to claim Spectrum never did anything like that. Or that previous agent could have been held accountable for promising something he had no business promising.

On a larger scale, I wish we could use market forces to drive better customer service, but in this arena it seems the markets are working against us. Or all the customer service companies are colluding. Instead of competing to offer better service, they all seem to be walking lockstep to the bottom. Since no one else is offering good customer service, why should we invest in good customer service, where that is a place ripe for budget cuts? If no one expects good customer service, then they won’t leave for a competitor because of lousy customer service, because they’ll expect the competitor will be just as lousy. Indeed, maybe offering even worse customer service can be excused if the offers are shiny enough.

This leads to my conclusion that we receive such bad customer service because we have, as a society, concluded we’d prefer cheaper prices than better service. I just don’t know if that’s because we truly value cheaper prices, regardless of the cost in customer service, or if we’ve given up on customer service because it has been so ubiquitously terrible.