I find that interacting with many modern organizations is a kind of spiritual exercise. Unless I am in the right frame of mind, it is easy to get angry.
The basic idea comes from the work on “expert systems” maybe twenty years ago. You organize your knowledge so that you deal with the most likely events first. Thus the typical telephone support service has a large number of minimum wage individuals, in one part of the world or another, with scripts for the common problems they will encounter. The overwhelming bulk of the queries will be satisfactorily dealt with by these answers.
The snag is that the minority of unusual queries are not so satisfactorily dealt with. This tends to hit those whose queries almost always fall in the minority. The overwhelming majority of queries are what I would regard as trivial. Most people are not particularly technically knowledgeable, and not particularly interested in making any effort to solve a problem for themselves. They would much rather just phone up and get the answer. Fair enough, and certainly the organization’s systems need to be designed to cope with that. Unfortunately, I only phone up as a last resort. As a result my queries are rarely dealt with in a way which I enjoy.
In principle, it would be easy for organizations to have a referral system, whereby tricky questions got referred to more expert people. In practice, that is exceedingly rare. All the pressure is to reduce costs, and so the front-line responders get given targets which make them reluctant to pass calls on.
Some organizations take this to extremes. I used to have an Ebay account. I never sold anything and I was not a big purchaser, but I must have made maybe a hundred modest (under £50) purchases and a few larger ones (under £500). One purchase I made proved awkward. The seller was based in Russia and required purchasers to jump some awkward hoops to complete the transaction. I rated him badly as a result. He did not like that, because it spoilt his 100% record. He put in a counter-complaint that I had not paid. That had the effect of blocking my rating. I had paid, but could not get his counter-complaint lifted. He explained that he would lift it if I would give him his normal good rating. I complained to Ebay.
It became clear that Ebay was not interested in wasting money responding to customer complaints. After a number of fruitless interchanges which failed to get my rating of the seller made effective, I cancelled my Ebay account and my blood pressure returned to normal.
Yahoo appears to be similar. I used to use Yahoo.com mail. I had to take the premium service ($30/year) in order to get popmail. In late 2005 or early 2006 ago I took out a flickr account, but stopped using it towards the end of 2006. It was then taken over by yahoo. I am now unable to access the flickr account. It is my own fault, because I failed to record the password and other details. But that is a common problem. Unfortunately, after two hours of effort, including emails and phone calls, it is clear that yahoo is not interested in resolving it. The most irritating part is that they deliberately do not have an email address which you can use. All you can do is send a single “webmail” which gets a single, probably automated, reply. No dialogue is possible. There is a phone number, but they refuse to deal with flickr queries, because flickr is a free service.
I do not particularly appreciate the “because it is a free service”. It is, or could be, a highly profitable site, so they ought to be providing proper customer support. Millions of people are providing interesting content (photos) without charge, which enables yahoo to earn substantial advertising revenue. Admittedly, the site has less ads than one would expect, but that is yahoo’s fault.
As it happens, I switched to gmail as my main email a year or two ago, and it has the advantage that popmail is free. So I have cancelled my premium service on yahoo and will at some point complete the switch-over to gmail. But I was definitely in the wrong mood yesterday and felt deeply, if temporarily, depressed after what seemed like endless fruitless wrangling with yahoo. It was the stupid circularity of the system and the fact that the software engineers/designers had clearly not thought through the process properly that depressed me.
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