Don't know if I've made a non-gaming topic before but I've had several bad customer support experiences lately and feel like it's enough of a pattern to warrant a slight rant. It feels like everywhere you look websites are trying to replace their customer support with AI or FAQs and hiding away the option to talk to a real human as much as they possibly can to cut down their expenses. I have had good customer support experiences in the past which bears mentioning (Bandai Namco Europe and suprisingly Crunchyroll), but lately it's been nothing but negative.

My three recent experiences:

• Just spend 2 hours writing with EA customer support because I lost access to Mass Effect Legendary Edition on my account which I could both prove I'd payed for and had installed on my machine, but in the end I had nothing to show for it. This was a real person (I'm fairly sure) but my impression was he was writing with several people and had an automated AI to fill in with empty questions when he was inactive for too long. I got asked the same question twice down to each individual letter.
• I encountered errors making an account on Chess.com and literally couldn't find a email to write to write to for the longest time only their automated AI support tree. When I finally did find an email (which they only revealed if you chose specific options when starting the chat, the bot itself wouldn't tell you) and wrote to them, I never got a response back.
• And this last one has nothing to do with AI and is a bit ridiculous but a local company actually threatened to ban me from their service when I complained about their terms of service. Great way to make customers.

I feel like it has to be shortsighed not being willing to spend any resources on customer support so you can actually keep your customers, but the sad truth is it might still pay off in some cases because most people aren't willing to go through the hassle or to boycott a company whose products they like over bad treatment. It's a sad state if it actually pays to hide behind and AI wall and not worry about fixing issues or the customers that feel cheated, but it feels like the companies that care about that are futher and further between.

But anyways that's my rant, if anybody else has had bad customer support experiences, or the opposite, please do chime in.

Edit: Oh I forgot I also disappointingly had a bad experience with HumbleBundle recently, they were at least polite but still very unhelpful.

Absolutely. Customer Support these days is either outsourced or intentionally built to inconvenience and frustrate the caller to the point they just give up.

It shows my age but your post reminds me of what happened with Circuit City shortly before they went bankrupt. The reason a lot people still preferred Circuit City, who was the number 2 retailer at the time, to Best Buy were the sales people. Circuit City sales people knew what they were taking about. They very knowledgeable, so they had the surperior customer service. Customers would often only buy from specific sales people. When Circuit City decided to convert their sales people, who were paid by commission, to hourly they got sticker shock. Their best sales people were making $80-$200 plus dollars an hour. So the let all their best sales people go, hired a bunch of college kids, and lost what made them unique from Best Buy. Sales tanked because customers that preferred Circuit City came there because of their superior customer service and now they were no different than Best Buy.

Xbox Live is currently down again for some on Xbox 360 like it was last month, and I'm one of them. I didn't contact Microsoft yet, but I've heard people who have aren't getting help.
PlayStation was useless a few months ago when I repeatedly got errors on my PS4 and had to factory reset it for the errors to stop.

At least now I know that I am talking to an AI, I don't have the feeling of hope followed by disappointment...

I tried for almost six months to get a hold of someone at Microsoft due to an issue with a service I tried to buy for someone, but it didn't work. As it turns out; the transaction went through, but the service didn't exist, so I was deducted a monthly fee for a subscription that never existed (Minecraft Realm for one of the kids at work). There is no number to call, no e-mail except for issues with Office365, Surface, or Xbox, the chat function didn't work at all (just stood at "it's your turn now" for hours on end, and no answer when I typed). I had to call the mediator (in this case, Klarna bank here in Sweden), but even they were useless, and nothing happened. After six months, I had to change my debit card to make the deductions end. A real shitshow, and at the time, Microsoft was literally the biggest company in the world.

PS: No, Minecraft support couldn't help me either, since the subscription never existed on their end.

Customer service has always gotten worse every year.

They make it so you have to go through so many loop holes just to get to a person.

What I don't like is that CS, more and more, requires you to contact them via cell phone. I'm sorry, but where I live, the cell service is crap. My landline works great, but nope, the CS people will only help via cell, and then you only get to talk to a person after they force you to work your way through their app!

Just had two instances of this in the past year, one with Comcast, the other with U-Haul.

Apple is fine most of the time, every other company sucks.

I think the primary reason for cutbacks in customer service is the massive amount of people who unneccesarily contact them over things that are written in the instruction manual or an FAQ. Or just common sense.
That's why a very commong troubleshooting question is "Did you check to see if you plugged in the device?/Turned the power On?"

That's crazy. I remember you mentioning this before. Sad that you werent able to find a solution until that long after.
Don't know if it's partially Klarana's fault, but I don't like that company anyway.

One time I bought something from the pharmacy for 3 dollars. And the only way to buy it online was through Klarna. They ran a background credit check on me, and sent me a letter revealing that they did. (Because its mandatory by law that they reveal this to the person they check.)

A credit check over a 3 dollar purchase.... feels very very unnecesary.
That sum was immediately drawn from my bank account when I used my debit card, so I don't even know what purpose Klarna played in that transaction.