Corporate “Offloading”

I railed against @Verizon last week (link) because of my inexcusably horrid customer service experience.  Well, I’m happy to report that the Verizon installer, who I think was an independent contractor, arrived this morning, on time, properly de-installed my two single-stream cards (called S-cards) and installed a new multi-stream card (M-card) in my TiVo.  He was pleasant and knew what he was doing.

The process was a little more involved than I thought it would be.  The technician had to connect and log in to my router and run a special program to do his voodoo to make it all work.  He then downloaded a desktop program to my computer which I am expected to use before calling Verizon Technical Support if I have a problem with picture quality. He did a good job, and everything is working great.

I have to say though, that I rather resent this corporate strategy:  off-load as much of your workforce onto your customers to increase profit margins by reducing personnel and operational costs.  Corporations do this more and more.  What I find so offensive is not that corporations expect me to use my unpaid time to do their work (though I do resent this), but that it reduces jobs for wo/men on the street that need them!  (And I don’t even want to hear the bull about keeping prices down.  I don’t think it does at all.  It keeps profit margins and CEOs bonuses going up while the powerless little people lose their jobs.  That’s what it really does.)

The only thing that makes me even more disgusted is when corporations turn offloading their work onto their customers into an even greater profit center through advertising. Classic example:  @Delta has reduced ticketing personnel so drastically (increase profit margins) that any savvy traveler is forced to print out the boarding pass at home.  Delta has offloaded their workload onto their generally unsuspecting (even grateful!) customers.  Since you use your own paper and toner/ink Delta saves even more money.  Clever!  Sneaky!

But the real insult is that Delta sells advertising space on the boarding pass you have to print out.  You use your paper and your toner to print an advertisement most of us don’t want at all but are forced to see.  You can scroll down to the bottom of the boarding pass to print it without the advertisement, but, based on casual observation from all of my traveling, almost everyone prints the stupid advertisements but me!

Related articles

• @Verizon Customer Service Is Horrendously Wretched! (timtyson.us)
• FiOS TV coming to Mac, iOS in 2011 (tuaw.com)
• Verizon bringing 150/35Mbps internet to FiOS customers, enraging customers of all other ISPs (engadget.com)
• Verizon Adding FiOS TV Support For Mac and iOS Next Year (macstories.net)
• Verizon FiOS gets 150/35 Mbps plan (slashgear.com)
• Verizon Speeds Up FiOS To 150Mbps (tech.slashdot.org)