After seeing our post where we highlighted that Walmart’s customer service chat only appeared to be open for one minute per week, Donald wrote in to show us that while Dish Network isn’t quite as bad, their chat only appeared to be open for two hours and forty-five minutes per day, seven days a week. The Walmart chat site wasn’t live, though, and the wacky hours posted at Dish aren’t real either. [More]
live chat
Better Type Fast: Walmart.com Live Chat Is Only Available One Minute A Week
By 8.16.13
Trying to contact a Walmart customer service representative in a live chat is apparently an exercise only to be undertaken by the fleetest of fingers, the tersest of typists. Because as Consumerist reader Jasmina points out, it’s only available for one minute every week. [More]
This T-Mobile Chat Transcript Shows Why Online Customer Service May Not Be A Huge Improvement
By 1.25.13
More and more businesses are pushing customers toward online chat as a preferred form of customer service. Best Buy even ditched its e-mail contacts in favor of chat. But is chat really any better? [More]
Best Buy No Longer Wants Customers Contacting It By E-Mail
By 12.12.12
Best Buy has never been the best at dealing with customer e-mails, but rather than invest in improving that facet of customer service, the retailer has decided to pull the option from its contact form on its customer service page. [More]
Coleman Live Help Only Open 1 Minute Once Per Week?
By 9.20.11
Hopefully this is some kind of typo, but, as it stands, Coleman’s website says that its live chat help is only available for one minute, once a week. Better set an alarm and have your finger poised over the mouse if you want to get in! [More]
Verizon Can't Help Me, Accidentally Gives Me Phone Sex Number
By 10.19.10
Spencer says Verizon has trouble helping new customers who don’t yet have a phone number on their accounts, and the problem led to him being passed around by unhelpful customer service reps until one of them mistakenly gave him a number that connected to a phone sex ad. [More]
Chat Live With Austan Goolsbee About The Economy
By 9.8.10
Austan Goolsbee, chief economist of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and someone who will actually speak on-camera with Consumerist, is taking questions live online today at 3 p.m. And you can get in on the fun. [More]
Zappos Customer Service Is Pleasant And Effective In The Third Person
By 6.5.09
Yes, Zappos has famously good customer service, and should be regarded as the gold standard of awesome. We know this. We just had to share this highly amusing customer service chat transcript. The post’s author (and chatter “Timmy”) wanted to check out the quality and flexibility of Zappos’s chat agents, and started with an odd, but not implausible, scenario.
Comcast's Twitter Reps Save The Day (Again) From Ineffectual Customer Support
By 5.13.09
Comcast might want to slash the budget on its Live Chat service and devote more resources to Frank and Sherri over on the Twitter side of things. The only good stories we hear about Comcast customer service comes from encounters with them, it seems.
