That dropped call with customer service? It was on purpose.

"I understand your frustration."

This single scripted line fills me with more rage than whatever was broken to begin with. Not only does the company not understand nor care, but they have the audacity to barely pay another human being to lie and tell me they understand.

Overly long “handle time”? He’d get dinged. Too few calls answered? He’d get dinged. Too many escalations to a supervisor? Ding. Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them. [...] it’s punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.

The last statement is a suprise to me.

We as customers have gotten lazy.

No, we haven't. Our choices have been removed through dismantling of unions, prevalence of offshoring, consolidation and collusion.

Admin night sounds positively delightful. I want that for my friends but doing it in person is the only way it'll work.

Lastly, I want to give a thankful shout out to another Tildes member who talked about how they got their government (? Or insurance) to cover a prescription and skipping sludge: by mass emailing every person they can look up addressed for and replying to ALL of them every time there is an update and auto response. Their advice was to be very polite but very persistent.

It worked: i got money back from Ticketmaster, notorious for not giving refunds.

Edit: Oh! Thank you for the gifted link, @gaywallet. Do you have any personal anecdotes about sludge?

“No one says, ‘Let’s do bad service,’”

Seems like those CEOs are saying just that, silently or not. Everyone knows this is how things currently work.

I'm very medieval about this stuff. I keep a ledger in my brain. If a company does this to me, they are attacking me. I fight back in every way I can, boycotting their products, denying them business, pestering higher ups if I can, sharing my stories online, making sure friends choose a competitor, until I feel like they have lost an amount of value equivalent to the damage I took. Then maybe we're even, depending on how impractical alternatives are or not.

The problem is one of scale, though. The article fails to mention the fact that there are a lot more people now, in absolute terms. The greater the number of customers, the smaller the impact of each individual customer's actions. And often when trying to fight back online you are drowned out by manipulation and disinformation (see: amazon reviews), although there are certain ways to suceed even so.

It wears you out, but we need to have a culture of fighting back by default. It's the only way to ensure that even if we can't coordinate effectively, bad behavior from these companies translates into bad results due to the uncoordinated actions of their mistreated customers.

What happens to the car next? I asked. I was told that if returned vehicles could be repaired, they could be resold with disclosures. But was Ford obligated to fix the defect before selling it? No one could give me a clear answer. I pondered options for warning potential buyers. Could I post something to Yelp and hope it somehow got noticed? Hide a note inside the car somewhere? Publish the Vehicle Identification Number—1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474—in a national magazine?

I enjoyed this section very much. I also really like the concept of "Admin night". I might have to implement that in my own life.

This doesn't work for all circumstances, but I've used it before to good effect when dealing with sludgey nonsense. I mentally call it "the communication chain."

Here's what you do:

• Document the date and type of each contact, as well as the point of contact.

• Contact repeatedly at regular intervals. Depending on the urgency this could be as much as daily, though my general rule of thumb is three to seven days.

• With each subsequent contact, initiate by "reading back the chain" of all previous contacts.

A made up example:

Hi Sarah,

I called your office on July 1 and spoke to Roger about [whatever the issue is]. He directed me to email you, which I did on July 1. I did not hear back from you and sent a follow-up email to you on July 4 and again did not receive a reply. I contacted Roger again on July 7, and he did not reply. I am now reaching out to you again [July 10] in hopes of resolving [the issue]. If you are not the point person for this, please let me know who I should be contacting.

This one has three points of prior contact: July 1st, 4th, 7th. On the next contact (say, July 13th) I would add the July 10th contact to the beginning. And if that one fails, I'd add the July 13th one to my July 17th email/phone call.

Yes, it's a little bit obnoxious, but that's sort of the point. It does a couple things:

1. It shows that you're documenting everything, which makes them more likely to take you seriously.
2. By doing it repeatedly with the same individual(s), you're showing that you're applying what little accountability you have in the situation to them making them more likely to take action on their end.
3. The longer the chain gets, the more it becomes a liability for them. You're effectively using their own sludge against them by repeatedly documenting their inaction.
4. It's effective in-person or on the phone because it's a passive aggressive way of saying "I'm pissed off right now" while maintaining politeness.
5. It's especially effective in email, because you're creating a written record.
6. It makes escalating your complaint much more of a concern for them, because they know that, if it gets there, you're going to read back the chain to a higher-up.

I got my masters degree from an accredited but very sketchy and poorly run program. I had to use this tactic multiple times with them. After generating those first couple of links in the chain, however, I was usually able to get what I wanted either out of persistence, or by me "threatening" to take my chain of communication up one link in their chain of command ("I would like to escalate this to someone who can solve this problem -- who should I contact?"). I think my longest chain with that program was in the 8-10 range, and with them I gave a full WEEK between points of contact (it was literally part of my Monday routine at the time).

I will fully acknowledge that it sucks that I even have to do something like this in the first place, and I fully realize that the people on the receiving end aren't at fault, but, in the face of sludge, this is one way I can try to gain some leverage in the situation.

I am surprised that there were no mentions of two powerful tools against the sludge: EECB ( Executive Email Carpet Bomb):Identify how a company emails are formatted (first name and last initial, or last name dot first name, etc) then look up the corporate officers and high level management and blast your problem to the decision makers that just want the issue to go away.
This can work well for small and mid-level businesses but large companies are harder.

Also don't forget about the Attorney General for your state. This should be your last resource but can be the ONLY thing massive companies fear.

My list for dealing with customer service in chronological order: regular customer service, manager, corporate, social media, EECB, lastly State or Federal agencies.

The overarching issue I've seen is that there's this emphasis on metrics that affects a large amount of society. McDonalds sort of suffers from the "sludge" issue, but it's more of a "fudge," you place a mundane order, Big Mac combo with fries and a coke, and they bounce you out of the line so some poor schmuck can schlep it to your car from the front door. This diminishes the customer experience (backing up what should be an auxillary zone for longer orders), diminishes the worker's experience (having to go out to a car, compared to the drive-thru window), but checks that one little box that the folks upstairs want: that interaction at the window was less than 90 seconds.

Keeping it, but redacted. Apparently there's actually a service improvement here, or at least mitigation of other issues.

I have been in cars bounced out of line for ordering 12 cheeseburgers, but that takes a long time, so is not the issue.

All of this comes from a perversion of what companies exist to do: Facilitate transactions for goods and service. I feel like "Make money" should be the second, asterisked point that is important, but can only happen, and frankly happens better, when people actually like engaging with your services. You need to spend a little more on credits due to fuckups? Great! The customer will make up for it in the future. Cataclysmic event happened and you need to refund every flight? Do the right thing so they'll remember that and re-book with you later.

It's this weird Jack Welch, optimize the crap out of everything mindset that's leading to a collapse of customer service when the shit hits the fan. Part of it is a response to people taking advantage of customer-benefiting policies, but most of it is this weird game of optimization where profits are all that matter, not actually doing a good job at your job at the company-wide level.

This wasn't intended as a rant, but some stuff that pissed me off when I went to school for business administration. We talk about "core competencies," and for a lot of companies, making money should not be the primary focus. Profitability often just comes with doing good work and having repeat business. I feel like we just live in an era of losing dollars while we chase cents, or at least inflicting misery that will lead to the loss of many more cents down the road.

Anecdote, I was in a car accident a couple years ago. Lady pulled out in front of me on a main road and there was nowhere for me to go but into her.

Collision went down as her fault, her insurance paid for the car which was like 20 years old so, cheap. They offered me a price just close enough to the bluebook price that it wasn’t worth arguing. Whatever.

These mfers would not pay my hospital bill. I went because I had a head injury. I called a few times asking for a proof of payment because the hospital kept sending the bill to my moms house (old address) and the rep just gave me the runaround. Eventually the rep on vacation and never came back.

That bill is on my credit report now. I never use my credit so I don’t care enough to go through the now ridiculous hassle of fixing that.