Bonum Certa Men Certa

This Holiday Season Dump Companies That Offload Everything to Skinnerbox "Apps", Un-Encrypted E-mail, and 'Webapps' (Proprietary JS Applications in 'Web Site' Clothing)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 27, 2024

Smartphone User

Society is getting worse in the way it treats customers because more companies do not treat customers at all, or just barely (if customers find the right tree to bark under). It's basically a race to the bottom because "everyone is doing it" or "they're all the same". They don't serve customers, they don't even listen to customers, and sometimes they let them play "games" on phone menus (voice menus that tell them site addresses to visit instead, usually because "it's easier online," according to them or their read-only bot - reading a mindless and dishonest script) and - worst of all! - chatbots. It's a sort of collective gaslighting which leaves more people unemployed, as jobs get eliminated despite them being very much necessary (appreciated and much-needed by customers). The queues on the line gradually get longer to discourage human interaction and increase phone bills (while employing fewer people whose workload is untenable and whose callers are more rude/impatient because they waited on the queue for ages). The Cybershow spoke about this in many past episodes and hours ago it published a new episode about efforts to replace musicians with CG junk, derived from entire catalogues and disguised as "AI" rather than mass plagiarism. Have a listen; I did...

Today I received a message after I had canceled an insurance policy (having had enough after more than a decade). I asked for paper confirmation, but thus far they only sent an E-mail that seems very generic and thus probably automated, not even personalised except 2-3 'fields'/'text tokens'. To quote:

Dear Doctor Schestowitz

We wanted to let you know that we’ve cancelled your Home Insurance, as requested. We can confirm that the policy’s been cancelled with effect from 29 December 2024.

We’re sorry we had to decline your claim, but sometimes we can’t avoid this.

If you’re due a refund, we’ll be in touch within the next 7 days, explaining how and when you’ll receive this.

We hope you’ve found the cover that’s just right for your home elsewhere.

If you’d like to tell us more about why you’re leaving please let us know and we hope you’ll consider us for your home insurance needs in the future.

If you’ve got any questions or need any help please contact us using the details below.

Thanks

RSA Customer Services Team on behalf of Nationwide

Signed by "RSA Customer Services Team", but was this written by an actual team member?

The message is moreover spyware; all the links go to some tokenised tracker URLs at http://williamsleatag-emails.wlt.com/ and there are embedded elements in the message (HotLinking in an E-mail that's a Web page or HTML pretending to be E-mail). There are also broken links. This is sheer incompetence and disrespect/arrogance towards clients' dignity. They even spy on their cancellation E-mail.

Notice how they didn't write anything about reasons, they just plugged in the date and name in a genetic template. It's very likely no actual person even bothered to review this E-mail. Is there any point or purpose for a human reading it? Sentences that say (for example) "If you’d like to tell us more about why you’re leaving" suggest they don't know why; I spent a long time explaining that to them already. So they ask me to sort of communicate with their bots (maybe for reasons to be textually scanned and summed up in bland statistics, then converted into a mere number in a tally for a pie chart). It's like nobody listens and interacts here.

Home insurance will be resumed with another company, but I probably should have done this years ago. Are other companies better? Maybe not. Maybe this is "normal" now... the standards have been lowered, unlike costs. Their fiscal surplus is your agony/mistreatment/free labour/time-wasting. They shift or 'offload' (outsource to the client) all the work. This is unfair and it lowers productivity in society (people less specialised doing all the work very slowly). Imagine them telling you, "build your own home, we'll send you the materials and instructions, just pay us a fee for it..."

I did not record our 36-minute conversation, but a lot of it was just voice menus and me being passed around between 3 "real people" to politely discuss my honest concerns with their (dis)service. Of course they have a nagging "retention" department (sometimes they call it "loyalty", not "cancellations"... too negative a word apparently, describing gatekeepers blocking the exit); it's meant to tire customers down (or cool them down by slowing them down, changing emotions/sentiments); they train people to do this, passing burden and blame to alter narratives post hoc.

An anecdote here is that this British insurance provider/company hid the option of snail mail, but eventually said yes (they said wait 10 days even though mail takes 1-2 days to arrive, so they probably batch and automate it to bulk-send), albeit only when we explicitly requested it; they don't like paper trails, except for themselves, as that puts in a position of disadvantage the customer. Same for pension providers, in my experience (which was documented here last year). This is grotesque, more so than offloading things to so-called "hey hi" (AI) in order to escape liability/accountability.

Are people meant to interact with E-mail bots? Is that what things nowadays boil down to? Customers wasting time interacting with opaque algorithms? It's like people having to deal with Windows botnets that spew out spam, except this is being done by large and supposedly "reputable" companies that have official registrations and managers with 6- or 7-figure salaries.

There's an even bigger blunder or widespread phenomenon here, albeit lurking somewhere in the details.

Another one instance is, British banks keep telling customers that some services are "online-only", but if one insists, then suddenly that's no longer the case. They do that in branch, too, albeit typically with unhappy faces (like asking for actual service is verboten and frowned upon). "Online" is not about speed. Any mistakes make? Blame the customer. Zero risk for the bank and its workers, who can always blame the customer after doing something he or she isn't even trained to do (and probably never experienced before). Some people I spoke to last week theorise that throwing people onto apps and online GUIs may also mean they cannot negotiate or haggle, e.g. play off one bank against another or seek a better deal/rate. It's a blackbox of bad choices and dark patterns (online and in apps). Banks without branches or without in-branch services must be avoided and let to fail (as a business). Only that way we stand a chance of rescuing what was once known as "customer service" rather than bot disservice.

Many banks do not offer insurance policies; they're just resellers for the likes of RSA. So even "small" or "local" banks basically relay you to Wall Street (another country/continent) under some other branding.

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli, Google News, and Other LLM Slopfarms
Why does Google News keep promoting these fake articles?
Links 29/10/2025: Amazon Kept "Data Center Water Use Secret", "Abuse of Power" Against Media
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/10/2025: "My Hardware Specs" and "Goodbye Debian…"
Links for the day
EPO Cocainegate: Feedback and Clarifications
Part III will come out soon
Links 29/10/2025: "US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination" and Boat Strikes Deemed Unlawful
Links for the day
Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
Techrights Party Countdown
Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
"edited / censored some time more recently"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
Links for the day
[Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
Links for the day
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
Links for the day
Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
Links for the day
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
Links for the day
PETA and Activism
Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
Big Blue, Huge Debt
debt will soar again
Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
Links for the day
Parties and Milestones Again
we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
Links for the day
This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
Against its most faithful enablers
19 Years, No Censorship
No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete