Playing With Customers' Patience to Discourage Inquiry
THIRTY MINUTES from now (at 8AM) shall mark exactly one week since I phoned Sainsbury's [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Nobody phoned me back. They have no intention to, so they basically lied to one of their first Sainsbury's To You (STY) customers. They just needed some early adopters or 'beta testers', now they're "done" with us... their revenue has nearly doubled since (from 17.43 billion to 31.49 billion GBP).
I certainly don't intend to pursue this anymore, but one observation is worth adding as it applies to many businesses in this "I, Daniel Blake" culture.
When you phone some company and they relay you to a call center with a random answerer (different person each time), you may then need to tell the whole story right from the start. In practice, you might think it's poor use of their workers' time, not yours. But a hidden goal is to tire you down till you simply give up. Telling the same story 10 times tires you down, it is not bothering them as much. First, they do not know your story and second, they're paid to listen to you on the line (salary), as they don't get charged by the minute like you. Ticketing and tracking systems in call centers do exist, usually for special cases, but writing and checking (later on) notes takes longer (or costs more) than you just wasting your time telling a story 10 times. Well, perhaps the goal in these situations is to frustrate people, to softly convince them to stop pursuing whatever it is they pursued in the first place. █