In my experience, that has been even worse. They'll ask you a question, you type your succinct answer, hit enter. Two minutes later they begin typing their next question (because they are helping 4 people at a time). Canned responses and in many cases ending with "for further support on this issue you require, please call us at 1-800-xxx-xxxx." Followed by a tirade of f-bombs I shout at my monitor.
Chatbots weed out the easy questions but who calls or chats for an easy question? I agree it’s limited help but they probably do the math and it reduces calls by 18.21345% and saves them some money. Blah.
I sympathize. This kind of customer service drives me nuts as well. However, it seems to me this has little do with Biden. The reason that a company would use an oversees call center seems clear: lower costs. Your claim is that the overall product would be better if companies increased costs to provide a more personalized domestic IT experience. There is certainly no law against this, so we must assume that the reason why this experience has become so rare is that when given a choice, consumers tend to choose the cheaper product over the one with superior customer service. In essence, you are saying consumers are wrong to be making this choice and are overvaluing their money relative to their customer support. I agree with the posts above that any federal legislation attempting to correct consumer values would seem like socialism, and not without justification.
Are there more than like 5% of American corporations (let's define corporation as companies with over 1,000 employees) that don't offshore their external support? Hell, most of them offshore their internal support for their own employees nowadays. My point being, it's not like I can easily shop for products that have only onshore support. I reckon if an American company advertised "all customer service calls are kept onshore", they'd be crucified by accusations of racism. (ie the true manifestation of "socialism" here). In fact, I bet there are a number of American companies who would LOVE to market in BIG FAT LETTERS that they are completely American owned and operated, but something tells me the Karine Jean-Pierre types would find fault with this. Hence, yes, it is a Biden problem.
This is starting to become a major problem for the medical community as alot of scheduling is starting to be done overseas or with AI. It is what it is. Support is very low priority for business because they dont get hit in the bottom line with your dissatisfaction with the service or product. Consolidation of products and services has been going on for 30 years, I dont see it changing anything soon. The only hope is that AI will eventually get good enough to solve your problem.
A lot of the companies I work with have outsourced their accounts Payable and receivables. When they call me, which is fairly often, I send it straight to voicemail. They're terrible to try and talk to and I know they'll send an email as soon as I ignore their phone call. Way easier via email
Who are you talking about? Reagan was the king of protectionism. Yep, even protected wooden clothespins cuz Maine was a swing state.
Was thinking NAFTA and WTO advocacy. Most free trade deals and bills have had Republican majority support even the bipartisan ones. I dont think either party is above specific pandering though.
Considering that “made in the USA” is still totally acceptable as far as I can tell, I’m not sure it would be out of bounds for a company to advertise American employees, but even if so, they could just advertise, “Calling our customer support will connect you with a real person that will know how to solve your problem.” That’s really what you are asking for, right? If there were a bunch of money to be had by doing that, it’s hard to imagine companies refusing those profits.
I just bought some socks that actually advertised proudly still made in usa. I thought about reporting them to Biden but decided to just keep them instead.
I perused the OP rant and some of the follow on comments. CS is bad but is 3X worse under Biden. OP has faith Trump can magically fix it (I guessed based on trump's record of fixing things?) by somehow imposing tariffs? OK. I do agree poor CS sucks. I will also say that if something important like my financial institutions had crappy CS, I wouldn't use them.
A small little tag or decal on the inside of a shirt is not even remotely close to saying "we'll make sure your call doesn't go offshore. All of our customer service reps are in America and English is their first language." Yeah, because they don't already do this. Please tell me you were kidding. Surely, you understand that many companies already throw that line out there. They just leave out the "in Bangladesh" part after the words "real person."
Ok let me ask this more directly: if companies can make millions in additional profits by using domestic staff for their customer service, why do they keep offshoring their customer service?
They can't. Offshore employees don't have to have health insurance, worker's comp or unemployment insurance paid for in any way by the company.
This gets into a broader problem. That is, corporations essentially banding together to make this sort of thing the "industry standard." Americans deserve better. We both know it used to not be this way. There was a time when gas stations actually pumped gas for customers. Small businesses, on the other hand, are more indebted to the American customer experience, because losing one customer hurts a small business much more so than it does a large corporation. A large corporation can simply outrun a lousy customer experience by mass producing product/service and marketing. I always have a better experience working with small businesses, even if they are web-based or not within reasonable driving distance for me. Small business owners have more on the line and typically, their own capital on the line as well. So to answer your question, obviously, corporations have determined their bottom line works out better if they offshore. I don't think I ever questioned that. There are a lot of things companies are not allowed to do either by law or regulation that would improve their bottom line. I don't think that's a healthy standard, necessarily, in all cases. And it doesn't hurt if corporations are banding together to make it the industry norm. (ie the "people will get over it while we enjoy our record bonuses"). But it is not at all a socialist idea. If you force companies to staff customer service here in the States, inevitably it will generate more competition and in the end, yes a better overall customer experience. Having boundaries isn't socialism. See the border. Fact is, we've lost a lot due to outsourcing. We are in tremendous debt. The only way it continues working is if our currency is the default reserve for most of the world. If that ever shifts in a large way or changes completely, we're f****d in more ways than one.
Core PCE has been running at a 4.8% clip the past two months and rising. MoM inflation has been rising since October 2023. You're looking at YoY rates which have the benefit of some bad months rolling off. If you look at the treasury market, it's portending higher inflation to come. PPI just hit a 12-month high. Inflation cooled in fall 2023 and leveled off, but started roaring back in December. If you think we're out of the woods, you're thinking wrong. As long as unemployment is where it is, inflation is going to be an issue. Historically, the UE rate has not run this low for this long. Believe it or not, the Fed would prefer UE be a little higher than it is right now. It's an inflation driver.
