OK, I should never have ordered a pair of shoes over the internet. But Amazon.com has always had good stuff, good prices and fast delivery. I've ordered lots of stuff from them over the years. A brand new iMac, top of the line bread baking machine, shelves of books and other stuff that has always arrived in great shape at a notable savings. But I had never had reason to ask questions or talk about an order with a customer service agent.That's good, because Amazon's idea of customer service doesn't mean dialing a 1-800 number and talking to someone. Their approach to customer service is just like ordering merchandise on Amazon. You are expected to click your way through a series of drop down windows with fixed choices till you narrow down a specific item that requires customer service, and then you click some more for options on how you contact customer service. A toll free customer service number is not an option and was not handily located on their web site. Playing "Where's Waldo" to find a phone number is not customer service.
I really wanted to talk to a someone at Amazon about the pair of Rockport ProWalker shoes that arrived with the front sole and curved toe of the right shoe looking not at all like the left one. Someone in Bangladesh running the toe rounding grinder clearly dozed off, grinding most of the toe area off the right shoe even leaving a flat spot on what was supposed to be an ample, evenly curved toe. Not to worry, it was boxed up and sent right off ... to me.
Worse yet, the quality of the shoes was more like what one might see in a Big Lots or Dollar Store closeout, not anything like the Rockport shoes I have worn for years. So, at this point you really want to talk to someone when things get this messed up. And you would think someone there would want to learn about shoddy merchandise going out under the company name.
If you find the word help in tiny blue lettering in all the stuff at the upper right of the page and then click around enough you eventually get to their customer service page.
The first option is to contact Amazon by email ("Usually answered within 12 hours") the other option is "PHONE" and clicking that does not lead you to a phone number, rather you must enter your area code and telephone number and Amazon will call you back. And you can only email or be called back after clicking through a series of drop-down menus and selecting from a list of reasons why you need customer service . . . there is no drop-down option to simply "Talk to a human being."
After facing this inflexible wall of non-applicable options, for the hell of it I just typed "Amazon.com 1-800 number" into a search engine and got 4,540,000 returns.
Amazon has never published its toll-free customer service number it seems. And this has infuriated hundreds of thousands of Amazon customers. Checking the search results, the story of Amazon's inflexibility has been reported for years by major news media like NPR, The New York Times, US News and World Report and countless news blogs and web sites.
One personal blog called amazoncustomerservice.blogspot.com publishes not only all of Amazon's toll free numbers, but all the other Amazon business and departmental numbers and addresses in the USA and in the UK. This site also provides the hard, if not impossible to find direct toll free numbers to Yahoo, PayPal, E-Bay, and Netflix.
I dialed Amazon's toll free U.S. number, (800) 201-7575, and after a bit of a pause for clicking and connecting and the routine recording declaring "this call may be recorded for quality purposes," I got Maria in Manila. Very sweet girl, happy to have her job in the call center there. Her pronounced accent was lilting and understandable. She knew nothing at all about Amazon's quality control or about mismatched shoes, but did find the return policy and procedures on her printed flow sheet which she read to me.
I had already printed out the Amazon return UPS label and returned the shoes. But Maria was so nice, even though she clearly knew nothing about Amazon's quality control operation, I simply thanked her for her help with return policy rules and confirmed that my credit card had been credited with a refund.
I returned to the Amazon page and in the search bar under "All Departments" at the top of the page, I typed in "customer service number" and promptly got three returns . . . the first was a book in Kindle Edition from which I took the graphic at the top of this article, "Secret Toll-Free Customer Service Phone Numbers and Shortcuts to an Operator for Nearly 600 Businesses and US Government Agencies " Clicking this $3.99 bargain opens up information about the book's content, and lo! scrolling down we read:
Did you notice that it is hard to find customer service phone numbers on many web sites? Well, businesses hide their customer service phone numbers. They want you to fill out lengthy online forms. BEAT THEM WITH THIS SECRET YELLOW PAGES BOOK. It collects nearly 600 Hard-to-Find Toll-Free Customer Service Phone Numbers together. Better yet, we tell you how to skip automated prompts and talk directly to a human operator."And there, on Amazon's own web site, topping the list of books for sale was this book, for sale in Amazon's Kindle eBook digital book offerings, loaded with a treasure trove of information. And who did the book's authors choose as an example of the most secretive and obfuscating practitioners of hiding or not even providing customer service numbers? Yep, you guessed it:
Example for Amazon.com toll-free phone numbersNone of this would concern my college student granddaughter. I, however, am old enough to remember real customer service from the electric power company, the telephone company, catalog order departments and many others. You dialed a number, talked with someone and found out what you needed to know.
Amazon.com (Cust. service): 1-800-201-7575; to reach an operator, do not dial or say anything.
Amazon.com (Seller support): 1-877-251-0696; to reach an operator, do not dial or say anything.
Amazon.com (Rebate status): 1-866-348-2492; to reach an operator, press 0.
Amazon Visa: 1-888-247-4080; to reach an operator, dial 00 at each prompt.
Amazon, AT&T, the cable TV company and any other place where I spend money really are not interested in talking ... they don't need to anymore. As soon as people willingly started to spend several dollars for a cup of coffee, who needed customer service any longer?
Graphic, with a tad of Photoshop: Mobile Reference
4 comments:
Larry, Larry, Larry---sigh--what's WRONG with you?! Talk to a human being? What do you think this is, the twentieth century?
Question, why not contact Rockport? They probably would have sent you a free pair of shoes. Or is that, too, part of a by-gone age?
I think Mark Twain once wrote of a complaint he sent to a railroad company about the bedbugs in the sleeper coach. He got a nice polite, apologetic answer but the secretary at the other end had accidentally included the boss's handwritten message to her on how to deal with the complaint. It said: "Send this son-of-a-bitch the bedbug letter."
Jeff Matthews
hi larry...
i can so dig this. i punch in zero or nine no matter what and at random...usually during or after the seemingless list of choices. amazing. 'a service representative will be with you shortly.' then about ten apologies indicating that all one rep. would shortly be resuscitated;
i have lost my impulse control with customer service. i ask repeatedly 'is this an actual person?
and say things like 'i am blind and so i cannot tell.'
when i get a real person 'where have you BEEN?' make up songs to sing while the person is looki ng for something. continue to sing the last line when they return.
all surveys are filled out with earnest evals of the rep;s wardrobe, cologne, etc. when receiving snail mail, i remove the guts from one, place the stuff in the return postage paid envelope and mail it off.
help. i used to read martin luther king, jr, nelson mandela, barbara jordan and other superb writers. no i fume over spellcheck errors. the latest describes a criminal on the loose:
'smith was last seen wearing blue and white running shoes...;
killl me now before i begin a sustained insane scream..
all of my selves love you. btw, overstock. com has pretty good c/s and so do most gun shops (accidental connection, long pleasant conversation with humorous polite guy i wouldn't mind marrying and whose wife hollared in the background 'ah, honey, yew can have him...' followed by a long conversation concluding with 'yeh, that's my ole cousin, we must be kin. yall come on by. we live down here in Sandy Pit, real town, was so tempted. need coffee love again
carole
addendum: i really am nearly blind, hence many typos..sorry. don't get me started on stuff i have heard on the radio. even better...
This is the superb facility as they will contain the phone numbers and shortcuts to the operators. That is new innovative thing.
Post a Comment