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