True story - a month ago my credit card bill showed a mysterious $100 charge from Amazon. Phone support found the charge but couldn't figure out why it had been made, and eventually asked me to call my bank and dispute it(!!). That sounded like crazy talk, but rather than arguing I just said thanks and tweeted @amazon. Their social people referred me to someone who wound up figuring out how to cancel the charge.
They don't seem to care unless there's a chance of other people noticing.
When thinking about customer service in big companies, it's important to remember that the vast majority of calls legitimately are of the sort that only require a very simple action to be taken, and then to be disconnected as quickly as possible. However frustrating, it's not irrational hatred of customers that makes it difficult to break through that assumption when you do have a more complicated issue.
Many years ago I was having trouble getting some accounts closed with NatWest (after a few cockups on their part already I moved to FirstDirect). I happen to work for a company that produces compliance software and offered related consultancy so we had copies of the FSA (then new, since reformed as the FCA) complaints manual lying around.
After months trying to get traction on the closing the accounts (including warnings of charges because one of them was "under funded" by virtue of having been emptied because I wanted it closed) including a couple of face-to-face meetings in the branch (back then little was done remotely), everything magically sorted itself out after the day I went in and read from that manual while waiting to be seen...
It isn't just "others noticing": any sort of fallout gets things more noticed.
In hindsight I had a case to just go strait to the authority about it and probably should have done. The bank would probably have got a five grand fine and I might have been compensated for my wasted time...
I mostly do it because it saves me driving in and/or waiting on hold, but those messages usually seem to be answered by the same team (and are generally handled very well).
Which is one reason why tweeting works well (or it does if you have enough followers). I've had great results that way from several firms, though I have not tweeted to Apple.
They ended up calling me to make sure everything was right, and called back a few weeks later to make sure I got my ID. Never had to step foot in an office like their phone support said I would.
I personally don't think twice about disputing fraudulent or even mistaken charges. I can see how you might want to reserve this tool as an all-else-fails, but really CC companies should be appreciative of people using the tool because it gives them useful signals. Much better than the many many others who are missing the charge and paying for it by mistake.
I believe it is against the merchant agreement to withhold service after a valid charge-back. That would be a major and unwarranted retaliation, which you could probably sue and win a large class action if this is really happening.
I will say, I should have made more clear, the first step in a dispute will be to contact the merchant. They will have a fixed number of days to reply and correct the problem.
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Apologies if you knew this already.
Losing my Steam account due to a chargeback is something that never occurred to me. It's a chilling thought!
Same thing can happen with any account, of course, but Google users tend to have a larger number of more important eggs in a single basket....
Perhaps worth adding, I was/am 99% sure how the charge occurred, and that it was a Heisenbug from when I'd trialled Prime. So there was no question of punishing them for being a bad vendor, I just needed them to bounce the issue around until it landed on someone who could fix it (which is essentially what happened).
I think the real root cause of situations like this is that social teams sometimes have more/better options for escalating issues than customer support does.
> Disputing the charge is the right thing to do in any case.
This is bordering on ranting, but happens all the time and is just a cost of doing business, which means my regular customers get to pay more to deal with people like you. Contact the merchant first, they are usually very prompt and want to avoid chargebacks like the plague, because they cost real money.
However there is a slippery slope. Two examples that hit me recently, an iDrive renewal where they refused to tell me the renewal price and their online form provided no way to opt-out of the renewal, their online chat told me to call a phone number, and it turns out the price was 10x the first year cost (and not at all competitive with any other backup service). Another was BitTorrent Sync which was supposed to be converted to a one-time license but then lo-and-behold a year later another charge showed up.
But for merchants that provide the ability to cancel a subscription online, and who let users know before an annual charge is about to hit your card, I agree the customer has some responsibility to manage their subscription.
My personal opinion is that monthly recurring billing can send invoices after the charge or even no email at all if charges are the same amount every month. Annual recurring should email a week before the charge to remind a customer it's coming, or should allow a full refund of the charge if contacted within 30 days of it hitting. For example LinkedIn refunded an annual recurring charge that I contacted them about within a few days of it hitting the card for a "subscription" I didn't actually want and it just took a single email to sort out.
In any case, if I signed up online I must be able to cancel online with a click. I won't play games with merchants who have dark patterns that make me jump through hoops or pick up a phone to manage an online subscription. These merchants deserve the extra chargebacks they get, and they know exactly how they could reduce their chargeback rates. They've just done the math and found the dark patterns unfortunately are net-profitable.
Edit: Not to mention that GP is referring to an anecdote of GGP's in which Amazon told him to dispute the charge because they couldn't sort it out. That's disgraceful.
Whereas phone support is the opposite - it's designed to be handle the 99% bulk of requests that you wouldn't want to be escalated, so it's not too surprising that it's not as good at handling outliers.