This is very interesting, as it shows what the future of customer support looks like.
I worked for 5 years in an insurance call center. Most people believe call centers are designed to deliberately waste your time so you just hang up and don't bother the company; there is nothing I could say that would dissuade you of this, because I believe it too.
In the future, we're all going to be stuck wrestling with AI chatbots that are nothing more than a stalling tactic; you'll argue with it for an age trying to get a refund or whatever and it'll just spin away without any capability to do anything except exhaust you, and on the off chance you do have it agree to refund you the company will just say "Oh, that was a bug in the bot, no refunds sorry!" and the whole process starts again.
A lot of people think about AI and wonder how good it'll get, but that is the wrong question. How bad will companies accept is the more prescient one.
Not gonna lie. The moment a company refuses a refund or a return that complies with their policies, or just stalls me for more than 30 minutes, I'm calling a governmental customer protection agency and issuing a "comply or get sued" through them.
Had to do it once with Sony and another time with an electronics insurance company. Money was back in my account in less than 24h.
In some countries I've lived, the government has refused to do anything against companies refusing a refund for various things, even if the conditions for the refund is matching. In other countries, I've had very helpful government people issuing a "letter of concern" (not sure exact translation) and the companies doing the refund quickly after that.
don't you have to have already agreed in the binding arbitration and waived your right to sue - in writing - ahead of time?
Not sure that if you have no prior agreement with someone that you can force them to not sue and use arbitration instead. Not a lawyer, but that is my understanding (in the USA anyway)
The problem is that these companies are monopolies or at least oligopolies. Punish them simply for being big, and they will either divide (like living cells do) or die. Then when one of them wastes your time, you can take your business to the next one.
Government is never going to fix these things. Politicians are geniuses at saying things that make you think they will fix these problems, but never actually doing it. The only hope is to align our needs (smaller corporations) with the government's needs (moar tax dollars). It's really quite simple.
I worked for 5 years in an insurance call center. Most people believe call centers are designed to deliberately waste your time so you just hang up and don't bother the company; there is nothing I could say that would dissuade you of this, because I believe it too.
In the future, we're all going to be stuck wrestling with AI chatbots that are nothing more than a stalling tactic; you'll argue with it for an age trying to get a refund or whatever and it'll just spin away without any capability to do anything except exhaust you, and on the off chance you do have it agree to refund you the company will just say "Oh, that was a bug in the bot, no refunds sorry!" and the whole process starts again.
A lot of people think about AI and wonder how good it'll get, but that is the wrong question. How bad will companies accept is the more prescient one.