The US govt has some of the worst support I've ever witnessed in my entire life.
1. I was audit by the IRS this year and so far I've logged about 6 hours of waiting on hold over ~15 individual call attempts of which I was never able to speak to someone beyond their initial call center.
Then I sent in the requested receipts as per their instructions. They told me the receipts -they- requested weren't proof enough, so I had to provide additional paperwork.
This has been an ongoing process for around 8 months and it's still not revolved. They haven't contacted me in about a month since the date they told me my case would be reviewed, so who knows what happened. Given they haven't asked me anything else or sent me a notice or bill warning, I'm guessing they finally figured out I wasn't lying all along.
2. I also once got denied a new social security card because I had an expired driver's license and no credit card. I brought a ton of documentation as per their website and had enough proof of ID. The lady at the desk told me "I'm sorry, I can't issue your request" so I showed her their own website with the proper forms of ID and she just repeated the same phrase. I left the place and mailed everything in along with a letter and my card was renewed but it took over 3 weeks.
3. After waiting 2.5 hours on hold for health insurance I finally got a person who told me they can't handle my request (even though this was the number listed on their website), so they forwarded me to a new number, and then I waited on hold for another hour, and then as soon as I got connected, they asked for a million pieces of information from me and hung up before processing anything. It was like 4 hours of a total waste of time and then I got penalized thousands of dollars in the end for not having insurance.
The worst part about this monopoly is we pay a ton of money towards taxes but get treated so poorly.
I once witnessed some little girl twist her ankle on a severely broken side walk. It took the town 3 years before they finally decided to fix it. It also took them 3 months to complete the job which was to redo about 20 feet of side walk.
Blame congress for the IRS - certain political elements would like to eliminate the IRS - they have this idea, that if we starve it, people will hate it so much we can make it go away.
Nevermind the fact that the IRS wont go away till there isnt an income tax anymore.
Taxes could also be a lot easier if Congress didn’t buy into lobbying from Intuit and other tax preparers to keep taxes complicated so individuals had to figure out their own taxes and spend inordinate amounts of time and effort determining out how to properly fill out every form.
That's a totally different issue from Congress failing to properly fund the IRS, a profit centre! It's one of the frew areas of government that spending money on makes money.
> It's one of the frew areas of government that spending money on makes money.
In a well run government, everything the government does should result in a benefit to the civilization and by it, the government. For example, adequately maintaining roads or other public infrastructure will save money on expensive urgent restauration works (e.g. when a water main explodes or a bridge collapses), as well as promote company growth (e.g. by building real, fast internet connectivity via local government owned utilities, thus enabling modern companies to work) which causes tax income to rise.
Even stuff that does not seem to be profitable at all in the long run makes profits. Take environment protection as an example: preventing or cleaning up pollution saves cost in the medical system (and even if it's a mess like in the US where most of it is privatized, the "win" is more worker productivity because they're not ill as much as before and can work more - or criminality decreases like w/ lead exposure), and trying to prevent climate change due to rising temperature will prove worth the money when the government saves money that would be spent on relocating people on the coasts.
Someone else put it perfectly when they said when cities decide each year whether to pay into pensions or fix failing infrastructure, they go with the option that won't sue them.
Well, if your infrastructure explodes like that bridge in Italy, then the survivors will sue... it's gambling, just with lives at stake.
Governments (worldwide) should be forced to a different accounting model - where maintenance for everything they build (infrastructure) or buy (IT software!) over the lifetime has to be budgeted for. No more expensive nutjobs like Olympic Games which will be unmaintainable after the single use...
Good customer support doesn't cost much more than bad customer support. They are people earning close to minimum wage who provide good customer support. The problem is that the IRS doesn't care to provide good customer support because they have no need to.
Test your hypothesis. By that argument tax collection agencies in all comparable states should behave similarly.
Just below the article someone comments that the Australian tax office has excellent support. Several European ones I have been in touch with have been very helpful as well (UK, Germany).
One thing that does differentiate the US from those places is the existence of a strong political force hostile to the idea of federal government ("drown it in the bath tub").
So the hypothesis that this is a home made political problem rather than an inevitable structural outcome of incentives fits the data better.
I can tell you from personal experience that many EU states have absolutely terrible tax agencies, even worse than what was described - namely Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Hungary. Everyone here "knows" it's because they have absolutely zero motivation to provide good services.
They actually did. Some family members lived there thru previous system and praised it many times. The current regime is a joke but the previous one (even more horrible) cared only about collecting taxes. New system dont care up to the point you go to jail, no big deal to “it”; in USSR the whole concept was of a working unit. Unity in strength of every individual working. You cant work when you behind bars. They once had supervisor fired on spot because indeed he was explaining tax related problem wrong.
Centrelink, Australia's welfare and social services provider, has this beat. You can't get service in offices anymore without an appointment. If you try to do something transactional they direct you to a bank of Internet-connected computers where you have to go through their website. For elderly or less technologically literate people this is an absolute nightmare. If you can't do it online you have to call them. Again, if you try in their offices they will send you to a phone which you can use. Official average wait times are 16 minutes but that's bullshit. Everybody has had the experience of waiting for 2.5 hours, and then getting cut off when the robot answering the call inevitably transfers you to the wrong department. People have literally attempted suicide when faced with the prospect of having to deal with Centrelink again. Our government of sociopaths applauds this system, seeing it as a deterrent for people to be on welfare and encouraging them to "get a job".
When I was younger and worked for an ISP, I had one of the VoiceOps people assign me a VoIP number.
The number is (08) 80087355 - which is leetspeak for oh eight boobless.
Anyway, one year I discovered calling Centrelink from that number bumps me to the top of the phone queue because the 08 8008 part of the phone number is assigned to a geographic region in remote NSW, even though the area code is 08 because it's closer to Adelaide than Sydney (Broken Hill's area code is also 08).
It looks like this still works, as per the Centrelink website here:
Our rural call centres answer calls from dedicated catchment areas in rural Queensland and South Australia. Our specialist staff answer all calls made to Centrelink 13 numbers from the catchment areas. They also answer all calls made to the Farmers Assistance hotline from anywhere in Australia.
Bonus points for being able to keep this number on a $0 per month pay what you use plan.
Oddly, my situations were all very pleasant. My contact with the IRS was all by mail. Each time I'd mail them something a clock would restart (6 weeks or something like that) and they'd respond a few weeks later (clock restarts) and we'd go back and forth me sending them some paperwork, and they asking for something else.
Eventually they got what they needed and we all moved on. It was a bit drawn out but I also enjoyed the amount of time I had to respond.
On the other hand when it comes to insurance I had a run in with State Farm who I'm 99% sure has a system entirely setup to ask repeat questions (same person asking the same questions and they're looking at the paperwork where I already answered it too...), provide inaccurate information, and simply delay you long enough to drop whatever claim you have. It felt like an actual scam...
My experience with the IRS was the same. On one hand the slowness with which they operate is ridiculous (does it really take a year and a half to tell you that some documentation in your return doesn't match up? and a couple months for every subsequent response?). On the other - once they got all the required documentation they were fair, acknowledged their mistakes, and adjusted the bill accordingly (canceled, really, since once everything was refigured the total was negligible). They're a bureaucracy, but they're not really an evil bureaucracy.
I suspect the slowness and the suddenness of a "you owe us X" is pretty stressful for many people. But if you read the letters it is mostly "hey send us some stuff so we can look at it" and while drawn out.... my experiences were fair and completed normally (granted that is just one experience).
At one point I printed the wrong thing entirely... they just sent a letter telling me I sent them the wrong thing and the clock kept restarting.
The people I spoke with weren't necessarily hostile (and I was always super calm and reasonable).
It's just taking forever and they sent a lot of paperwork that conflicted with other letters they sent. They kept sending bills stating I owed X by Y when in reality I had sent in what they asked for which would null those bills a month before that bill arrived.
The people on the phone also typically said they can't help because the questions I were asking could only be answered by my auditor, but I was never allowed to talk to that person.
Customer support is something I partly do for a living (supporting the video courses I create) and I think keeping people in the loop and providing more information rather than less is really important when something goes wrong. No one wants to feel like they are getting ignored or tossed around in a system with millions of others.
For context, I single handily do personal 1 on 1 support for around 40,000 people and it doesn't take that long because I invested a lot of time in my product and systems to make things as streamlined as possible. I'm confident I could continue giving high levels of personal support even with 100,000 people just based on time spent doing support now vs doing other things.
Here's a fun fact. As of 2014, the IRS had 94,516 employees. I'm sure it's grown since then, there's also 325 million people in the US. I know not each employee deals with customer service but that's a ratio of 1 IRS employee to every 3,438 citizens of the US. Even if only half of those people are doing customer related services, that's an abysmal ratio -- especially considering those people are doing that job full time and the IRS has spent a ridiculous amount of money running this operation (11 billion+ a year) to create a nearly unusable product.
I live in New Zealand - things are much much simpler when the country is small.
Generally New Zealand govt services are fast and painless. If I ring the IRD (==IRS) they just register the phone number and call back. The person is genuinely helpful, and they generally are just keen to get your money with the least amount of hassle to anyone. Very simple taxation policy helps too (e.g. totally reduced the special taxation cases, such that most people have to spend zero time filing taxes, it is done automatically and you just get a bill or refund!).
I ordered a replacement passport last week - it was all online including the uploading the photo - and it was couriered to me a few days later.
This is repeated in many different services. There are horror stories -- mostly I hear them about health/ACC and sometimes Work and Income (social welfare). But you regularly hear good stories about those too.
So it is at least possible for monopoly services to be good.
In Switzerland (pop 8M), tax authority is not hold by federal government but by the 26 cantons[1]. Because the central government would be way too big for that much power in the eyes of the Swiss people.
[1]that’s also why we have a bunch of tax havens and generally a lower tax rate, as all cantons and even the communes within them are in a competition.
> I ordered a replacement passport last week - it was all online including the uploading the photo
Is it me, or is does this seem like a case where they simplified so much that they lost some of the inherent checks and balances in the system?
I guess if I need a fake passport, I have a lead on how one can be made. Just social engineer the info to access government services out of a New Zealander...
I believe you can only do the online process once you've already had a passport and the initial passport is issued by the "traditional" means of showing up in person.
Replacements and renewals can be done entirely online because of facial biometrics (to compare the previous passport photograph with the new one and to see if the new picture may be used elsewhere) and digitization of other records for internal comparisons.
ABC (Australia) has an interesting video on Youtube describing the process.
I was under the impression that you had to have your photo taken at the post office. In the case where you've already provided verifying documentation, having that official also take the picture neatly verifies the picture at the time of the application.
I just looked, and apply by mail is only available in certain situations, one of which is that it must be a renewal, and the prior on must have been within the last 15 years and you must have been over 16. It sort of makes sense with those rules, but still seems somewhat lax to me.
Some politicians have the goal of making these things run as ineffectively as possible. Underfunding initiatives and then claiming they don't work well is a tried and tested method for attacking government services.
NZ's taxation department has suprisingly good customer service - but from what I understand, that's a deliberate way to get people to give them more money without having to use their coercive powers.
> Neither the health insurance issue nor the sidewalk was under US government purview.
It is when health insurance is mandatory (enforced by the US govt) and not having it causes you to pay unavoidable penalties which get added to your govt taxes.
> In fact, repair of sidewalks between private property and the street are almost always the responsibility of the property owner.
This really depends where you live. In this case it was the town's responsibility (and it's documented in the town's codes).
It was a really dangerous road too. It was one of those decently trafficked 30 mph suburban roads with properties alongside the road. If you tripped the wrong way on that sidewalk you had a decent chance of ending up in the middle of the road.
>> Neither the health insurance issue nor the sidewalk was under US government purview.
> It is when health insurance is mandatory (enforced by the US govt) and not having it causes you to pay unavoidable penalties which get added to your govt taxes.
How does that follow? The government says you need insurance. It doesn’t say you have to buy from that company or that companies can’t compete on customer service.
If your car insurance company has bad customer service, do you think it’s your state government’s fault, too? My mortgage company requires homeowner’s insurance – is it their fault if I pick a company with bad support?
Do you live in the US? People often have exactly one choice of health insurance because the ones that don't come from your employer are far to expensive to afford. Even in a 2 income house one partners may be substantially worse or nonexistent.
The ACA changed this dynamic in areas with competitive markets by providing subsidies that allowed people options. This is going away.
The unsubsidized options would cost almost 1/2 of my pre tax income and my wife has major medical difficulties that preclude her continuing her career and cost significant sums. I have asthma difficulties which without insurance would 4000 just so I can keep breathing.
I would have options if we moved to a cardboard box in order to pay for different insurance.
Don’t ask me to defend the American healthcare system in any way. I just don’t see how poor customer service should be blamed on the government rather than the company, or seen as a sign that the current model is incurably broken.
Again, how does that proposed relationship work? Does the government force those companies to have bad service or is your claim essentially that the government is failing to force them to spend more on customer service?
I saw harvard.edu and was optimistic that this was going to be a real study. Instead it was just "haha, IRS support sucks, monopolies are bad." I've called the IRS support line multiple times for fairly non-trivial problems and had nothing but good experiences.
And that's if you're lucky enough to get to talk to someone. One third of calls are summarily disconnected.
> Our study showed that 1 out of 3 calls to the IRS Collections Line for Businesses would be disconnected, with this sometimes occurring after 2 hours of waiting.
The disconnects are the worst part of so-called customer support because I know it is likely to happen especially as the hold time goes on. Worse when you call back they've somehow lost all the information you previously gave them 3 times over.
Blame dumb call center metrics, intentional disconnects like that keep the average wait time down which allows bad call centers to look better in reports.
I can see why they wouldn't want to include all disconnects in their adjusted wait time because that'd include everyone who disconnects accidentally and disconnects because they figured it out some other way.
Ironic that you complained about lack of data and then launched into an anecdote.
I have a few anecdotes about the DMV. I wonder if research would back up my hunch that the DMV is really bad at customer service. I'd certainly bet on it in a prediction market.
That depends on the state, honestly. I am from Indiana, where they worked on improving that experience. I haven't lived there for 5 years, but even before then I noticed a vast difference. It was no longer a soul-sucking experience that had the very real potential to eat your day.
I've experienced the hit/miss DMVs in Texas, and it's similar in the PNW (if you avoid the major metro downtowns, then it's all miss). I've heard horror stories about the DMV in CA.
Norway is completely different :) I'm american living in Norway. I'm not legal to drive, but my Norwegian spouse is and I've gone through buying a car and figured out some of these differences. He thinks the American system is insane (and is right, comparatively).
You do have to renew your drivers licence every x years, but in some states you can do that online at times. Instead of the population register, where you update your address, most places in the US do that through your drivers license. Most people's main form of ID is their license as well and most states want pictures to be updated. Some states have different backgrounds for those under 21 (the drinking age) as well.
Buying a car requires a trip to the DMV as well. There is no option of simply waiting for your papers in the mail. To complicate things further, in some states the physical license plate isn't associated with the car, but with the person owning the car.
In many states, you have to also register your car every year and update your plates. Some states you can do this online, however, in many cases.
That is on top of things like getting your drivers licence, learning permits, and all of those little things.
I’ve called the IRS recently due to them losing my filings, hard to get a person on the phone, even their advocates told me everyone struggles with it, the robot hangs up on you, when you do get someone they have no idea what to do an transfer you around, some agents just make things up, contradict policies they just told you. I ended up physically going to their office to drop off the paper work to get an official receipt they received my filing for when they lose it again. Next step is contacting my local congresswomen’s office for help. My experience at least with something very simple.
What's worse about the IRS than most is any instructions given to you by them are not part of tax-law, so you can't rely on them.
I had firsthand experience of this when I called to try to resolve some issues from a prior year. I talked to the agent and then acted on their advice. I later received a letter in the mail stating that the advice that was given was possibly not legal and that I would be on the hook for any fees and penalties if I followed it.
Luckily for me there was no consequences, but it made the whole process extra stressful.
I had horrible times with the IRS. Including demanding to speak to me directly despite a speech impediment that often makes me hard to understand in the phone and then hanging up because they couldn't understand me. I think that is an ADA violation. After doing stuff like mixing up tax payment checks and applying my parents' tax payment check to mine and my smaller one to theirs.
I don't mind paying taxes just make the system streamlined okay.
I had to call the IRS once a few years ago to dispute their dispute of my tax returns and was put on hold for 2 hours, only to be told that my returns were correct all along.
Last year I waited on hold for 45 minutes. When I reached the representative, she said she could only help me with generic questions rather than account-specific ones because her computer system was down. I asked when they expected the issue to be resolved so I could call back then, only to be told "Oh, it's just my system that's down. I'm just required to keep answering calls."
At this point, I would pay a few thousand dollars to be able to say that 'My secific issue with the government, which was created by them, was solved in about 2 hours'.
Me too. In the past, the IRS has been very helpful to me with suggestions for complex situations. I can only say positive things about their support. Perhaps now that they've been so defunded their support is bad, I don't know.
I think the IRS had tremendous support. The people are knowledgeable and almost always compassionate. They know you are probably at least a little scared and work to find a solution that doesnt add to your fear.
I've got some sympathy for the IRS (in this limited case) -- their budget is cut by small-government crusaders, thus reducing service, angering taxpayers and thus aligning public sentiment against the IRS. Same political ideology also works to make the tax code more complicated, also achieving the same objective.
I don't mind a wait if it means competent service on the most essential part of our society. I've called them for both business and personal issues with taxes and while it was by no means 'fun', they were both willing and able to help.
Now, the experience with Google Ads, that I can wholeheartedly echo. Every time I've spoken to them, it's just been a further waste of my time; and I can say the same of Yelp, too. So I think the core idea has merit - a private business' need to maintain and grow a customer base can be identified by how well they support current customers rather than how aggressively they advertise to new potential customers.
But like boys and girls, public government and private business are different.
If you have a balance due, calling the department responsible for collecting the balance is actually much faster. Don’t call the normal 1040 line, call the people who deal with money...they can do most of what the 1040 people can do and never have much of a wait.
No, this is no more insightful that when your uncle joked about the same thing at the last family barbecue, and less funny. Yes, companies don't spend on things that won't make them money, unless there's a problem in the company. When you have no competition, you don't have to worry about any quality of your business being worse than the competition.
Surely IRS are civil service and so are required specifically not to worry about voters. If you're a non-voter you still get "service" from the IRS (though many might wish they didn't!).
You can vote out your representatives but you can't usually directly vote out any element of your civil service.
I had to call the IRS recently and had a pretty good experience. The lady was super helpful and provided me with some resources I didn’t know about before.
I've had good experience calling the business-side part of CRA, though I think they're small enough that they're a different beast from the department that has to handle all generic questions/complaints from consumers.
Totally different experience with the IRS. My one phone call with them was an excellent experience. I got someone much much more knowledgeable than me who quickly and clearly walked me through what I needed. My colleague has had a similar experience.
Had a family member who was audited by the IRS every year for years. Each time IRS received a tax lesson. Only stopped when family member got US Representative and both Senators to lean on the IRS.
It's funny how supposedly "random" computer systems can somehow target an individual.
I had an issue with a sheriff's deputy pulling my wife over on her way home from work twice a week for a month. Same deputy each time, and unfortunately my wife couldn't take another route. The deputy would only say she looked suspicious and then ask her personal questions.
I mentioned it to my boss, who was formerly an important person in the region, and he made a phone call. My wife never saw the deputy again.
In what I can only assume was retaliation, I suddenly got called for jury duty. Every other week. After the sixth notice, I mentioned it to my boss. He made a phone call, and put me on a list of people who should never be pulled for jury duty (for celebrities, etc...) in that county.
We moved to another state a few months later.
Computers sometimes seem to make the system easier to corrupt, rather than keep it from being corrupt.
As an Australian my experience of the IRS has thankfully been limited (not as limited as it should be), but each time I have had the misfortune of calling them they have just read out in a monotone the text on their websites word for word. Maybe my experience is because I am not a US tax payer, but it certainly wasn't helpful.
This is why SaaS companies created Customer Success. They need to win your business year over year. Once they realize you can’t switch, the audits and price hikes begin, and the support ends.
Any New Zealander who is with one of our two dominant internet/phone providers (Spark and Vodafone NZ) has experienced this well - long waits to get someone in the Phillipines who can't actually help you, and doesn't quite understand what they're doing.
They only really compete for new customers, so if you ever ring them to sign up, well, boy howdy that's a whole other experience. Calls answered immediately by knowledgeable people.
Duopolies - for when you like pretending you have a competitive market.
The DMV is also an expense center which is visited infrequently. There is little pressure to make it a campaign issue to run on. While a pain in the ass it isn't a pressing issue unless an area is completely un(der)served.
Could this assessment be extended to "companies can be guessed to be large by calling customer support"? I can think of few examples of large companies, monopolies or not, having good phone customer support; many large companies outsource their call centers, which could contribute. This method of assessing "monopolies" will give many false positives if the answer to my question is yes.
A rather odd one is the Swedish tax authority, they generally have good to excellent support within the legal framework they have to work with. They are better than almost any company I've had to deal with, and usually whomever you get to talk to either know what they are talking about, or can refer you to someone who can. There are probably people with negative experiences too, but I've yet to hear a single horror story about their service!
As with any tax authority, you shouldn't try to keep them from their coin, but it seems like somewhere along the way they figured out that they didn't get more money if they had shitty service, but rather the other way around. It's probably also easier, and cheaper to retain people if not everyone hate your guts simply because you work there.
The best customer support I've received is from DigiKey - they have millions of components you can order in quantity 1, and if they make a mistake they'll overnight you a replacement at their expense, basically no questions asked.
I took up EE projects as a hobby! I should write some of them up, but I do some PCB layout / design and embedded systems work on my own time. Most recent was our house door opener which is spliced into the buzzer wires. I source all my components from Digikey.
Amazon’s customer service is still very good to excellent especially considering the volume they handle and the loss they take on return frauds. It’s still no Costco or Nordstrom but Amazon is the gold standard for online retail experience.
In the last year Amazon stopped price matching themselves (used to be within the last 30 days). Now even if the item is still in the mail they require you to ship it back at your cost and re-order at the lower price.
They've also modified their Wish List/Gift List to remove the "Buying this elsewhere" button. Now you have to purchase from Amazon.com or ruin the surprise if using a friend's Wish List. This isn't reflected in Amazon's help site[0] and their customer service spent three weeks investigating this only to tell me they're "Constantly trying to improve the site"(???).
My point is, that Amazon's CS is slipping. It used to be fantastic, now it is fine, but definitely getting less friendly in terms of policy even if the agents themselves are still pleasant. They're more or less ruined their own Wish Lists.
Those are all fair points. Their Prime program used to be ridiculously generous in earlier days. However, I have a very very hard time thinking of someone, big or small, who does it better.
Amazon actually has awful customer service if your inquiry can't be solved by either refunding or reshipping your order.
Had them repeatedly ship something glass in inappropriate packaging, it showed up shattered every time. Pleas to "please package appropriately" were repeatedly ignored. Finally I gave up and decided I didn't really need the item anyways.
This spills over into Whole Foods as well, from my experience. I personally don't know quite how to feel about the idea that Amazon bought them out, but the in-store customer service is leagues above Walmart and on par with Publix.
Social media support might be a better option. I see a lot of monopolies blatantly ignore masses of complaints on their Facebook page.
I can't imagine anything worse for PR. Post a "Happy New Year" picture and have 20 people mob that post complaining about terrible service and how they're unable to reach customer service.
This article makes good argument. I want to note, though, that Comcast support has done a 180 for several calls I made.
I receive their call back in seconds. I usually talk to someone in India whose both highly enthusiastic about hearing from me and apologetic about the circumstances. If anything, they're too nice since it comes off as unbelievable. They've credited my bill without me asking maybe twice. When I need a tech, they're usually backed up a bit but bump me into next day somehow. Ive always suspected that was a gimmick.
That's the gist of it. They know what they're doing, really polite, better connection quality than past maybe, and super helpful. I think Comcast is both trying to improve its image for leverage in public debates and/or using better support to improve retention. Im loving it either way. Plus, the remote reboot feature on the mobile app. Saves time and trips.
I suspect there are enough markets where Comcast is not a monopoly as to affect their business. I've been switching between them and Verizon FiOS to get promotional rates. I used to prefer FiOS customer service, but in the past few years, that has reversed. Additionally, when I switch away from Comcast, they credit me a pro-rated billing period. But Verizon just kept the change.
I usually talk to someone in India whose both highly enthusiastic about hearing from me and apologetic about the circumstances.
Same here, but they are utterly ineffective at actually resolving anything beyond prewritten scripts.
Their converter boxes are cheap, energy hogging crap, and they hang frequently. The cure is to have them reset, but they usually fail to issue a reset despite claiming that they did (you can easily see the process when properly triggered). Power cycling doesn't always work.
I finally gave up and keep an extra, then rotate the cold one in when there's a problem.
And even when you do call, they generally omit the day credit they owe you.
Comcast can survive only as a de facto monopoly. Few users choose them of their own volition.
Sometimes the best approach is to do everything by registered mail, with a return confirmation.
You keep copies of everything included in each mailing, that way if it reaches court you hand everything over and your documentation does the talking.
I have found as soon as i take this approach it gets sorted straight away and is never a problem as they realise that they dont have a leg to stand on.
In another case a business always had their used cheques returned to them once processed by the bank.
When the tax office repeatedly stated a payment had not been made.. their accountant said over the phone to the tax office "thats funny because i am holding their processed check returned to them with the tax offices recieved stamp on it.." it was then magically immediately fixed.
I think its because of people not wanting to do their job within their department so they handball it when ever possible, on the smallest excuse.
Last winter i faced a non-standard situation with Microsoft Office subscription. I moved to another country and had no active CC from the original country working anymore - realized only when my Office stopped working - and had no way to switch country or payment method before paying my arrears - which i counldn't do because of not having the damn payment method...
Surprisingly, MS support was quick and absolutely helpful in resolving this for me - took no more than 15 minutes - and they ended up simply waving my arrears so i never paid that $10 - and let me enter new payment method.
Complete inverse of my experience. HMRC (the British IRS) are exceptionally good over the phone. As indeed were the divorce courts. Maybe the British government see the British jurisdiction as optional for their highest ticket clients :-P
The worst offenders in the UK have been cell-service providers, where the competition is fierce, and companies like Sports Direct, where the margins are tiny because the competition is so fierce. Good luck with low-cost airlines too, where the Heathrow-monopoly-abusing (according to VS) British Airways are also great on the phone.
I have this issue with my student loans. They let it sit for weeks 'in processing' while I accrue interest on it.
What am I applying for? IBR. Income based repayment because I'm effectively poor. It just sucks seeing the balance grow and grow and have my credit wrecked, just because they let my paperwork sit in processing. I turn around and re-submit stuff when they ask within a day. For them it's 2-4 weeks between replies. JFC.
I recently had to call the Dutch tax service help line Belastingtelephone and the experience was rather pleasant. You have to wait 15-30 minutes sometimes, but you do get connected to someone who really can help you. I had to fill in a number of rather obscure forms recently and I called them 3 times in total. Each time I had my questions resolved with about 30 minutes.
Their slogan is "we can't make it more enjoyable, but we can make it easier" ("Leuker kunnen we het niet maken, wel makkelijk"). I haven't yet have to file taxes in any other country but when I compare my experiences to those of others on HN I suppose they're doing okay.
I got audited by the IRS... I had accidentally forgotten to file one of the many 1099 forms I had received that year. The agent handling the audit easily had some of the best customer service I’ve ever experienced and I was able to get the problem resolved.
For those of you who work in a huge bureaucracy: does your bureaucracy decree that you must rely on some other internal team for a particular service? what level of "customer" support does this service provide?
I worked at a phone company years ago. It was around the time when GTE became Verizon (it has been a while).
The entire system was segmented. I was in the "disconnect department" - folks late on their bill and about to be disconnected or newly disconnected (this was for landlines).
We literally could not do much more than that. We did not have any access to billing tools and could not fix those. We could not put in a repair ticket at all. We could not see cellular service. Basically, if it wasn't a disconnection reconnection or payment plan we couldn't help you.
Some of this was a knowlege thing: National call centers needing to learn the ins and out of different state laws (some states public utility commissions were stricter and more powerful than others). Some of this was built in: We literally didn't have access to these things. I'm sure some of it was because training on all of the things wasn't cost effective. There were also things we simply weren't allowed to do without being a supervisor (Which was often an experienced rep working a hotline for a few hours).
It does provide horrible customer service in many cases, especially if there is a wait time to another department. It would make it slightly easier if you could jump to the start of the other department's queue, but that wasn't the case. ON the other hand, many states had laws about how quickly you were supposed to answer the phones and queue jumping probably affected that.
Is that a very good heuristic? Some markets aren't supported in the first place either because of assumptions of knowledge (including being too simple to mess up) or commoditized enough that it is negligible.
Again an abuse of the word monopoly. I wish authors could grasp the difference between having a single actor in a market and one that is dominant among many others. This is absolutely not the same thing.
If the aliens typed “call amazon” into google, they’d get a human almost instantly. It’s not rocket science, although aliens would be good at that too i guess.
1. I was audit by the IRS this year and so far I've logged about 6 hours of waiting on hold over ~15 individual call attempts of which I was never able to speak to someone beyond their initial call center.
Then I sent in the requested receipts as per their instructions. They told me the receipts -they- requested weren't proof enough, so I had to provide additional paperwork.
This has been an ongoing process for around 8 months and it's still not revolved. They haven't contacted me in about a month since the date they told me my case would be reviewed, so who knows what happened. Given they haven't asked me anything else or sent me a notice or bill warning, I'm guessing they finally figured out I wasn't lying all along.
2. I also once got denied a new social security card because I had an expired driver's license and no credit card. I brought a ton of documentation as per their website and had enough proof of ID. The lady at the desk told me "I'm sorry, I can't issue your request" so I showed her their own website with the proper forms of ID and she just repeated the same phrase. I left the place and mailed everything in along with a letter and my card was renewed but it took over 3 weeks.
3. After waiting 2.5 hours on hold for health insurance I finally got a person who told me they can't handle my request (even though this was the number listed on their website), so they forwarded me to a new number, and then I waited on hold for another hour, and then as soon as I got connected, they asked for a million pieces of information from me and hung up before processing anything. It was like 4 hours of a total waste of time and then I got penalized thousands of dollars in the end for not having insurance.
The worst part about this monopoly is we pay a ton of money towards taxes but get treated so poorly.
I once witnessed some little girl twist her ankle on a severely broken side walk. It took the town 3 years before they finally decided to fix it. It also took them 3 months to complete the job which was to redo about 20 feet of side walk.