Incompetent Competence
It’s ironic I’m writing this on a day our platform decided to balk at clients accessing one of our most read reports. The team is troubleshooting as I write. Glitches happen. They are never ideal, and we don’t wish for them, but when they do happen, we are at least responsive — have a person on the other end of the line or email and help solve the problem.
We all have customer experiences to tend to. I’ve been noticing a new trend: Make our (largely) digital customer service experiences so incompetent we frustrate customers to no end. They will give up and stop asking for their money back. The coffers fill up and greedy corporations and bloated government bureaucrats laugh all the way to the bank. They are competent through incompetence.
It goes like this. In just the last month:
1) A store on Madison Avenue forgets to ship a package for its sister store in Las Vegas where I shopped on Mother’s Day. Ten days later, UPS has an overnight delivery ordered only to leave a sticky note on my front door that I wasn’t home to sign.
Three crazymaker calls later where I only “speak” to an automated attendant, and one day waiting at home (to still no sign), the package isn’t brought back (as promised). It’s taken instead to a western wear shop 10 miles away — a UPS access point that has no bearing on anything related to what I bought. UPS customer service was abominable. I confirm too, stores for this brand don’t like to share merchandise — they don’t get credit for the sale and would rather keep it in-store to sell themselves. Between Madison Avenue and UPS it’s a service nightmare. Thank god the salesperson in Las Vegas gave me his text.
2) On the way home from that LV trip, United Airlines drops us mid-connection onto an LAX runway along with a text saying our flight home is cancelled, but thankfully our bags have gone on without us and they’ve booked us for a flight the next day. No hotel. No voucher and no bags!
One hour in a customer service line later, we are told there are no other flights to surrounding airports, nor rental cars. No mention of a hotel, nor why our bags went on without us while we were expected to stay the night. We decide to Uber to Santa Barbara and rent a car there and drive home.
A week later we are told no refund of points or dollars for the unused portion of our flight nor for a hotel room for being unceremoniously dumped. Customer service says it’s all due to extreme weather. My local paper says the outage was due to Air Traffic Control equipment and airport performance. No one takes responsibility and we are out 35,000 points and $350.
I could go to the website where I am directed by a customer service rep (oh, the irony of that) and fight back by uploading my article link to The Carmel Pine Cone, our must-read “paper,” but decide the time and energy isn’t worth it. United takes the money and runs and I’ve conspired to let them.
3) We are in Tennessee on a family trip and our home alarm goes off. We return to an $80 charge from the sheriff’s office because they came out, deemed there was no break in, so it must be a false alarm and since we are slackers for letting it happen, they fine us.
There is no website functioning, so we resort to phone. That’s all local counties have, it seems, in the seventh largest economy in the world. We tell them that six months ago we reported an intruder, and the sheriff came out. AND with proof we were away, it’s not a leap to check in when an alarm goes off. Sheriffs would come check things out and not charge us, any reasonable person would assume. It’s why they come!
Here too, three calls and one letter later, we are pressing for that fine to be dropped. Will the $80 and return-on-effort clash? Will we give in? Hubby says he won’t cave. It’s principle. He takes this one on. But once again, it is about who blinks first. Will we pay the $80 before we get late fees and let the county coffers go up?
And so, the more incompetent these (largely digital) customer service experiences, the more they get to keep the money as frustrated customers give up. At some point, the inability to speak to anyone and the awful website and phone experiences, they send us over the brink. The persistent push to point us to chatbots, if we are lucky enough to find one, is insanity. Customer service has become DIY, via phone or websites that are clunky, at best; deeply unsatisfying, at worst. One can only believe plots in boardrooms conspire to figure out even more ways to take our money and run.
All the while, some UI/UX “designer” actually creates these processes, making a lot of money for their employers. A must-have, hard-to-find function we are told. Maybe it’s because they specialize in must-have, hard-to-find functionality. Talk about digital ROI.
Leaders: Call your 1–800 number, hit the contact us button. Leave voicemails and mystery shop your digital experiences. We have to take back service. Our tech-driven world is broken. Information and solutions are not flowing. Only the money is, and it’s going in the wrong direction.