The world of customer service

I work in the field of customer service. Well, it's not really a field. More like a pasture. Where they stick old horses, although I'm not very old yet.

I won't disclose the company that I work for, for fear of retaliation by my superiors, but I will say that most of our business ir conducted on the internet and we offer a service, not a product.

I don't have much to say right now except for this: if there is one thing that I have learned, it's that the big dot-com failure is very likely to have been because of ineptitude of consumers than anything within the companies' control.

Our website is easy to navigate. The prices are clear. All of the details of what you're ordering are given at the onset of the ordering process. We have an Order Summary Screen, which asks for a credit card number while also providing a display of what is being ordered and the price. And, of course, a submit button to submit the order.

But it seems that this process is far too difficult for many people. They don't read the details of what they're ordering, then claim that it's not there even when I provide them with the exact link that they were shown. They claim that the prices aren't given, despite the fact that the price is shown at least twice, no matter what avenue they go through to place the order. They add on a service, in addition to the service they're already ordering by clicking a little box that even says ADD-ON, then say that this, in essence, should have changed their $40.00 product into a $20.00 product (instead of the correct $60). When there are certain limitations to a service, we indicate this with an asterisk, but people have apparently forgotten the grade school lesson of what an asterisk is used for.

And we're just a service company. I can't imagine companies like Amazon who deal with actual product. "What do you mean my Aladdin DVD doesn't include a DVD player with it? Man, you guys suck. You're running a scam!"

Sure, some of these people are surely lying, just to get their money back, but for many, it should be illegal for them to have a computer.