Better Customer Service Guaranteed (if you’re willing to Pay)

It's difficult to get reasonable customer care these days. Call a computer company asking for tech support, and you can expect to the put on hold for 15 minutes. Call for repair service on an appliance and you're given a wide eight-hour window. And then the technician misses the window by a wide margin. These days though, the big consumer product corporations are promising better customer service and better care. There's just one little catch.

You have to pay for it. In short, they are trying to sell us a new product, something they call better customer service. Once you pay for it, you get around-the-clock access, practically no waiting time, and so on. Is this worth it? Or is this just something like the airlines are doing – taking away something we were always owed and then charging us to restore service to former levels?

Read a few user reviews on any product on Amazon or anywhere else, and you will see that poor customer service is want attracts the most impassioned hatred and anger in customers. Two out of three Americans claim that they have stopped doing business with at least one company in the past yeur because of the level of service provided. Providing service is quite a nightmare to all these companies. Companies dealing in consumer products and services feel that it is hardly fair of their customers expect them to absorb the costs of hiring, training and employee thousands of service representatives to answer their questions and provide prompt service when it can be extremely expensive and the expenses can go on for five years after each sale is made. And so, businesses from airline companies to electronics makers are offering paid service. As far as they're concerned, it's the only way to provide better customer service today.

So how much do they charge? It is not a small sum. Time Warner Cable for instance charges nearly $200 a year to give you a guaranteed three-hour service window. Apple has a business customer service package that it calls Joint Venture that costs in the hundreds too.

Of course, the companies claim that they provide quality customer service and everyone; they just claim that the paid service is for customers who want extra special VIP treatment. So will consumers pay for something that used to be free?

Apparently, they will. Preliminary polls show that four out of five consumers will do this. But really, can it possibly be worth it? If every company goes and charges you hundreds of dollars for better service, you'd be out thousands of dollars every year. At Best Buy and at the Gap, you have to spend a couple of thousand every year at their stores to get better service.

So should you pay for something like this? Well, you might consider it if a company was known for decent levels of service at all times. It is unlikely that the moment you pay a poorly performing company, they'll find a way to deliver all of a sudden. And of course, if you look around and find that there are other companies offering a similar product with better service for free, you have no reason to put money down for service.