The state of customer service, and the trendencies (a Lingovation) toward its complete deterioration are being seen worldwide, but especially in the United States. In this latest episode of CEM (Customer Experience Management), the nation's largest telecomm carrier, Verizon, has decided to charge its customers an actual fee for paying their bills!
This is not about a late payment fee, or a legal surcharge, or anything worthy of punishment: this is about Verizon's attempt, as part of a great and powerful oligopoly, to 1)) steal as much money as possible while they have leverage in terms of customer demand, territory and absentee regulation, and 2) behavioral modification in order to force customers to pay their bills online so that Verizon isn't burdened with the personal overhead associated with processing payments received by other less 'streamlined' means.
Fascinating: First Verizon fires customer service and support staff to make room in its budget for more advertising and promotion; now they want to eliminate those people (i.e., eliminate their jobs and salaries) who work at payments processing. Verizon wants direct and recurring access to your wallet via direct debit. They want you to be plugged into their Matrix.
If the US Postal Service weren't so close to closing up shop, Verizon probably would have gone a step further -- really ticking off Big Government -- and would have said that they no longer accept payments by mail.
It's kind of ironic that I can't pay my Verizon bill by telephone (although I use ATT)...Verizon could have simply have just made the telephone payment service slower and longer, so that they could cause their customers to incur greater telephone charges for all of those additional minutes. How did they miss that?
No, ladies and gentlemen...Verizon does not hear you now. They are victimizing you because they (in their clandestine mathematical modeling laboratory hidden in cyberspace) have calculated that they can and will get away with it. And if they don't, they will be able to reap a nice "bonus" until somebody stops them. Expect this trend to continue with every large utility or dominant territorial company.
It also proves one basic tenet of Classical Economics (I majored in Economics after doing miserably at chemistry): Where there is no competition, there is no incentive for keeping prices reasonable, or for providing customer service. And competition (one of the old-school entrepreneurial directives) is on the decline at macroeconomic levels as the large get larger and more gluttonous with each economic recession.
If consumers cannot become activists and gather their collective, collaborative bargaining strength to bludgeon these predatory beasts, the bloodfest will indeed continue.
Large, intrusive government and giant companies are positioned as enemies (under the guise of providing the best possible service) of the consumers...consumers (collectively) are comprised, by the way, of fearful, weakened, conditioned individual Human Beings. To see an example, look in the mirror.
Verizon is charging a "fee fee". Sounds a bit like a name for a toy poodle, doesn't it?
The following article appeared today, courtesy of Yahoo News!
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Verizon to charge customers for paying bills
The nation's largest cellphone carrier adds a "convenience fee" for some forms of payment. Angry reaction
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Although the above is indeed saddening, while changing flights at the Hong Kong International Airport, I saw an encouraging sign of some entrepreneurial movement in the direction of giving away something for free, in the interest of acquiring customers. I was delighted, so I took a photo with my iPhone:
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