Tangentially related, but I think a huge problem in the situation is when major companies outsource what should be domestic support.
For example, I left something in an enterprise Rent-A-Car. I called the only number available and I get someone halfway around the world. They said they file a lost claim, and promised that the rental location will get the message immediately and will get the item etc.
Fortunately, I was local so I just went back to the airport. When I spoke to the manager, I learned that none of that customer service stuff ever filters down to them at the physical location. “That system doesn’t work” shocked me.
With customer service literally on the other side of the planet from the customers, there has got to be a breakdown in communication that could be resolved if you moved the bulk of customer service domestically closer to your consumers.
Ie lost baggage should be handled by the airport and the airline’s local customer service. Not an international call center.
I faced a similar issue with Netflix when I tried to update the credit-card on my account.
Got a PHL Call Center that insisted the card txn was being declined. I tried to explain that there had been no api call for an authorisation attempt happening, as the failure was immediate, so there simply hadn't been any time for a backend round trip or stripe api call.
After some typical call center stonewalling I finally got through to a manager who looked at the logs and admitted the problem was an unexplained Netflix error and that in fact my card authorisation attempt wasn’t even happening despite the six times I retried based on the advice of the original CSR.
Then he told me they didn't know what was happening as it hadn't ever happened this way before and so presumably wasn't in their scripts, and nor could they kick it up to engineering! It was a one way callcenter outsourcing with no opportunity to inform upstream of any problems.
Their proposed solution was to delete my account with all the accumulated history back to the late 2000s … so, in effect, anyone who calls the Netflix help Center is being “unhelped” and encouraged to stop being a customer!
That's quite an unintended consequence of what was presumably intended as a cost-cutting measure, not a customer-cutting measure!
Non-local customer support is just terribly broken. I would wish for all support to be of the Joel Spolsky / Paul Graham type where competent developers can actually debug and fix problems, and problems are surfaced, not deliberately deep-sixed.
For example, I left something in an enterprise Rent-A-Car. I called the only number available and I get someone halfway around the world. They said they file a lost claim, and promised that the rental location will get the message immediately and will get the item etc.
Fortunately, I was local so I just went back to the airport. When I spoke to the manager, I learned that none of that customer service stuff ever filters down to them at the physical location. “That system doesn’t work” shocked me.
With customer service literally on the other side of the planet from the customers, there has got to be a breakdown in communication that could be resolved if you moved the bulk of customer service domestically closer to your consumers.
Ie lost baggage should be handled by the airport and the airline’s local customer service. Not an international call center.