More Pet Peeves

[Dave Gray]

- Required auto-renewal

This one chaps my ass, since the entire business model feels like hoping people forget they have a service and renew anyway.  I don't mind using autorenewal for services that I'm using regularly and choosing to opt in monthly.  But sometimes, I just want one month or one year of something and don't want to have to remember to un-buy it later.  DuoLingo comes to mind.  Also, GoToMyPC -- even though I use that regularly, I like to pay yearly to take advantage of cost breaks.  But I can't foresee my needs 1 year in....and what if in 1 year, I choose to switch to monthly.  It's a $400+ ping to my credit card also that I might not want.

But auto-renewal is required.  You can go in and call them and ask them to essentially cancel your account, but it's what it takes -- waiting on hold with customer service for something you just purchased, so you don't have to buy it in perpetuity.


- Nintendo's e-card system

Nintendo is behind the times with how their DLC works.  My daughter got gifted a card for a game expansion from a classmate for her birthday.  When I open the card, in small print on the back, it says "code is on receipt".  The card is nothing.  But there's an industry standard at this point.  Imagine buying a gift card and when you go to use it, the gift card isn't anything and the card is actually the receipt you used to buy the card.  So dumb.  I called Nintendo.  Their official policy is "get fucked, nerd".  Luckily, we contacted the parent of the kid (who understandably isn't up to date on Nintendo's DLC policy) and they had saved the receipt, in an unlikely occurrence.  Still, it was an awkward communication to ask for a receipt for a gift you received from a stranger.  I'm just thinking about how many grandparents are buying this for kids at Christmas and there's nothing there buy a useless cardboard card.  On top of it, this is all downloadable, so there's no threat of actual loss of a product if someone were to slip one past the goalie, so to speak.

[Dave Gray]

Oh another one --

Any time you have to enter a bunch of info in order to get connected to someone, and then they have to ask for all that info again.  Like, I verify my name and address and who I am and everything.  Then I get connected to a person, and they have never heard of me.

[Brian Fein]

Oh another one --

Any time you have to enter a bunch of info in order to get connected to someone, and then they have to ask for all that info again.  Like, I verify my name and address and who I am and everything.  Then I get connected to a person, and they have never heard of me.

This one chaps my ass.  For real, why did i need to go through all that before?  Also, I hate talking to computers in general.  They seldom understand what you're asking and almost never can solve a problem.  There needs to be a way to get to a person expeditiously, but call centers want to filter out simple requests to save headcount.  I get it, but in the day of internet and web productivity, I'm only calling if i have a legit problem i can't slve myself, and neither can your automated system.  Let me talk to a person without having to answer 40 questions, please.

[fyo]

This one chaps my ass.  For real, why did i need to go through all that before?  Also, I hate talking to computers in general.  They seldom understand what you're asking and almost never can solve a problem.  There needs to be a way to get to a person expeditiously, but call centers want to filter out simple requests to save headcount.  I get it, but in the day of internet and web productivity, I'm only calling if i have a legit problem i can't slve myself, and neither can your automated system.  Let me talk to a person without having to answer 40 questions, please.

Having actually done some support a long time ago, I can tell you that people are stupid and just because you're not calling in with a simple issue, well, pretty much everyone else is.

[Spider-Dan]

Having actually done some support a long time ago, I can tell you that people are stupid and just because you're not calling in with a simple issue, well, pretty much everyone else is.

Seconded.
I'd guess somewhere around half of support requests are easy fixes that the caller could have done themselves (like restarting the computer).

[Sunstroke]

That last peeve looks like it has a long line...and count me in.  I've had to deal with this with a couple of companies lately. USAA, who I did my car loan with and my insurance...and some banking, and SHIFT, the online dealer where I purchased my used car this past week (2008 Cadillac CTS). It seems like any time I call either of those companies, I give all of my information to three different people each time.

Aggravation in major spades...

[CF DolFan]

My biggest pet peeve is calling customer service for just about any large company.  It almost always takes you to some guy named "J" who is working in the middle of the night in India. Wouldn't be an issue if they were actually helpful but more times than not they are reading from a script in really bad english and are forcing me to do things I've done several times already. 

Most recent time I called in an issue with my Direct TV. We painfully went throught the script for me to reboot everything... which I had already done but she couldn't comprehend. Finally she said she has done all she could do and would need to send out a technician for my particular problem. She scheduled them for Saturday before noon. This was on a Tuesday. Imagine my surprise when on Saturday at noon I recieved a phone call from another Indian explaining that they did not have any techs in the area. I said none in Eustis and she said none in the Orlando area. In fact they do not have anyone in the state of Florida.  I was so pissed. She also informed me I would need to call customer servie again to reschedule. That was a whole another debacle. I really miss the days when I had a local office I could go into to switch out the equipment myself.

[fyo]

On the India issue, I don't think it really matters where the Customer Service center is located, but how they are set up, what information they have access to, and what they are able to do (technically and in terms of policy). I've only dealt with a few, but the interactions have generally been pretty positive and even when they clearly didn't have to help me (thanks Microsoft), they did. Apple is probably the one exception where my issue was not resolved - and still isn't, ticket open for a year, Apple have no clue and I've been stalling calling them again, because going through the whole thing again even though they have access to the old info is just more than I can handle. It's a really tricky issue though and the solutions that are really supposed to work (and appear to do for everyone else) just don't in my case. Or, rather, they work for a short period of time, then revert, suggesting that Apple updating information from a stale cache somewhere, but why that would only be affecting me is... weird - they do acknowledge there's a problem and that I'm not the cause of it, but that doesn't help if they can't fix it. I do have a couple of things I could try, but they would be major hassles to me (changing phone number or even just closing all my Apple accounts and starting fresh), but I really do need to get things fixed or I am going to be completely screwed if things go south around here and I'm just incommunicado because Apple decided to reroute my messages to a black hole.

Which, I guess, is a pet peeve of mine: Things that really should work (and be simple), but just aren't, and no one understands why. It happens regularly at work as well as at home and I just want to start tearing things apart to figure out wtf is going on, but that's not always a very constructive use of my (/company) time.

[fyo]

My biggest pet peeve, though:

Companies that save a penny on materials or a component resulting in a product with a needlessly reduced life span or increased maintenance (or just general product performance). This penny-pinching, bean-counting crap really aggravates me.

It seems like all companies do it.

I have brilliant coffee grinder with a start switch mounted on an asymmetric piece of plastic which bends slightly whenever operated instead of spending 5 cents on a spring and the two seconds extra it would take to mount it over the plastic. And what happens when plastic is bent repeatedly in the same spot? Yeah, it breaks. Stupid ass design. I had a fairly expensive hand mixer where the manufacturer switched the brushless electric motor in the original production run for a brushed one (a lot noisier, was the main issue), obviously without changing model# or anything (I took it back). I have a USB wifi dongle in a drawer somewhere where the manufacturer switched chipsets in the device, again without changing model# or box, meaning it actually couldn't do what I needed it to do.

It's just everything, everywhere. I could point to the first dozen things on my car, with my house, even half my clothes, pretty much everything I own, and point to things where saving fractions of a percent of the total production cost (much less retail price) significantly and negatively impact the product.

My wife finds it incredibly annoying the way I find fault with everything, so I've learned to (mostly) shut up about it, but sometimes she can just tell by the way I look at something... Man, I wish there were some way we, as a society, could get to where we iterated over products and just improved them every "generation" instead of changing the design completely every 2 years just because consumers need to have something "new" to buy - something that doesn't look like the old thing, because, you know, that's "old", so even if a company were interested in iteratively improving their products (and why would they be), they basically start over every generation and the only changes that are ever made to an existing design is to cut costs (short of fatal and/or lawsuit-induced flaws).

[Dave Gray]

^ YES!


I notice this especially when I get inside a product and find a stress point and it's like a shitty, plastic washer that's of course going to break because it's at a stress point.  Switching to metal for less than a penny would save the product.

I get that you can't do that for every part or it would greatly affect the cost, but they must stress test these products and see where the failure points are, since it's usually a place that's involving motion.

[masterfins]

^^^

I agree I hate having to dispose of products because it's cheaper to buy a new one than to have it fixed.  Example - I bought a TCL TV that worked great for about a year and a half, then all of a sudden the picture stopped working and it wouldn't boot up.  Well there's probably a simple part (like a computer chip) that could be swapped out and it would work fine.  But it's cheaper to just buy a whole new TV as opposed to taking it to a repair center and having it fixed.  Same thing happened to me with a microwave, a little plastic piece where the door latches broke after about a year and a half - more expensive to fix it than to just buy a new one.  Both happened just after the 1 year warranty expired.

[Phishfan]

You guys this is more than saving on the price of the parts in production, right? These things are specifically designed to wear out to facilitate buying a new product.

[fyo]

You guys this is more than saving on the price of the parts in production, right? These things are specifically designed to wear out to facilitate buying a new product.

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

I'm not saying the planned wearing out doesn't happen, but I think the explanation is probably incompetence and bean-counter-save-a-nickel'ism in the vast majority of cases.

[Dave Gray]

^ I agree.  I'm not quite so cynical to think they're doing it on purpose.  Also, for the vast majority of people, there isn't brand loyalty for most products.  If the spring in the door of their entertainment system fails, I don't think they're looking to replace from the same vendor.

Especially with cars.  Things that break are usually just annoying but don't make you go get a new car.  If the cup holder mechanism is shoddy, I'm just less likely to buy that brand of car next time.

[Sunstroke]

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

Hanlon and Occam should go bowling...