Elsewhere Online: Thanks for calling, please go away

Seth Godin had a lousy experience with PayPal and it seems hundreds of others have, too. While publicizing customer service failures can be useful, it begs the question, "What is the next step?" How do we get companies to "feel our pain" and actually change the way they operate?

Frequently, there seems to be no way to resolve the issues until the situation gets so bad the company finally goes out of business. This seems a ridiculous situation when, theoretically, these companies are supposed to be working for us.

One another note, how do people continue to work for companies where their entire job is obfuscation, delay and deny? I can't imagine they would like the tactics were they the focus of behavior similar to that they dish out on a daily basis. We, as workers, are responsible for the continued dismal state of business if we don't refuse to work for companies that abuse their customers.

Thanks for calling, please go away

Most customer service organizations are architected around a simple idea: interacting with customers is expensive, driving costs down is a good thing, thus getting people to go away is beneficial.

(Continues on web site)

(Via Seth's Blog.)