Ask HN: What do you do when you run into poor or deceptive customer service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do when you run into poor or deceptive customer service?

43 pointsjMyles45 comments

I have been chatting all day with Simple Mobile.

And honestly, I've never encountered such ugly service.

It now appears that a promotion that they sent out was actually a deceptive tactic for getting me to re-up. They offered 10GB extra data, only to later deny that any such promotion existed (even going so far as to say that they weren't responsible for the contents of a subdomain of theirs).

You may find my chat with them to be entertaining:

https://jmyles.github.io/simple-mobile-drama/chat-publish.html

What do you do when you encounter something like this?

View on HN

This car rental p2p company in LA still hasn't paid me nearly $300 that it has owed since early October.

Their policies were very sound, otherwise why would I rent my car out to a stranger? But they completely blew off policy and have just stopped responding to me.

Sometimes they post on Who's Hiring posts here, I've replied there to get a response but no dice. Emailed the founder, called all the numbers I had (they never pick up my calls now).

I sent the founder another email today after seeing this thread, but I'm filing a lawsuit next week (it's like a 3 page worksheet in LA) and then I'm blogging about the process.

It's crazy to think that suckers like me are out there lending their cars to these guys based on the trust and policy of the platform when in reality there is no policy (and therefore no platform worth trusting).

Total aside, but you should rent it out again (perhaps to someone you actually know) and then contact them saying something's amiss....

Can you clarify this a bit? I don't understand your suggestion.

Sorry —

I want you to rent out your car to me through the service. I'm going to hit a deer with it, or maybe a bear. You'd then have another reason to communicate with the service provider, right? They couldn't ignore you then.

Exaggerated, but I think you get where I'm going.

Worst case scenario, I've found that credit card chargebacks are usually pretty effective. You don't need to deal with customer service anymore and you don't need to worry about getting your money back. I wouldn't really go there if you were still interested in doing business with that company though.

This. Always buy an appliance on a credit card.

I'm afraid this won't help anyone in the U.S., but it will suggest what we in the U.S. could learn from Mexico.

I live part time in Mexico. I had a problem with Telmex (the phone company). Five times the said they would come and fix the problem, but they never showed. I walked down the street to the Profeco office, signed in, and in half an hour someone from Profeco was on the phone with Telmex laying down the law.

Profeco carries the legal force of Mexico's federal government.

The next morning at 9:00 A.M. Telmex was at my door and didn't leave until the problem was fixed.

Some might think that the U.S. has all the answers, but we don't. I wish we had something like this in the U.S.

A state's attorney general or a public utilities commission are probably the best US analogs.

Yes but they don't work like prefect does, they have similar concept in Europe. It works really well when it does, and it seems to work in Mexico.

I once dealt with a deceptive and/or fraudulent gym by filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The gym called me almost immediately and gave me whatever I wanted.

It turned out that the gym was being sold, and the BBB complaint was probably a negotiation liability many times greater than what they actually owed me.

Simple Mobile is a subsidiary of América Móvil, who also own Tracfone. Their customer service and that of all their subsidiaries is a nightmare, in my experience. If you can manage to get past that, you can get good deals, but if they fuck you over, you're usually out of luck.

I upgraded from a feature phone to a smartphone with Tracfone some years back and they deleted most of my minutes/data in the process, and then gave my phone number to someone else as well. It took contacting about 13 different customer service people and posting publicly on their forums before I finally got someone who would reinstate the data (but my number was lost).

Most of my communications with them were very similar to this, incredibly frustrating, with people on the verge of moronic, who would disconnect me and stop chatting when I got pushy about wanting what I paid for back.

Depending on what you're dealing with, I tend to go legal/regulatory. For instance, I was building my own PVR like a billion years ago (had outgrown my hacked Tivo and cable companies hadn't started offering their own in an attempt to destroy personal recording) and found out that there were federal regulations which required cable companies to provide a cable box with a working Firewire port.

Talking to the local cable companies customer service and techs was useless, they either had no idea what I was talking about or insisted that it was not possible. So I found out that cable companies are regulated by the Public Utilities Commission. Placed a call to them. They had no idea what I was talking about either, but I cited the law and they looked it up and agreed.

The next day I got a call from the owner of the local cable company franchise, and he was very concerned. I got the impression that getting a call from the office of the public utilities commission is not a great day for a person in his position. Turned out all they needed to do was check a checkbox on my account and the firewire port started working. Had it up and going later that day!

If a company screws you properly, it usually means they broke a law. Find out what it is and who is in charge of slamming their hand in the door when they step over the line. Contact those people.

Complaining on twitter works if you can get someone to notice you unless its Apple (they don't care). At work, it is basically telling the next sales rep to call that I don't do business with companies I cannot trust. Some companies are easier to deal with than others. HP did right by me when we had a lot of hard drive failures in their netbooks ("uhm, that's getting to be a really high failure rate.. uhm... you got techs there right? well, why don't I just send replacements for all of them?"). Some forget they were supposed to return the computer after it was repaired.

I think its a lot like working with any individual. What they care about is particular to the company and it is often hard to know the correct thing unless you have experience with the company.

I did ban one company for about 5 years over a conversation that had me shouting at my phone and saying a word I don't normally say. It was quite strange as I normally speak slowly and lower when irritated while I try to figure out if I'm just being stupid or the person I'm talking to is actually a world class idiot.

Their rep (a different person) that called five years later was new and getting a lay of the land and I wasn't as diplomatic as I should have been. I imagine cold calling former customers is not a fun part of a reps day if their CRM doesn't warn them. I amazingly was still mad, but kept my voice even.

Sounds like Simple Mobile could really use a decent CRM or record every call because I get the feeling the metric is time needed to get you out of the queue or customers per hour. Reps do adapt to the metrics set not the goals of customer service or later sales.

Sometimes emailing a higher up executive helps. I had placed an order for an iPhone 6 a few years back when there was a 1 month wait. While waiting, the card they had on file expired and the charge failed when my phone was about to be shipped.

Conversations with customer support were going nowhere and they were going to place us "in the back of the line" again. An email to T-Mobile CEO's response team and SVP of customer support seemed to do the trick and our phones were shipped the next day.

I stop doing business with the companies, and avoid them permanently.

Residential Cable and Fiber Optic utility companies are companies I refuse to do business with.

Their employees hate their jobs, and I hate the prices the companies charge.

Realizing that there is likely a balance to draw between pricing and employee compensation, I don't fault the employees at all, for despising the living they must earn to put a roof over their heads. I also realize that running an infrastructure project like a fiber optic plant [0,1] is no small challenge.

Nonetheless, I really do not benefit from the service, considering what I get for the chunk bitten from my wallet on a monthly recurring basis. To compound this, having to negotiate with unhappy people, clamoring for a drop of power taken from my life and added to theirs, when something doesn't go perfectly, really leaves me dissatisfied enough, to never go back.

Paying an ISP money (my own money), I'd rate as a task about as enjoyable as maintaining SSL certificates.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_plant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_plant

It depends if I've options: Sometimes one doesn't, especially with prepaid mobile carriers.

Some years back, I had a pre-paid phone through T-Mobile and had ordered a refurbished phone from their website. Wound up needing repairs, under warranty.

Since it was prepaid, no loaner phone. The cheapo I picked up worked better as a flashlight than phone. But back to the story: I sent it in, and it didn't come back. I called a few times, being told that nothing was there. Then being told it was returned to me and I should have it. Each rep had a different story.

Each time I called, I had to go through the same troubleshooting to even be able to get anywhere. Most refused to escalate the call. This is pretty on-par with pre-paid phone customer service - I remember at&t had 2 separate departments for it. At the time, if you didn't have a contract, you didn't matter.

I finally got online and found an e-mail address for their cooporate office, complete with the name of the service manager for the company. I wound up speaking with one of his people in the main office.

Soon, I was sent a replacement phone.

Other times, usually with more traditional utilities, I've not been so lucky as the state i lived in had a weak public utilities commission.

Much luck to you.

For a vendor I can live without, I just stop doing business with them. And a chargeback on whatever CC I used for the transaction in question, if I feel I was defrauded in some way.

For somebody like an ISP or cellular provider, where I don't have much option (in the US), I'm pretty much stuck complaining on Twitter, for the good that does.

For problems with consumer goods, Twitter can be good at getting quick responses from the vendor. Usually better for niche items, where the vendor has an image to uphold. As noted elsewhere, Apple probably doesn't care enough to respond.

Thankfully, I've never had a problem that was large enough to consider legal remedy through the court system. I came close on a car insurance claim, but it resolved days before I visited the local court (after months of being jerked around).

I really hope people will take the time to read these chat transcripts. They're truly insane. I almost can't believe it.

Complain on their social media channels. Public shaming works.

That's an interesting angle. Just like... tag them? On Facebook and twitter?

Write a post on their Facebook page/wall. Tweet at them. Do things that are publicly visible.

Nobody who works for $company cares about you, the individual. But $company employs a whole team of people whose job is to make them look good on social media.

Sending a tweet @company can work wonderfully. Make sure not to put the @ right at the beginning, so it's not marked as a reply and shows up to everybody following you. Most companies really hate being called out in public.

I wish I could do this to a few politicians, but they're smart enough to turn off visitor posts.

I had to get historical bills from a terrible cellphone provider in Canada (Wind mobile, now Freedom mobile, now owned by Shaw communications) a little while back.

Their customer support process was useless (they'll send historical bills to third party organisations for stuff like background checks, but they're afraid that consumers will use the bills to prove that they're misapplying charges). Thinking I'd just just have to navigate their customer service departments, I started recording the calls (legal in my jurisdiction).

After several conversations with friendly but incredibly unhelpful CSRs (thanks to corporate policy), I started to look at other ways that I could get my info. I issued a formal request for all of my personal data under Canadian federal and provincial privacy laws (PIPEDA). Their legal department claimed that I issued the request incorrectly ("by email"), so I responded by citing the relevant clauses (never mind that there was a paper version that I sent at the same time). Then they made a couple of other similar claims (that PIPEDA doesn't apply to them, my reply was that telcos are specifically named).

Seeing that they were drawing things out, I started to respond with expansions to my request (asking for potentially damaging things like a list of who they intentionally or unintentionally disclosed my personal information to), and threatening to report the issue to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Some combination here seemed to do the trick, someone from their corporate security department reached out to me by email, and had the authority and power to give me my data. They ended up charging me an exorbitant amount for the original request's export (and never actually fully complied with my request for disclosures), but I ended up getting what I wanted.

I now take the opportunity to share my experience whenever possible, and figure that these types of stories being out there (along with the potential customers they lose) will provide the financial incentive for them to change their processes long-term.

TL;DR: CS process first, then recording, then escalating the request slowly using privacy laws to your advantage, then expanding on the request to give them time pressure (that eventually you'll request data they legally have to provide but practically can't), then providing pressure to respond by threatening to take it to a federal regulatory body.

A friend of mine once had such an experience with an e commerce company. He wrote a script using the facebook API to comment his problem on every Facebook post of the company. He was contacted soon by the company reps and his problem was taken care of.

I am having issues with 2 scammy companies and I would love to employ this method. Would your friend be willing to opensource his script?

My wife and I, after years of excellent service from Amazon, had a couple spectacular failures. It was always from their India-based customer service, not resolved by talking to supervisors, required multiple calls and hours. In each case, after doing our best to get things resolved, we emailed Jeff Bezos directly. His executive care team efficiently and satisfactorily resolved our complaints. We hope that we're driving meaningful change there, and we appreciate his team patching things up, but it would be far better if the India folks would just get it right the first time.

In Australia if it's telecommunications related, raise a complaint to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO).

For anything else raise a complaint to Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

Have the facts straight Complain loudly including twitter Write to the CFPB and BBB Call out the CEO on social media. Customer service has been a loss leader for companies existing in oligopolic structures. Time to follow the Amazon model and make customer service a USP

Set up a VoIP system that records all calls. When you call the customer service department at any company, open with "I'm calling from a phone system where calls may be recorded, is that OK with you?". Unless you are in a universal single party consent country such as Canada.

Complain to your state's Attorney General and whatever they call their consumer protection division.

I use 'hess' to find all the email addresses of their company that I can possibly find on their website and start emailing all their employees every few minutes using a little script and a cron job.

What is this 'hess' you speak of?

The best way is to threaten to take them to courts and hope they will wilt under that threat. You could also try lodging a false/misleading advertisement complaint.

This is a good way to get a CS rep to stop being interested in helping you and instead refer you directly to legal@

I'd never threaten a suit unless you intend to file right then and there.

actually I had a serious issue with my COBRA administrator (health insurance) and threatening to sue was the only wat they escalated my issue and fixed it for me promptly.

> What do you do when you encounter something like this?

I write a letter on paper and send it by mail to their complaints department.

has sending a paper letter actually made any difference in your experience?

Yes.

One time a bank sent me an application for a credit card. I wrote to them to explain that I was on the Mail Preference Service lists and that they should not have mailed me, and could they please i) remove my name from their lists and ii) make sure they've suitably cleaned their lists. They apologised and sent a cheque for £25.

I found a large splinter of wood in a food packet once. (The food was in a plastic sealed wrapper, inside a card box. The splinter was in the box, but outside the plastic wrapper.) I sent the splinter to the company, and said they might want to know about this for their quality control. I said that it hadn't put me off the product, and that I would continue to enjoy the product in the future. They sent me vouchers for about £30 of any of their products. (This was in the late 1990s) The vouchers had very little limitation - they weren't "50p off an item, no more than one coupon per item", I could use the vouchers to get free product.

A company sent me three premium rate SMS messages. I wrote to them to tell them I was on the telephone preference service lists, and that they should not have sent me the texts, and I asked for them to repay me. They sent a cheque to refund the cost of the text messages. (I also contacted the regulator because it felt like a scam).

There are a few others.

It's the price of a stamp and a few minutes writing a friendly, polite, letter to let them know they've got a problem which obviously they, being a high quality organisation, want to do something about.

The only one I've had no luck with are Virgin Media, who keep sending mail to me.

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Turn to Twitter.

Hate the game, not the player. Being mad at the underpaid support guy won't get you anywhere, being nice might.

Capitalism trends towards monopoly, and a monopoly doesn't have to give a shit about how they treat customers as customers have no choice. So a radical(as in, rizomatic) solution would be to make people aware of the actual problem and claim for better regulation or lobby if you have the power to do it. Now for a personal solution, good luck (:

Whoa whoa, was I mean? I tried to be as clear, polite, and light-hearted as possible. Can you tell me which part of this chat you thought was mean?

"You: Eduardo, do you think that this is like regular data, but sparkly? You: I don't feel particularly sparkly. "

Ok, maybe mean wasn't a good word choice. I just assumed you were kinda mad, and with reason to be, my point is being nice to people usually works better than demanding what's "right". It's their job to drive you into surrender, they're trained to do it, unless you overcome the medium abstraction and gain some empathy, you won't get anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com