Tag Archives: bad customer service

Why is Customer Service So Bad?

Posted on May 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Why is it? I really don’t know. It drives me crazy though – having to put up with horrible service again and again. Is it possible that only a few people actually care about service? I know I care about it, but given the preference of business to continually provide horrible service it should be that you can just provide plan mediocre service and take their business. Yet these companies providing what seems likes worse and worse service somehow stay … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management | Tagged | 7 Comments

Change Your Name

Posted on December 28, 2006 by John Hunter

Best Buy Asks Man To Change Name [the broken link was removed]: Turns out if your last name is less than three letters, the online sign-up isn’t an option for you. Companies often put up barriers for no reason, then leave customer service agents to try and explain. And then this happens: When he called Best Buy one customer service agent even suggested he change his name Now that is great 🙂 Charles Yu: “I said well, I think that … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

No Customer Focus

Posted on November 3, 2006 by John Hunter

John Battelle writes the excellent searchblog. A recent post, Rant: The Comcast HD DVR Is Simply, Terribly Awful, provides another example of a company lacking customer focus. See the comments for even more confirmation of the lack of customer focus. The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail – and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Fun, IT, Management | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand

Posted on June 28, 2006 by John Hunter

Conversation with Boston Volkswagen [the broken link was removed] by Paul Graham I recently looked into getting a new car. The Kafkaesque conversation that resulted would have been funny if it were happening to someone else. If only Volkswagen could redesign the sales process to be as good as their cars…. For me it did happen to someone else so it is funny 🙂 However, I run across similar thinking and “customer service” and then I don’t find it as … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Innovation, IT, Management | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus

Posted on April 13, 2006 by John Hunter

Reddit is a site for what’s new and popular on the web (votes by the user community rate web links). That user community is highly skewed toward software engineers who are a bit irreverent (as some of the language in this post shows). Today Reddit linked to: Introducing the Dell De-Crapifier… [the broken link was removed] which is essentially a tool to help you get rid of all the extra software you get with the Dell computer. Dell gets paid … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Customer Service is Important

Posted on January 10, 2006 by John Hunter

Double Trouble, Don Oldenburg, Washington Post: Digging into the details, Stevenson, a mechanical engineer, did a double take at what looked to him like a double charge. Verizon was billing his sweetie for the local plan, for the new regional plan and also for a la carte services that are included in the regional plan. Sorry, wrong numbers! He called Verizon to complain. “The customer service representative said that they knew they’ve been having an issue with their system double-billing,” … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Price Discrimination in the Internet Age

Posted on January 18, 2005 by John Hunter

Re: Boing Boing post – Why HP’s region coding excuse is bogus There is a simple method for large multi-national companies to use to protect against currency fluctuation. They can use foreign exchange futures to do so. Companies do this all the time (some also chose not to for their own business reasons). “Foreign Exchange is the largest of the global financial markets. Daily trading volume in the currency markets is estimated to be 1.1 US trillion dollars.” – Smith … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Economics, Management | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments