*pulls up chair*
You want to know what the problem is? Everyone. The problem is that people allow this to happen. When you've got people who are happy to sit on hold for an hour only to speak to Jamesh in Bangladesh who knows three words of English and only speaks off a script, what incentive is there for companies to get their act together? I can't blame them either, if I was a CEO I'd also happily take tens of millions in bonuses every year if people are happy to roll over and get stiffed with crap service.
I guarantee that if everyone said "**** this, I'm going elsewhere" all on the same day, these companies would sort themselves out overnight and would be begging for our custom again. But we don't, we sit back and chill, wasting days or even weeks of our lives dealing with incompetence, getting frustrated and irritated and often taking it out on family members. I don't know about you lot, but when I've been on the phone to Jamesh in Bangladesh for an hour listening to his 5 sentence script and four word vocabulary only to put the phone down having achieved absolutely naff all, I am rather irritable and will be grumpy for a few hours.
Now the overarching societal problems here are two fold: people want cheap, and people are greedy. The public wants cheap, and the CEOs are greedy, so money is saved on the customer service departments which then goes in to the CEO's pockets. Tell me these clowns can't take a smaller bonus every year and hire more staff instead, it's very possible, but greed innit.
I fully understand that mistakes happen, everyone has crap days, etc. There's a massive difference between chatting to someone in customer services who's helping sort a mistake or whatever, to dealing with plain old incompetence, and this difference will generally reveal itself on the first phone call. If I deal with a company which is the latter, my solution is very simple: I email the CEO.
Find the CEO's email
here and email them. We live in a society where people tend to forget that we're the customer, not the product, so by emailing them I'm reminding them that they're being paid to provide a service, and if they don't, I'll find someone who will. I have zero time for crap companies and will do everything I can to avoid them.
Perfect example today, I am trying to book tickets to Odeon on Saturday and I'm having problems with the app, it's not accepting my unlimited card. Phone them up, get some automated email that I need to use the webform which then hangs up. That service costs my wife and I £20 a month combined, so no, it's not acceptable. I pinged an email over to their CEO Mark Way so he can deal with it.
If the rest of society want to spend their lives waiting for crap customer service, getting frustrated and irritated at very-avoidable incompetence that's up to them, but I ain't got no time fo' dat.