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nunb | 3 years ago
Got a PHL Call Center that insisted the card txn was being declined. I tried to explain that there had been no api call for an authorisation attempt happening, as the failure was immediate, so there simply hadn't been any time for a backend round trip or stripe api call.
After some typical call center stonewalling I finally got through to a manager who looked at the logs and admitted the problem was an unexplained Netflix error and that in fact my card authorisation attempt wasn’t even happening despite the six times I retried based on the advice of the original CSR.
Then he told me they didn't know what was happening as it hadn't ever happened this way before and so presumably wasn't in their scripts, and nor could they kick it up to engineering! It was a one way callcenter outsourcing with no opportunity to inform upstream of any problems.
Their proposed solution was to delete my account with all the accumulated history back to the late 2000s … so, in effect, anyone who calls the Netflix help Center is being “unhelped” and encouraged to stop being a customer!
That's quite an unintended consequence of what was presumably intended as a cost-cutting measure, not a customer-cutting measure!
Non-local customer support is just terribly broken. I would wish for all support to be of the Joel Spolsky / Paul Graham type where competent developers can actually debug and fix problems, and problems are surfaced, not deliberately deep-sixed.
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