On The Turning Away

Last week Bob Garfield hung up his boots after an 11-long months of crusading against Comcast. In the interim, many thousands “angry, mistreated” customers have visited the site to voice their grievances. Now their efforts appear to bear fruit: Griping Online? Comcast Hears and Talks Back.

Besides cable providers, credit card companies also deserve a place in the pantheon of abusive customer service. And we’ve had our fair share of woes with Chase credit card, part of JP Morgan Chase.

If you google “complaints about Chase credit card”, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results, with the most recent ones dated yesterday. Which makes you wonder: Is Chase listening at all to those complaints or is it business as usual? If our experience today is any guide, the answer might be the latter.
For a simple billing inquiry, we spent hours on the phone dealing with reps ranging from the incompetent (e.g. giving out wrong information/regurgitating what’s on your statement) to the abusive (e.g. hanging up on you when asked to be transfered to supervisors). In fact, it wouldn’t be totally out of line to suggest that it takes a masochist to relish such horrible encounters.

Consider that on average credit card companies spend $200 on each new customer, from a cost-and-benefit point of view, it’d be a better deal to retain existing customers by resolving their problems. Failing that, they should at least make the effort. Or at the very least, be courteous.

Alas, not in our case. The heavy dose of bad customer service today is enough to infuriate the most mild, easy-going person in you. A 2007 survey by NPR found that customer service is often dreadful: one out of two customers had problems while they shopped, ranging from long lines to uninformed sales staff.

[W]hen customers are unhappy, they don’t stay quiet about it — they often share their negative experiences with others. Many retailers have been slow to recognize that the cost of poor customer service is steep.

That’s exactly what happened to Comcast. However, the company may have been spared the electric chair by adopting a practice of listening to customers and improving service. Don’t hold your breath for Chase’s rehabilitation, though. After reviewing mounting complaints about the credit card issuer, we figure an easy way out of the misery is to chuck the card and take our business elsewhere. Vive la choice.