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Comment by DrScump | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Comcast outages. If you catch a failure as it happens, and if you navigate through the maze that is their phone tree, and if you wait long enough to actual speak to somebody in their offshore call center, and if you go through all the unrelated hoops they make you endure (e.g. "you reset your box wrong"), they will usually, eventually tell you that they will credit your account for one day's worth of charges.

And sometimes, the credit actually happens.

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FWIW you can usually ask for more (I usually get around $20), but you have to actually negotiate with the person on the phone. It's really weird, you would expect them to just be reading off of a script, but they actually negotiate like a trained car salesman or something.

When I worked in a cable co call center a customer tried to negotiate a bigger discount by arguing that I couldn't prove the service was working while she was sleeping. I relented because it was going to cost the company more for me to stay on the phone than it did to just give her another 2 days worth of credit.

The downside is that the credit incentivizes her to repeat the process again and again.

I believe the customer support people usually have, say, $20 at their disposal to use as they see fit in order to deal with situations in which escalation would be more expensive than those $20. Thus, if it appears you're going to be costing more than that (through your negotiating), they'll probably just hand it out.

I worked at a US cellular company costumer service call-center once, we had 'unlimited' credits to give out to people, but we were incetivized to give none whenever is possible, that's why it seems like negotiating, because giving credit affects an employees metrics.

It also depends greatly on the mood of the one answering your call and your issue, if they're about to quit, big chances you get a nice credit for your complaint, it's kinda seen as a "just shut up" trump card.

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