Picking your pocket with a smile…

Excellent column by David Pogue in today’s NYT on the trend of large companies toward passive-aggressive customer-service.

Pogue presents an interesting theory to explain the phenomena.

…I called Verizon. “Don’t worry,” the lady told me. “You signed up for the 700-minute plan with a 100-minute-a-month bonus. When you get your bill, you’ll see 800 minutes of airtime free.”

As you can probably guess, I did not, in fact, get those extra 100 minutes. For two straight months, I had to call Verizon and ask them to fix it. Each time, they apologized and gave me the 100-minute credit. But each time, I lost 25 minutes of my life.

Yes, it’s possible that I just had the good luck to call three incompetent customer-service reps in a row.

But there’s another possibility: Verizon knows that a certain percentage of customers will never notice that they’re being overbilled, or will trust that the problem has been corrected after the first complaint.

I’d chalk this up as an isolated oddity—but the thing is, this was the third or fourth time it’s come up this year.

For example, only a month earlier, the same story had played out with our MCI home long-distance service: our plan was supposed to include unlimited, free long-distance calls on the main line. Yet month after month, we were billed for long-distance calls. Month after month, we’d call customer service. “Oh, I’m so sorry; we’ll credit that to your next bill”—and no credit ever appeared. (We finally dumped MCI.)

Oh, that we could dump all the companies that are jumping on this bandwagon!

Pogue leaves out my own pet peeves. They include impenetrable voicemail systems; being placed on-hold for 20 minutes or longer; the requirement that you punch in your contact information, only to have to repeat it to the person who finally answers; the insistence that one department cannot communicate directly with another, thereby restarting the whole process; and, when all else fails, undisguised rudeness on the part of managers.

AT&T Wireless excels in these techniques. That's why I bought out of my contract early and will never sign with them again.

Read Pogue's column here.