Comment by dropfrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dropfrog | Hacker News Reader

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But that call-in "customer support" is a deal killer. I made an online purchase, a cheap antenna (thank goodness). It arrived in a box with my address taped on it but with customized shirts inside. Boxes were damaged during shipping and when put back together, someone got my stuff and I got theirs. UPS - "it's not on us, contact Best Buy". So I decided to use this to test Best Buy's customer support. I call. Foreign accent. I explain very carefully, slowly, in detail. She didn't listen to a thing I said. Started asking questions that did not pertain to the situation whatsoever. More explanation. 10 minutes in. 15 minutes. Finally she says, oh, I have a tracking number right here and your new shipment is on its way! I said, give me the tracking number, a little surprised she found the solution so suddenly. She read it off. It was the identical tracking number of the damaged box I had just received, and UPS showed it delivered to my house already of course (the one with the shirts inside). Anything to get me off the line. I called her bluff and said "That's the same tracking number as the box that was already delivered and had shirts inside". She said "Well, it's not our responsibility anyway." Me, "goodbye". Only $15 (and 20 minutes of time) to determine to what extent Best Buy cares about customer support, and to guide my purchasing decisions accordingly.

After reaching out to their customer service to try and resolve it, the next call should've been to you bank. You could've disputed the charges and gotten a refund pretty easily.

I've had similar issues with Verizon support reps. What I've started doing is if I get the feeling they're not helping, I just hang up and call again. At least with Verizon I'd say 50% of agents know what they're talking about, so usually that works.

I know this is a shitty solution (and to be honest, I've never had to do the same with Amazon) but it does help.

I recently switched to T-Mobile from Verizon, because they were willing to straight up pay off the phone I bought a few months ago, whereas being a Verizon customer for a decade has given me basically no benefits whatsoever.

Anyway, there was a screwup with the reimbursement, and the one thing I'll give T-Mobile's customer service is that any time you contact them, they text a survey to you afterward, and if you express displeasure through the survey, man, they are all over that. You get a call back shortly after from someone in a department dedicated to fixing customer service issues.

I'm pretty sure it's the very first time that responding to one of those surveys wasn't a total waste of time. I really wish more companies handled it that way.

Call the executive office instead. I had to do that when they tried to charge an early termination fee a couple of years after the contract expired and while guy on the phone was quickly fixing that he casually mentioned that when the customer service rep seems like they don’t understand it’s usually that they aren’t allowed to do something AND can’t tell you this.

It sounded like the worst job in the world and it was unnerving how casually he described it as the natural order of things.

> What I've started doing is if I get the feeling they're not helping, I just hang up and call again.

How much time do you end up waiting on hold?! Every time I had to deal with Verizon support it was a 30+ minute wait.

So somewhere, perhaps, somebody who was expecting a box of customized shirts received a cheap antenna?

That's exactly what happened - makes me smile. And that someone also received their customized shirts (if all went as planned) because I noticed the shirts had a local company name imprinted. I gave the box with the shirts back to UPS, let them know what had gone down, and hopefully they took care of business.

From my experience with UPS, they probably burned the shirts.

Technically, there might have been N>2 parties involved in the switcheroo.

Someone expecting the antenna received shirts, someone expecting X received the antenna, someone expecting shirts received X, ....

A tiny side note, it used to be the same everywhere, but recently (I'm in Paris) businesses start to care about customer support. To the point they even advertise it quite visibly on commercials (all local tech support). There might be a change.

On that note, it's tiring to read your experience.. I had better help from minuscule ebay sellers somewhere in China..

Conversely, Amazon customer support is world-class. I've had multiple instances of things arriving DoA, or breaking some months later, and every time I've hopped on the text chat Amazon has just shipped me a new one without asking for the old one back

When I get someone like that, I just hang up on them and call right back. Usually the next person is better.

But really, as someone else pointed out, you should have charged back.

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