Comment by ianferrel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianferrel | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that the DMV is fine and reasonably efficient... as long as something out of the ordinary doesn't happen. Then they're hamstrung by convoluted sequencing, seemingly arbitrary rules, and zero initiative on anyone's part to make things easy or pleasant.

The last time I needed to do something at the DMV that I couldn't do by mail, I made an appointment and showed up on time. Their computers were down. They couldn't do anything. Could they at least look over my forms and see if there was anything I forgot so when I came back it would be faster? No. Could they give me an estimate of how long the problem might last? No. Could they tell me how long it lasted the last time there was an outage? No. Is there a website or a phone number I could call to find the status? No. Could they give me the phone number for this location so I could call tomorrow before I drove all the way there? No. Could they move my appointment because it was their fault I couldn't process my business. No (I had to either make another appointment two weeks out, which would have missed a deadline, or I got to come back and wait in line for an hour).

Not a great experience. If a business was that lacking in customer service, I'd go find one of their competitors to give my money to.

So, serious question - how often do people actually switch their cellphone carrier or ISP due to poor customer service? From what I can tell, they're all pretty much universally reviled (especially Comcast, Verizon, AT&T), but manage to retain customers due to [actual monopoly over cable, unsurpassed coverage, device exclusivity, lock-in contracts, etc]

The hassle of switching from megacorp-A is not worth the trouble because the customer service doesn't actually improve with megacorp-B.

In India, since the new Mobile Number Portability rules have been introduced, making it very simple to switch your carrier, more than 10 million people are switching their operators every month. The system must be made easy enough so that the operators realize the value of customer service. http://www.medianama.com/2011/08/223-mobile-number-portabili...

I dropped an CLEC DSL a few years ago because I was spending 2 days every six months babysitting their repair jobs. Considered Comcast, but just signing up was an immense hassle - phone reps couldn't find the offers I had in my mail, or on the web, offers weren't what they seemed - and so I went with a local wireless ISP that, AFAIK, is a two person operation. They are more expensive than cable internet, but I've never had to babysit an outage in two years, and they're always responsive when there is a problem. Recently considered giving Comcast a try, but have an almost physical aversion to it.

Except... Every business I've encountered has the exact same problems. Unless you're dealing with someone who has absolute authority and no one to answer to, you're going to have problems when anything unusual happens.

With very small businesses you can get lucky and deal directly with an owner who hopefully behaves like a human being, but anything bigger, and you're going to have problems, and the further away from the top whoever you're dealing with is, the more problematic.

Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, it doesn't matter if it's government or business.

One trick that works for me, from time to time, when dealing with a CSR in person or over the phone, and running into roadblocks - ask them, human to human, what I should do. It obviously doesn't free them from their bureaucratic chains, but it sometimes frees them to give me insight into how to navigate the bureaucracy they know so much better than I do.

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