This Is the Most Annoying Thing About Customer Service
The number of Americans fed up with lousy customer service is decreasing but there are still some practices that irritate nearly everyone, according to a newly published report in Consumer Reports’ September issue.
There was a tie for the top customer service complaint. Seventy-five per percent of shoppers surveyed were annoyed by the inability to get a live person on the phone and by dealing with a representative who was rude or condescending.
Seventy-four percent of consumers said they were highly annoyed at being disconnected from a customer service rep, and 71 percent were dissatisfied that they’d been disconnected and then unable to reach the same representative again.
“Many companies today are simply awful at resolving customer protections, despite investments in whiz-bang technologies and considerable advertising about their customer focus,” Scott Broetzman, president of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, told the magazine.
In a separate report released this week, 24/7 Wall Street found that Amazon.com is the best big company for customer service, followed by Chick-fil-A and Apple. The companies in the publication’s “Customer Service Hall of Shame” include Bank of America, DirectTV and Comcast.
In order to get the best possible customer service, Consumer Reports recommends using the phone, rather than email; showing—and asking for—empathy; and escalating when necessary.
The magazine also suggests putting technology to work. The website Dial a Human can help find the best customer service number for a company, and the service Lucy Phone lets you enter a company’s name and number and then calls you when a rep becomes available so you don’t have to wait on hold.
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- The New Generation of ‘Genuinely Creepy’ Electronic Devices
- Who Are These People Giving Money to Donald Trump?
Number of the Day: $132,900
The cap on Social Security payroll taxes will rise to $132,900 next year, an increase of 3.5 percent. (Earnings up to that level are subject to the Social Security tax.) The increase will affect about 11.6 million workers, Politico reports. Beneficiaries are also getting a boost, with a 2.8 percent cost-of-living increase coming in 2019.
Photo of the Day: Kanye West at the White House
This is 2018: Kanye West visited President Trump at the White House Thursday and made a rambling 10-minute statement that aired on TV news networks. West’s lunch with the president was supposed to focus on clemency, crime in his hometown of Chicago and economic investment in urban areas, but his Oval Office rant veered into the bizarre. And since this is the world we live in, we’ll also point out that West apparently became “the first person to ever publicly say 'mother-f***er' in the Oval Office.”
Trump called Kanye’s monologue “pretty impressive.”
“That was bonkers,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi said afterward.
Again, this is 2018.
Chart of the Day: GDP Growth Before and After the Tax Bill
President Trump and the rest of the GOP are celebrating the recent burst in economic growth in the wake of the tax cuts, with the president claiming that it’s unprecedented and defies what the experts were predicting just a year ago. But Rex Nutting of MarketWatch points out that elevated growth rates over a few quarters have been seen plenty of times in recent years, and the extra growth generated by the Republican tax cuts was predicted by most economists, including those at the Congressional Budget Office, whose revised projections are shown below.
Are States Ready for the Next Downturn?
The Great Recession hit state budgets hard, but nearly half are now prepared to weather the next modest downturn. Moody’s Analytics says that 23 states have enough reserves to meet budget shortfalls in a moderate economic contraction, up from just 16 last year, Bloomberg reports. Another 10 states are close. The map below shows which states are within 1 percent of their funding needs for their rainy day funds (in green) and which states are falling short.
Chart of the Day: Evolving Price of the F-35
The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed in August included 77 F-35 Lightning II jets for the Defense Department, but Congress decided to bump up that number in the defense spending bill finalized this week, for a total of 93 in the next fiscal year – 16 more than requested by the Pentagon. Here’s a look from Forbes at the evolving per unit cost of the stealth jet, which is expected to eventually fall to roughly $80 million when full-rate production begins in the next few years.
