Inspired to by Mike D’s Vonage story, Austin writes in a hot tip for all of looking to pole vault low-level CSR and reach the Valhalla of customer service.
csr
Pith & Vinegar
By 5.30.06
• Shopping for lingerie at Agent Provacteur includes free critiques of your boobs. [The Company Bitch]
Cancelling Vonage, The Nick Denton Story
By 5.30.06
Have you ever wanted to stand in Nick Denton’s shoes, astride a vast and powerful blog network? Us neither, but if you did, your wet dream has just come true. Nick’s on the phone with Vonage and it’s not to congratulate them on losing 13% of their share price since their recent IPO. Rather, its to hang up the phone on Vonage, something they’re a little less than helpful with enabling…
Ask The Consumerists: Who Owns Our CSR Records?
By 5.25.06
Question: when your call is recorded for “quality control”… who owns the call?
If Companies Care About Word of Mouth, Why Aren’t They Improving Their Call Centers?
By 5.18.06
If you can bear to read the meme-saturated twaddle of what Popken likes to call a “marketing douchebag”, Peter Blackshaw asks a crazy question: if companies are so interested in reaching out to their customers by having them make their ads and feel more involved in the business, why aren’t they paying any attention at all to the shameful service of their call centers?
Take Me Off Your Damn List, UNICEF!
By 5.16.06
Trixare4kids is one of those zen consumerists who can sit in the lotus position for hours, a telephone nuzzled into the crook of her neck, as she hypnotically murmurs chakras to herself and tries to get herself removed from mailing lists. She’s pleasant, perky and polite with CSRs, but she is adamant in getting her name off the labeled stickers a thousand companies a year slap on half a tree and smash through her mail slot.
Airhitch Hookup Ends in Bitchslap
By 5.15.06
Customer looks for answers from airhitch.org, a site that helps people hitchhike on commercial jets; instead, gets ass roundly handed to them. After the conversation turns deadly, the customer threatens to take a screenshot of the chat and send it around cyberworld, the Airhitch CSR tells him to, “Send it to GOD if you want.”
Reader Actually Likes Bank of America
By 5.15.06
When Bank of America isn’t busy calling their customers liars, they seem to occasionally do the right thing.
India Steals America’s Youth
By 5.12.06
The next time you call tech support and get routed to India, the voice on the other end of the line may sound disarmingly familiar: American. No, Bangalore is not employing voice-changing software but rather, a growing number of college graduates are heading east, young man–Far East.
Duped by Dell
By 5.11.06
We think our Dell XPS Laptop is the cat’s pajamas and can’t understand why all these strange people around the internet have such a burn against the computer maker. Maybe that’s because we’ve never needed it to get repaired or otherwise tickle the warranty.
UPDATE: Time Warner Cable Hoists Customer on its Own Petard
By 5.4.06
Last week B wrote in about his struggles with Time Warner Cable. His signal was fine until a neighbor got his cable installed.
Time Warner Cable Hoists Customer on its Own Petard
By 5.2.06
B’s neighbor in the apartment complex got cable installed. The cable hookups for all apartments are located in a common utility closet. Shortly after his neighbor got his cable installed, B noticed his signal strength was vastly degraded.
Customer Enjoys Painless Robot Interaction
By 5.2.06
Stuck in the phonic bowels of a robot automated customer support line, claustrophobically twitching for the five seconds of actual human interaction required to resolve your complaint, it can be hard to remember that sometimes automated lines actually have their advantages. Blair wrote us in with a positive experience with automation:
United Lies To Another Customer. Also, Continental’s Bitch CSR!
By 5.2.06
Apparently, lying to customers is an integral part of United’s strategy for dealing with frustrated travelers. A fter Laura complained to us about United delaying her flight, losing her bags and then unblinkingly lying to her, we received this email from Brian,who details another experience in which United lied to a customer about a lost bag.
UPDATE: Ugly American Apparel
By 5.1.06
Last week, Holly complained about some shoddily constructed American Apparel shirts she bought that disentegrated shortly after purchase.
Verizon’s Customer Service Stops Sucking, Eventually
By 5.1.06
- “Messieurs and Mistresses Consumerati:
Time to Human vs. Time to Sentience
By 4.28.06
With debit card fraud on the rise, banks are getting way hardcore about putting stops on accounts if they notice any slight deviation from normal activity. Unfortunately, their customer service desks haven’t kept pace with the uptick.
