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What's actually annoying about bad customer service?
Jane Galt posts her thoughts on Sony Vaio customer service. I bought a Sony Vaio a few months ago, at the recommendation of a friend. Fortunately [it now seems] it arrived at the Best Buy with a broken drive and I never had the chance to lay my hands on it. It was only last week that they gave me my money back. Best Buy wouldn't give me the computer, and Sony wouldn't accept the damage claim from Best Buy rather than from the customer.
I see two especially frustrating elements in bad customer service. First, the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are already turned on, anticipating that a longstanding problem -- lack of a computer -- was going to be solved. The resulting disappointment is especially acute, much worse than before you try to fix the problem.
Second, we don't like the tension of not knowing when the problem will be solved, or when being put on hold will end. Going to the dentist with certainty stresses me less than some chance I might have to go.
I try to manage the former problem by not getting excited until the product has been working for at least a day. That means I remain a bit emotionally flat in some spheres of commercial life and I don't go out shopping enough or with enough gusto. I try to manage the second problem by mentally capitalizing the worst case customer service outcome I can imagine. That means when something goes wrong I toss in the towel too quickly. Sometimes I just buy a new item rather than solving the problem with the old one, or working to get a refund.
On this matter, Natasha believes I am crazy, yet I persist in my ways.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 7, 2007 at 12:44 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
I'm not an economist, so I am not aware of the proper economic jargon, but I place a high value on my time, so I will pay extra to avoid hassle. My girlfriend thinks I am crazy, for instance, to shop at the closer grocery store which is also about 30% more expensive, but that means I don't have to spend an extra hour each time driving.
If I were poor, I'd make the choice for the other store. As I am not poor any longer, I prefer that hour be my own, to use for something else.
At the DMV, etc., I wish there were queue that you could pay, say, $50 to join that guaranteed service in five minutes or less. If so, I'd get in this line every time.
What's puzzling to me is non-poor people who will waste hours of their time to save a few dollars. Reminds of something someone once said about Linux (best I can recall): "Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing."
Posted by: Ibod Catooga at Jul 7, 2007 6:36:02 AM
@ibod: This quite clearly is an example of the opportunity cost of time. If Tyler can't explain that to his wife, then nobody can... Then again, even as an economist who really should know better, I might still spend hours on finding the best deal on some gadget, but to be fair, I kinda enjoy that ;). Perhaps that's somehow comparable to the enjoyment women seem to derive from shopping for clothing (where I'm absolutely ready to pay premium to get in and out quickly)? As for some of us using Linux, we do it because we're more productive with it. It might take slighlty more time to get setup (tho once you're up to speed I would start to debate that), but once it is up and running, it fits my way of working much better than Windows ever did. Or OSX for that reason ;)
Posted by: Linux using economist at Jul 7, 2007 9:18:46 AM
I imagine Sony and Best Buy interface quite often. However, in cases such as these, why do they always behave as though they've never met? You'd think that if you're in the business to make laptops and sell them, you'd have a procedural plan for such a run-of-the-mill scenario.
I'm led to believe that most innovation is spawned from within an organization/industry, rather than by outsiders (rogue inventors). As a result, I'm intrigued by the inability of capitalist stewards such as these to navigate such familiar territory (failed hardware exchange by a third-party retailer)- or at least draw up a better map of the unknown.
Am I wrong to value adaptability so highly- or rather, assume it is understood by economic actors?
Posted by: djconnor at Jul 7, 2007 9:47:38 AM
ibod: the quotation comes from Jamie Zawinski-- a former hacker who now runs a bar in San Francisco. There are many other famous Zawinski quotes, generally corollaries of the 'root quote'-- "My purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others"
Posted by: MattF at Jul 7, 2007 10:32:06 AM
Linux is free as in freedom and free speech. The extra time it may take me to figure out how to do something in GNU/Linux is worth it if software freedom is worth something to me.
Posted by: Scott Carpenter at Jul 7, 2007 10:59:29 AM
I once got into the middle of a service issue between Sprint and BestBuy that ended up screwing me out of $90. Best Buy basically told me that their big ass store in Manhattan had "no manager" to whom I could speak.
My four-year boycott of Best Buy just ended earlier this year. My final reason for wanting the manager's name was to know who to send copies of the thousands of dollars of receipts I racked up with Circuit City over that time. Interestingly, that period is one of the few where CC actually outperformed BBY:
http://finance.yahoo.com/charts#chart1:symbol=bby;range=20030303,20070103;compare=cc;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;logscale=on;source=undefined
Posted by: M. Hodak at Jul 7, 2007 12:04:45 PM
This reminds me of when I went to see Transformers on Thursday. The theater had a digital projector. At about 15 minutes in, the projector glitched and stopped playing the movie to the packed house.
My immediate response was to get up and go get a refund, then come back another day. Unfortunately, the other members of my party first decided to wait 5 minutes to see if it came back on. No. Then the manager comes out and says it will take 20 minutes to fix. Again I reiterate that it is better to get refunds now and not wait, but I am overruled by the other members of the party.
After twenty minutes they cancel the movie and everyone gets into a huge line for refunds. To avoid the long line, I finally convince people to just leave and come back another day, despite the manager telling us that we can't get refunds unless we stand in line. The next day we go back and get a bunch of free tickets with no wait (but not a cash refund).
The lesson: if you ever have any problems while watching a movie, just immediately get up and go get your refund. There is a huge cost of not knowing when or if the movie will get fixed, and standing in line waiting for service. It's always better to cut your losses early.
Posted by: Nathan Whitehead at Jul 7, 2007 1:04:50 PM
I'm also a Best Buy boycotter. They're generally terrible and they really screwed me once.
Posted by: David J. Balan at Jul 7, 2007 4:17:58 PM
I had even worse problems with Sony's customer support last year. Here's my story in a nutshell:
Over the year I owned my S260, I had a total of six motherboards put in it, three LCD screens, two hard drives, and two DVD players placed in it. The issues I had with Sony have literally cost me hundreds of hours, including some precious moments with friends during my last days in Orlando. They also affected my grades during school last year. If I put a dollar value on this time, it is far more than the computer is worth.
Read my detailed account here:
http://thinkingonthemargin.blogspot.com/2007/07/sony-vaio-customer-service-continues-to.html
Posted by: Brian Hollar at Jul 8, 2007 12:03:20 AM
I fix computers for fun, mainly to help calm the adult ADD part of my life. Sony sucks, period. Their full sized machines don't suck as bad as their laptop, but it's close. Their laptops tends to be hard to fix because of the many proprietary parts and complicated assemblies, not to mention screws of various sizes chosen specifically to aggravate the typical computer tech. Replacing a hard drive, or Heaven forbid, an optical drive, on a typical Sony laptop can mean anything from one plastic panel and 3 screws to removing the upper casing, the keyboard, the drive cage, the touchpad connector and about 10 screws. The typical Sony laptop story is that it will break after the warranty expired and the place you got it from will charge you an arm, a leg and your firstborn as sacrifice to appease the computer gods. At that time, you will take the machine and head to your local friendly independent computer guys (one just might be me). I made it a point to charge at least 30 min. of shop time upfront because of this. To make this short, get a Dell. They may not be as cool as the Sony, but when it dies, the parts are plentiful and easy to replace. I replaced an LCD on one in less than 15 min. You can swap the optical drive on those in 15 min. with time for a coffee break in between.
Also, Best Buy is teh suxxor. Good if you know what you are looking for, just don't expect much in the customer service department. They seemed to be staffed by a bunch of sub-literate high school kids. You want to know who's the manager? Look for the dude with the spiky hair and not as many pimples, that's the one.
He'll have been there at least six months.
Posted by: Blademonkey at Jul 8, 2007 5:19:42 AM
Remove the frontal lobe, there will be nothing actually annoying about bad customer service.
Posted by: Yan Li at Jul 8, 2007 3:34:24 PM
I agree with Blademonkey. Dell techsupport is uniformly polite ahd clueless, and once you've sat through their troubleshooting script they're always willing to send you the needed part, which can be installed by a monkey (hard drive, optical drive, RAM) or a trained monkey (pretty much anything else). I don't know about the availability of parts, but the company itself is very good about that.
Posted by: jb at Jul 8, 2007 7:02:17 PM
Hey jb, you can also go to ebay to find Dell parts. Since they made so many laptops and some of the series have interchangeable parts, made it a viable way for some broke college kid to sell the perfectly good LCD assembly, the optical drive, the casing etc. after the motherboard or the hard drive failed. Yes, these parts can be installed by a monkey, Blademonkey, to be exact :D. Dell is good about this because a lot of the issues that cannot be solved by their scripted trouble shooting scenarios tends to be hardware related. Easier to replace the hardware than to attempt further trouble shooting or have the laptop sent back to their authorized service centers. This takes care of a huge chunk of these technical issues, my guesstimate is around 75 to 80%.
That's why they are so nice about it, I suspect that it keeps the cost down in some way.
Posted by: Blademonkey at Jul 9, 2007 4:46:07 AM
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