I work in customer service. I am kinda a middle manager, but I don't really have any managerial duties aside from reporting "bad behvior" which I try to do as little as possible. I basically work from home and either assist the primary callers with questions or I take their angry or demanding customers, mostly called escalated customers. I like helping the team get the answers they need, it's nice to be able to correct an honest mistake. This is not most of my conversations with higher ups or people.
We're a retail store, not saying which one cause this is a pretty anonymous space already and I don't want any heat from them. (It's a arts and crafts store in America, pretty popular. Maybe if we had actual anti-trust laws the guessing game here would be harder.) The issue is that recently there was a change in our e-Commerce department (recently meaning like a year ago or year and a half) which lead to a good website update and a very bad plan moving forward for people who want accountability in thier online purchases with us. The biggest issues were the creation of a third party market place, adding a Branded Credit Card option, and just straight up reducing staff by like half or so.
For those who are unaware, the hip new thing in online spaces to siphon people's money is to be a platform. Think Etsy, Amazon, even Walmart and other random retailers have third party vendors selling through their sites. The thing about being a platform is if you're big enough, you get little snippets of all transactions taking place but have very very little overhead to deal with because all the order processing and shipping is through the individual sellers. This is supposed to be a trade off for the sellers, they get more promotion on a big website and don't have to figure out how to make their own platform for selling their items or getting traffic to them. I don't have a lot of experience from the seller end, so I cannot speak to that. But as someone who is responsible for hearing customer experiences, it's not good when it doesn't work. (I might argue that the point of customer logistics is to be the ones who HAVE A PLAN OF WHAT TO DO when something goes wrong with this system, as if inevitably will because supply chains are a nightmare and if like 70 different systems are communicating with each other it is not uncommon AT ALL to end up with some kind of miscommunication or mistake.)
So what happens to some of these customers is they're just fucked. We're a 5.3 billion dollar company as of 2024 (keep guessing!) and so I have limits of what I can just allow and if someone is getting fucked over by this system I will absolutely just refund them in the end because the return policies are poorly advertised and IMO intentially very similar to the standard return policy for other items so if they're not caught then customers are out money. That being said, that means that those who have spent the most and been screwed the most have to go through all the fucking red tape possible. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't. At that point they're interacting with our internal systems designed and motivated to keep money and benefit the business. At some point the cost of doing right is too much for these stupid fucking executives.
The other thing is that it basically kneecaps anyone on my team's ability to actually help the fucking customer. Like it or not, they don't wanna wait for their refund. Sometimes I think that's reasonable, sometimes they're just mad. (Sometimes they're also rude, but those people are problems for separate reasons.) So that is coupled with the fact that we have way less people here, cause this platform is creating situations that stay around for longer but we now have fewer people to even chug through these cases. They're convinced that they can get away with splitting our department in half and having the remainder handle the same amount of volume. ALSO! THIS IS NO WHERE NEAR WHAT I WANT TO DO OR EVEN STUDIED IN SCHOOL!
Update: 11/30/2024
I have to complain about this again here, but for a more specific reason this time. I hate Same Day Delivery. It's not necessarily a new trend in E-Commerce at this point but it's one of the newer ones for sure. Essentially, retail companies are able to partner directly with gig-delivery companies to include their orders in their queue of deliveries. Using the famously really good and ethical gig economy to (not so) reliably bring goods from local stores fulfilling orders to the customer. There is most often a range limit for these, like with Jimmy John's 2 mile delivery range to maintain their brand identity of Freaky Fast.
You might be able to guess my issue with this already. To jump the thesis gun, this is not a reliable form of delivery. It is not at all uncommon for our team to have to reach out to a customer via phone or email (or both) and straight up ask someone if they got their order. It's one matter for us to lose visibility once a shipment is handed to a shipping company like UPS or Purolator in Canada, but at least those companies are reliable in terms of inquiring about issues that arise during delivery and they're also scanning the package several times along the way so the visibility of where the shipment currently is located ranks far higher than that of any of these gig-delivery companies like DoorDash, Instacart, or Uber. These companies often have 2 scans, one to note the order has been received by the driver and another once the item is delivered. This is annoying because while standard tracking has a barcode that is literally scanned for these updates, these gig drivers just click buttons and sometimes take a photo. Most annoyingly, Same Day Delivery is HEAVILY advertised as reliable and reasonable especially during the holidays.
I want to be clear that my issue here isn't inherently with the cusotmers or delivery drivers. There are some bad actors, rude customers or drivers who take merchandise and don't return it, but both these issues don't exist if we don't have this awful tumor of a system made in the first place. By having this option and advertising it as reliable, the company encourages the worst behavior of customers: waiting until day of to place an online order. I somehow didn't mention this in my prior rant but e-commerce, in it's infancy, used to not be trusted and was used with extreme caution if at all. As far as my immediate understanding without further research goes, a massive marketing push from Amazon is a big reason (if not the primary reason) why this has changed. Now we have people placing orders for items needed for a wedding the same fucking week (without looking at what the shipping times are because a shocking number of the general public just assume the Amazon 2-day method is universal) and get mad when it's delayed or just not going to get there by the time they expected, even if it's still within what was promised on the website.
Again, I think it's important to say that the customer is not entirely to blame for this idea. The company I work for clearly makes an effort to obfuscate the shipping timelines to encourage purchasing from them and not any competitors. The information on shipping times is often hidden and the most obvious listed timeline seems to be based of an expedited/2-business-day shipping option we have and not the standard ground shipping that is free over a certain subtotal. This adds to my above rant where I have to pretend like this is normal and not the stupidest thing in the world when a customer calls to complain about this practice.
To unceremoniously end this section, I want this shit gone. I don't want Same Day Delivery to be available as an option and I think we should just fucking remove it. The issue is that, since these companies work through a system that requires endless growth, removal of revenue streams is what one might call a Mortal Sin. Most times the argument goes that the toothpaste, once squeezed out, cannot be put back into the tube. My counter-argument is that I don't want this back in the tube. I want to wipe it with a paper towel and throw it in the fucking trash. I'd vaporize this shit if I could.