At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.
There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.
I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.
As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.
For brick and mortar retail that isn't fast fashion or supermarkets, dropping troublesome customers is generally extremely sensible.
Profit on most goods is low - single digit % typically - and a single return can eliminate the profit margins on a dozen sales. Sometimes cost can be reclaimed from goods providers - i.e. genuinely defective or manufacturer refurbishment programs - and sometimes they can resell the item as new. But if the item has been used, broken by the customer, etc. the loss is significant. It turns out that some people are more honest than others, and some people are directly trying to scam companies.
When one 'dodgy' customer can eliminate the value of 10 'real' sales with every return the maths say to ban people quickly.
A little anecdote - I have a distant relative who, circa 2005, would buy a vacuum cleaner use it, and then return it. He rotated stores (hardware stores, supermarkets, electronic stores) until he gradually got banned from them all. Once that happened he moved house. Not only had he almost certainly spent more in time and fuel than a reasonable vacuum would have cost him (which I will note he could afford); but the cost and waste he has incurred on both individual companies and society at large through that and similar schemes is staggering. I don't know if he's still at it - or alive - but the people he was surrounding himself with all saw such behaviour as reasonable.
All true, I have no doubt, but this experience has weighted your judgement here IMO. That isn't the force at play in modern customer service policies.
> net positive profit-wise over time.
There are definitely many customers you should drop, but business are not even that interested in retaining profitable customers. The problem is with the "over time".
Management are rewarded with bonuses and options that focus on the next few years so they are not really interested in how profitable a customer will be over the next ten years, only over the next one or two. Small businesses and family owned businesses are different, but for a big, widely held, professionally managed business the incentives are all short term.
> treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.
may be true in the past, but a business cannot scale up good customer service - it's at best a linear scaling, where each new customer costs the same fixed amount due to needing high touch/people to manage that customer.
With the internet, businesses have found scaling to work better by ensuring your fixed costs stay fixed even if you scaled up customer count - this includes support/call centers etc. Without doing this, the business cannot scale up exponentially.
A family member helped start up a call center for UPS back in the 90's, for their shipping software. The problem she was working on was that the average time for a call to be answered was 60 seconds, and they were trying to get it to 45 seconds. They also had formal tiers of agents that could quickly escalate a call to a technical expert if needed. The golden age of call centers I guess.
It did "math out" because these industries heavily lobbied and regulated that starting an alternative is close to impossible. Think about Wise: How many companies out there have the same service? The closest are Revolut and Airwallex. So in a world of 8 billion people and millions of businesses, there are only 3 companies that do the same thing that Wise do. In comparison, there are thousands of banks around the world.
Wise's USP is a consequence of the way the US banking industry works (possibly as a result of US regulation). Free and instantaneous interbank transfers are ubiquitous in other banking systems, as are low-fee international transfers.
Wise is a British company with lots of customers around the world, the article is by someone in New Zealand.
It is cheaper than British banks for international transfers. Its business accounts are both easier to open and cheaper to run than those of the banks.
You are right that transfers from personal bank accounts in the UK are usually free and rapid (usually immediate, guaranteed to be within two hours), and similar or better in many other places, but Wise still has an offering beyond that.
Low fee international transfers are not ubiquitous unless you're talking about SEPA.
> It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers.
You missed the first step, which is to burn though tons of cash offering your services below cost, driving all competitors out of business. Then once you've done that, where else are they going to go?
Wise customer service is amazingly good though.
I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers
OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture.
Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?
To counter this, I was using my account for years with no issues, then one day I've had my Wise account "closed" for no reason other than "breach of terms".
No other insights or discussion and the appeal process basally took months with nothing but an automated response.
I've given up on all these "fintech" companies and am using tradition banks.. at least there is regulations and they can't randomly decide to close your account and remain unresponsive when you require support.
I've been telling my loved ones to stay away from Wise, PayPal and similar services.
> OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address
Well, the article says otherwise. I think "The document was rejected because it was a tax invoice, not a bill." is a pretty lame rejection reason.
That being said, I didn't quite get the solution Wise suggested. Don't they already have a lease document for the new office? It looks like the author has omitted some crucial detail.
I've had good interactions with Wise twice.
I couldn't log on, got the problem escalated, then they got me to create a logged session in their app, and from that they diagnosed the problem was due to larger text on a smaller screen causing their app to crash. I've rarely had technical faults diagnosed and fixed by any company.
Cough economist and financial times
Had a transfer frozen by the central bank earlier this year.
Wise was very helpful in getting it resolved, and made it clear that if anything else came up, just reply to the e-mail anytime.
Did you read the post? The business had just moved. Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?
> Was it supposed to wait on the tax office for the next tax statement, which could arrive months later?
In Australia you can get a Company Extract from ASIC for $10. Apparently it's free in NZ [1].
I believe they haven't actually updated their registered company address for some reason, and that triggered Wise's systems.
[1] https://companies-register.companiesoffice.govt.nz/help-cent...
> At some point customer service died.
At some point enforcement died. It used to be that locking someone out of their money would wind up with people in jail.
Now, it's not just a cost of doing business but also viewed as a positive by state actors.
...when exactly would you have gone to jail for this?
Yep. I'd like to see some news stories confirming this magical past.
Lots of banking access laws were put in place after the Great Depression and vestiges still remain although most of them have been repealed.
See, for example, Section 37.002(c) of the Texas finance code: "An office or operation may not remain closed for more than three consecutive days, excluding days on which the bank is customarily closed, without the banking commissioner’s approval."
Laws like these were put in place because failing to disburse someone's money could cause a bank run.
I was thinking the same thing recently (dealing with 2 different companies). As soon as the company get some market share - all customer support is just gone. You only get some automated messages in reply, and if you're lucky to speak with someone on the phone - they still just read the answers from some predefined FAQ.
Completely agree. I run a small company and great customer service has been a competitive advantage in what is more or less a red ocean. Just the ability to speak to a human being goes a long way, and if you actually solve their problem, you not only build loyalty but referrals.
With these companies, if it takes more to keep the 10% of customers that will leave because of bad service than providing good service, then bad service will be delivered.
That's what you get for the low cost of entry. When most customers are self-signup (and probably low margin) there's no individual responsible for them.
Good in that you never have to speak to a salesperson, bad in that there will be no-one to take care of you if things go sideways.
Yes. I think that is a reasonable point. When cost of retention exceeds the cost of acquisition.
On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.
On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.
I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.
The worst customer service is usually for things where you don't have a choice, like when your mortgage gets sold to a new servicer.
In principle I agree with the concept of charging for support and refunding if the issue is not at the customer's end. I'd certainly be fine with that myself, even if it cost $50 or so to get a responsible human on the line when there's trouble with a service like banking, payments, or business-critical SaaS providers.
I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.
The problem is dealing with those other 5% of calls. If you are in a 5% situation, you're seemingly SOL these days.