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What a week. So many things we’ve been dealing with that we shouldn’t have to and never had to in past years. This isn’t past years now, is it? What we’ve been doing practically every single day recently is doing the work for corporations that no longer are capable or willing to do squat in terms of customer service. Once upon a time (that’s how fairy tales start) companies were all about customer service. Now it seems the overriding corporate mantra is “if you’re having problems with our service or products, you need to figure the problem out yourselves.” We’ve both resigned to the fact this is the new normal. (Side comment: I hope Trump et. al. hasn’t now become the new normal.)
I’ll tell you about a few of our travails. Stuff like this used to be the exception, not the norm. Free time used to be the time you had to do what you wanted to do when not working. Now free time has become being on the phone for hours practically every day talking to company representatives.
Smileycreek paid our local business taxes online as that’s what they require now. I did it for the first time years ago. For some reason, they were able to get our money but somehow had no record of it on their end. Smileycreek did it again this year...like three times. Each time she worked with someone on the phone to get it right. Our business is then supposed to be in their system so that paying our taxes in subsequent years is an electronic breeze. Every time they told her it was now done right. She was told to check back in a few days with their system to see for herself. She checked —> nope. She did it again just a few days ago as they claimed it hadn’t been done correctly before even though they did it with her previously. Will the third time be a charm? If not, we won’t be surprised. It seems like nothing works anymore. As silly as that seems to say, it’s become one of our nearly daily jokes we say to each other. “Nothing works anymore.”
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Customer service is a thing of the past. We are trying to get a new cable modem since the one Xfinity installed some years ago apparently isn’t working properly now. How did we discover this? Our internet connection has slowed to a snail's pace. Comcast says the cable modem they installed is obsolete and that something is broken inside it. That’s the reason we were getting 5 Mbps download speeds. Now it’s down to 2.7 Mbps. OK Comcast, if you say so. Can we make an appointment to have a technician come out and install a new one since we are paying you $10 per month to rent it from you? “We don’t do that anymore unless you pay $70.” Wow.
OK, I did research and discovered I could buy a new cable modem/wifi combo thing at Best Buy, Amazon or even WalMart that will work with Xfinity. They cost around $170 — $200, but they are up to the current top standard of 24/8 and Docsis3.0. The one we have now from Xfinity is 4/4 and Docsis3.0. I went to Best Buy in Chico to have a talk with them. They let me know all about cable modems and also let me know that the new ones Xfinity now installs are actually already almost totally obsolete → 8/4 Docsis3.0. They said that is typical of Comcast since they buy a bunch of them and it takes years for them to go through their inventory. Makes sense. If I buy one from Best Buy it will be far and away better quality and save us $10 per month meaning that after 10 months it will have paid for itself.
I really like Best Buy because they actually still do something called customer service and do know what they are talking about.
I bought it and then paid to have the Geek Squad come and install it as I don’t know how to do it. You have to figure out the right gateway settings and all sorts of other things. Someone like Darryl House would know how to that. I don’t. Geek Squad now costs $100 to show up. I said, “yes” because I just want this to work and figure $300 will be recouped after 2 ½ years. That’s worth it to me.
Geek Squad calls Tuesday morning before coming up from Chico like they always do. Guy asks me what Xfinity setup we have. Do we have a house alarm with them? “No.”Do we have phone service with them? “Yes.” I told him we have the Xfinity Bundle (cable, internet and phone) because if you don’t get the bundle, Xfinity won’t give you fast internet service.
Uh Oh. The $200 modem I just bought on Monday won’t work because it doesn’t have a phone jack. It only works with cable TV and internet. The Geek Squad guy let me know that Comcast is really not happy when people don’t go through them exclusively for hardware and that Comcast only allows Best Buy to sell one modem that will work with the Xfinity bundle. They don’t keep it in stock. It will have to be special ordered and costs at least $400 because that’s the way Comcast rolls baby. Then for $100, they’ll install it.
The Geek Squad guy suggested I don’t do that due to the cost and explained that even the current now basically obsolete (8/4 Docsis3.0) cable modem/wifi thing Comcast has is actually probably good enough for our needs. All I have to do is bring my old modem down to Comcast and pick-up and install a new one...fail to do so...then have Xfinity come and make it work for $70. Of course, we’ll be paying $10 each month to “rent” the thing. Well, that’s what Comcast wants me to do. I refuse to do that in my mind. Then I have to accept the reality of the situation.
So we made an appointment with Comcast to charge us the $70 for a technician to show up and to bring a new cable modem with him and install it. Oh well.
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We’ve had a huge problem with Chase Bank over the past 8 months. We’ve used their Paymentech service at our office for decades which allows folks to use credit cards to pay for our services. We have a credit card swiper unit from them. Well, Paymentech has suddenly become unreliable. Credit card charges aren’t being done right. People get charged at our end and it shows up as being “authorized” and as having happened but at the Paymentech end, some of these charges have been simply sitting there suspended and not processed. Why? “Don’t know.” What do we do? “You have to make it work?” How do we do that? “You can’t unless we give you the authorization to do that.” How on earth do you expect us to suddenly know that? “We don’t because it’s only on a single basis by basis situation.” Will you release those credit card charges? “OK.” Then smileycreek discovers that oops, they recharged a shitload of people again a second time by accident going back over a year on random dates. Why? “Don’t know. We did something wrong and have no idea what happened.”
So, we had to eat hundreds of dollars of service we did to undo the double charging. Why? Because to undo the double charge, they have to also undo the original correct charge too...meaning we’d then have to contact each person that happened to and tell them we need to charge them again for a treatment done in March 2017 for instance. Why did this happen? “Don’t know. It’s not supposed to happen. Sorry.” We are done, done, done with Paymentech.
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Got a new card reader to work with Quickbooks directly. It costs more to do credit card charges through Quickbooks by a good amount vs. using Paymentech, but Paymentech is now unreliable and costing us a lot of money. We always went the less expensive way as we only lose a bit less than 3% per charge vs. the higher percentage of fees per charge that Quickbooks dings you for. Since we can’t count on Chase Bank to do the thing right anymore, and having lost a bunch of money from the past year now, we decided to do it.
Credit card reader came. It doesn’t work with our computer. Why? It works with phones but not computers. Why did you not tell us this? “You didn’t ask.” You were told our situation and what we do. We told you we are using Quickbooks on a computer to run our business. How are we to know what questions exactly we should be asking? “Don’t know. “You can simply use your old Chase card reader which works just fine and send the one we sent you back.”
So we already had the hardware we needed and could have started charging via Quickbooks instead of going through Chase Bank? “Yes.” Why didn’t you tell us that? “Don’t know. Sorry.”
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As much as I’d like to believe the situation here is that it’s just me getting older, that’s not the problem. That would be the easy explanation but that has nothing to do with it. Everyone, regardless of age, is having the same experience with corporations. They really don’t care about customer service anymore. They screw up and you have to fix it. They make a mess of your business and you have to eat it.
Nothing works anymore.
What do you want to talk about today?
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