Is the Customer Always Wrong?
I created some accounts with a well-known social media company in December. After three weeks of operating normally within these accounts, the company deleted my accounts, without warning, and sent me an email saying that I violated one of their policies. I re-read the policies and found 1 obscure line that conflicted with some of my content. So, I moved on thinking it was my mistake.
Three weeks later, I decided to create new accounts and be absolutely sure not to violate this policy. After four weeks, without warning, the company deleted the new accounts. When I asked why, they referred to one of my old abandoned accounts in December. I informed them that I was no longer using the old account and my new accounts had zero violations. So I asked them to either show me a current violation or restore them and
all the hard work I put in. They produced no evidence of a violation and refused to restore my accounts.
This time, I also did some Google searches and found that there were 22,000 active, user-held accounts that currently violate the policy. I informed them of this through their support page and they ignored me.
The next incident was with a car loan company. I was nearing the end of my payments and wanted to know my payoff amount. They told me that it also included 4 late payments. I protested because I knew that I was in their auto-draft system and it drafted my account each month and the money was always there.
They told me that since the draft date sometimes fell on a weekend or holiday, their system wouldn't draft then, and when it did, they would tack on a late fee without informing me. Those fees built up over the last 18 months and now they expect me to pay all of them in my payoff amount. I complained about this and asked for a supervisor to help me. She acknowledged my years of faithful payments, admitted the flaw in their
drafting system, but refused to drop the late charges or credit me for them.
This got me thinking. Are we now living in a society where companies feel that customers aren't so important anymore? Are they so emboldened that even when confronted with their own flaws and errors, they simply refuse to set things right with their customers? Even when setting things right may be a petty pittance to them, that
can get the customer off their back, so everyone can move on? Maybe it's just me. If the saying "The customer is always right" sounds old, tired, and not expected anymore, then I say that something is seriously wrong.
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Charles Goodnight -
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inter123 -
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CreativeWest -
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