Stats not service: ever feel like the world has moved on?

Amazon, DPD, maybe Apple and so many other companies don't care about 'you' anymore...

I wrote about my recent experience with Amazon concerning the purchase of 2 iPhone 15 Pros. Neither got delivered, it has taken countless conversations with the company to get the refunds issued and still I have no money back in my bank account.

The incompetency from Amazon is disappointing and even more so is the appalling way DPD works, but more than anything I have been shocked by the unwillingness of either organisation to even sense that something has gone wrong.

I raised a complaint through an X direct message and a case was opened. The resultant emails told me to wait 2 weeks for a refund and no matter how much I explained how poor the service was, the replies would just repeat the need to wait. No apology, no human touch at all and even worse a disinterested tone from everyone at Amazon I have dealt with.

It would probably scare me if I calculated how much I have spent with Amazon over the years and every recent Christmas has been dominated by Amazon purchases, but this year they will get £0 from me and for as long as I can I shall stay away.

The problem is that Amazon has become the only place to buy certain goods. On most shopping trips we come back empty-handed because the stores do not have stock or they require a long time to wait for delivery, and in far too many the service is not far away from my recent Amazon experiences.

I sometimes feel as if the world has moved on and bemoan the loss of genuine customer service with only a few organisations still clinging on to the kind of service every customer deserves. My main concern is that the success of organisations such as Amazon means that the competition has to lessen training, pay less and live with service that they would have sacked someone for not so long ago.

I saw this in a previous company I worked for. The seniors and employees were rewarded for dealing with a certain number of enquiries and the numbers were all that mattered. At no point were the enquiry responses ever looked at and the majority of them were abysmal (that's being kind). These responses were so bad that they would cause more enquiries to come in on the back of them and as the enquiries went up, the number of employees went up and everyone was rewarded more. The quality of the service offered did not matter because no one looked outside of the company and to this day the performance remains just as bad as previously.

We reward people for being busy in place of being productive. We promote people who follow the party line and who offer no threat to the seniors, and so the demise of customer service continues.

I can only hope that Amazon's complacency with their most loyal customers eventually hits them enough to make the company change course, but alas that does feel unlikely because so many other companies are following them. These companies seem to forget why they got so big and service was a huge part of that.

Look at the state of the reviews for Amazon recently on Trustpilot. And what is happening to Apple???

Note: bought a third iPhone 15 Pro direct from Apple, and then realised even they use DPD for delivery. FFS!