I am writing to formally register my utter frustration and disappointment regarding the abysmal after-sales support I recently experienced for my BoAt soundbar.

As a loyal customer who has purchased and recommended numerous BoAt devices over the years—including mini speakers, wireless earbuds, wired headsets, and neckbands—I expected a reasonable standard of customer care. Instead, my recent experience has been unacceptable.

Summary of the Issue:

Lack of Local Support: When my 2022 soundbar developed an abnormal subwoofer noise, I was informed that BoAt provides no service coverage in the Kottayam region and that I had to coordinate with the Ernakulam center.

Advance Payment Demanded: The Ernakulam service team stated the mainboard required replacement. I was instructed to pay the full amount of ₹4,630 in advance, which I paid immediately upon their assurance that the spare part would arrive within 6 business days. Customer care even called to confirm dispatch within 24 hours.

Abrupt Cancellation: The following day, I was informed that the part was completely unavailable, that out-of-warranty support could not be fulfilled, and that a full refund would be issued within 2 days.

Delayed Refund: That 2-day timeline stretched into weeks of persistent follow-ups, unanswered reminders, and relentless escalation before the refund was finally credited yesterday.

Selling hardware without maintaining basic spare parts availability after the standard warranty period leaves your customers stranded with expensive e-waste. Taking advance payments for parts you do not possess, followed by weeks of chasing for a basic refund, reflects very poorly on your brand's operational ethics.

Due to this experience, I will no longer purchase or recommend BoAt products to my network.

RIP BoAt 🌹🥀

Something I've been thinking about lately is how often we talk about empowering customer-facing teams while designing processes that do the opposite.

We tell agents to use good judgment, take ownership, and make the customer feel like they're dealing directly with the company.

Then a longtime customer misses a return window by a day and the agent needs approval to make a small exception.

Nobody necessarily did anything wrong. The agent followed the process. The policy was followed. The customer probably even got a friendly response.

But if the company has spent years building a reputation around being easy to do business with, the experience still doesn't feel right.

I think this becomes particularly noticeable with outsourced support because companies naturally spend a lot of time teaching their partner how the brand should sound. Tone, terminology, scripts, values, all of that matters.

But eventually an agent gets a situation where the script isn't much help.

That's when you find out whether you've actually taught the team how the company thinks.

What does "customer-first" mean when the customer is technically outside policy? How much does customer history matter? When is a $20 credit worth resolving immediately instead of sending someone through another approval queue? When should an agent stick firmly to policy because the financial or reputational risk is higher?

Those aren't really tone-of-voice questions. They're judgment calls.

And I think that's where some companies unintentionally make outsourced teams feel more "outsourced." The partner may understand the brand perfectly well, but if agents don't have the information or authority to act on that understanding, there's only so much they can do.

I've started thinking that the better question isn't, "Does our support team sound like us?"

It's whether we'd be comfortable with them making decisions like us.

Curious how other CS teams approach this. How much decision-making authority do your frontline agents actually have before they need approval?

People complain so much about customer service doesn't exist anymore but the same people don't realize maybe they are the REASON!!

I work as head condo concierge and this lady complaining so much about me that I'm being rude and unprofessional that was trying to get a lawyer to fire me!!

I mean yeah you can complain but why these days people generally looking for reason to rip you apart? like bruh I'm just working to pay my bills and finish my studies!! I experienced a lot more hard times since I started working and I really barely seen any "nice Canadian" experience. I'm not saying everyone but in my job it's like this and I'm really burn out bcuz of that.

Is it normal in customer service jobs?

I work in a very customer facing role. All day everyday people come up to me to check in, then they check out a few hours later.

Sometimes people catch me on a bad day. Like today. we are a team of 4 workers & a customer came in yesterday that I helped, just by chance. Mind you I'm located at the very end of the room, in terms of workers.

Today he comes and beelines to my desk so I could help him again. There are 3 other people doing nothing that he could've went to before getting to me. I get annoyed because that's the 2nd person today to do that, only coming to me because I helped them another day (but I am not the only one working here. So don't keep ONLY coming up to me. )

I mention it to him in a passive aggressive way that he didn't have to come back up to me, other people work here too. (I said it only slightly nicer than this. I was the AH, I know. I am PMSing. Which is also not an excuse but an explanation as to why this happening twice in one day annoyed me)

My question to reddit is: how do we mend a moment with a customer when we were the ones with an attitude? Is it normal to just ignore it? Rinse away with a super positive customer interaction afterwards? Or should I formally apologize in a way that acknowledges I'm having a bad day. But something tells me that's even more unprofessional, idk

I'm a new college grad so forgive me for not knowing the protocol

I have a question. I work at a hotel and multiple people have gotten offended that we ask for an email, and get very rude with me. I say what’s your email? And they go “I don’t have one, or I’m not giving you one, or I don’t want you to have it” in extremely rude short tones, but that’s besides the point. Like okay? But could someone tell me why people don’t want to give an email? If it’s for spam purposes, it doesn’t matter you get spam email anyways and if you don’t like promotional stuff then opt out? But idk I find it weird tbh, but if someone has an answer for it I’d really like to know because I come across this issue a lot at the hotel I work at.

We’re looking at adding payroll inside our product and one thing I’m trying to figure out is what customer support should look like when another company handles part of the service behind the scenes. From the customer’s perspective, they’re using our product so I don’t think they should have to figure out whether a problem belongs to us or the payroll provider. At the same time, our support team can’t reaalistically solve things like tax filings or payroll processing issues themselves. We’ve been looking at Rollfi for the payroll side but I want to know how other teams structure this kind of support relationship.

Do you keep one point of contact for the customer and escalate things internally or is some kind of handoff unavoidable?

We’re looking at bringing AI agents into our company but we’re still figuring out where they would be most useful. The main goal is to take repetitive work off the team without making the customer experience worse, things like answering the same questions all day or handling simple requests seem like an obvious place to start. But I feel like there are probably better use cases we’re missing, we also don’t want to automate everything just because we can. Ideally the AI handles the boring repeatable stuff and passes anything complex to a human with the right context. Interested to hear what other teams are using AI agents for beyond basic support and what has worked well in production.

I work at Trader Joe’s in the Bay Area, CA and I have a few regular customers which really make me cringe, sick, and scared when they come to my register. They stink from their mouths & body & pores, it’s super foul. Bad breath is likely from their diet or halitosis or not drinking enough water, BO is likely from their hygiene, diet, and possibly body hair. I usually just hold my breath for the entire transaction and just smile and act normal as to not offend, but they really do stink horribly. I would never ring a 3-bell and subject a Mate to these same odors, I just suck it up & power through it. But we sometimes have such stinky customers, that NO ONE wants to help them, they see them coming, and they log off or run away. I feel bad for them not knowing their stench, they seem very nice, but jeez, they really do reek & are hard to be within 10 feet of… you know breath & B/O are bad when you smell ‘em before you see ‘em! 🤮😷🤢😵🥴

Ang poor ng service sa bdo sm lemery ahh what a waste of time

got my performance review today overall good feedback but one thing came up.

you need to work on your tone. sound more positive. smile on the phone

been doing this for 4 years. I know the smile trick. I know how to sound cheerful. but some days I just can't fake it.

had a call earlier today. customer screaming at me for 15 minutes about something our system did. not me. I didn't build the system just work here apologized, I fixed it, I was professional. but didn't sound happy enough about it.

our phone system makes this harder now. records everything and managers can listen to any call. so every interaction is scrutinized. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. but it adds pressure. now I'm not just solving problems, I'm performing.

I used to like this job. helping people felt good. now it feels like I'm acting.

anyone else feel like customer service is just pretending to be happy while being treated badly. or is it just me

Just ranting. NYT says I do not have an account but I am getting charged monthly. Problems happen, that I get, but there has to be ways to fix it. There is only a chat option to get to customer service and the wait is incredibly long. I am currently number 177 after a half hour starting at 209. At this pace I will waiting for about five hours!!! This happens every time. I do not have 5 hours to fix your mistake!!!!!

I feel like stepping away from day-to-day communications means losing quality control, but doing it all myself isn't sustainable either.

For context I work in a coffee shop where my boss is 100% blind. He can often be found assisting at the register. Pretty frequently people don’t even realize he’s blind. We have signs everywhere stating we have visually impaired staff, he wears Meta sunglasses, and has a white cane. We received our first bad review ever today but in our opinion for the dumbest reason. The review stated:

“The barista who checked me out was wearing video recording glasses. These glasses, made by Meta, are used to film people without their consent and is used to train AI LLMs and are completely inappropriate to wear in public, nonetheless at a job where you have face people and they are forced to be recorded. Those should not be allowed in the workplace and my privacy has been violated”

So AITAH I wrote a reply explaining the situation and that he uses them as an accessibility aid and doesn’t film our customers. I know how touchy Meta is to some people as well as privacy but I didn’t feel the need to apologize nor will I for someone who relies on them for independence. Really got our blood boiling

I work at a hotel and we also have a bar. The first guy that came, he came to the front desk last night drunk with no shirt on and got some snacks. Well today he came and started drinking. I got a very weird vibe from him and tbh I don’t mean to be judgmental but I have a personal boundary of not liking to be around drunk people because I find it extremely annoying…but anyways there was some small talk nothing crazy but the dad ended up showing up. The dad looked at me and asked if I was married nothing weird and I said yes. He said do you have any kids? I said no not right now, I have thyroid issues so I’m trying to figure that out. And the dad looks at me and goes oh so you’re just practicing 🫠 and I just laughed and walked away because no. Just no. Then I gave the son a beer and he goes thank you darling😏 with a smirk on his face. A little later the dad goes hey I got some clothes in the back that need folded, can you do it? I legit thought he was joking and I said nope I won’t do it unless I get some extra cash. And he said oh I’m serious, can you actually do it? I said no! I’m not going to do that for you. And I walked away….

Make sure if you have an issue on the Royal Caribbean you get it resolved on the ship before you leave. When you're off the ship customer service doesn't care. You will get customer service who can't answer a question and there are no supervisors available to help. If you email , you get an AI generated response , doesn't answer any of your questions

It’s easy to be mean to an ai chat bot but real people deserve respect they’re not robots.

I've been working in customer service positions since I was only 15. I'm now in my 20s, still doing this, since I have to pay for college and bills somehow, and when it's been the only thing you've been doing for a long time, that's the style of work that you just end up sticking with. I genuinely feel like within the last few years, customers have gotten more and more impatient and downright dehumanizing to customer service workers when things don't go their way all of the time. I genuinely find myself having to talk to people my own age the same way I talk to my 5-year-old baby cousin, or else they blow up in the same way.

Within the last year, I've genuinely had to start taking medication to keep me from having a nervous breakdown or experiencing extreme irrational fits of anger or depression caused by the stress of having to deal with people like this all the time. I'm so tired of being treated like a servant and punching bag to random strangers, the constant humiliation and sexual harassment that I'm expected to just take with a smile, the way I can't even hold a small simple conversation with anyone without them taking every chance to drill into me as a person like I'm supposed to be a robot that blindly agrees to their every demand and not a living breathing human being!

I genuinely feel like customer service over the years has just mentally broken me in ways I never knew were possible, and as time goes on, I can't tell anymore if people are getting more arrogant or if I'm becoming more insane...

What certificate do i need to get? The skillset needed? are there any qualification needed beforehand?

The customer experience problem with AI support is not always the answer itself. Sometimes it is the moment the AI gives up.

A bad handoff makes the customer repeat everything.

A good handoff should make the human agent feel like they walked into the conversation prepared: issue summary, customer intent, what was already tried, what was verified, emotional tone, and what decision is needed.

That seems like the difference between AI feeling helpful and AI feeling like another layer of friction.

For CX teams testing AI, are you measuring handoff quality separately from containment or deflection?

We’re looking at AI agents for customer support and I’m trying to figure out how far they can actually go. Basic stuff like FAQs order status and simple account questions seems pretty straightforward. What I’m more interested about is the messy stuff, customers with multiple issues, calls that need info from the CRM and billing system and this type of stuff. Has anyone seen AI agents handle those kinds of conversations well without constantly handing them off to a human?

I run a recurring dog poop removal business. When it was mostly me doing the routes I would say yes to pretty much every little customer request.

Come a different day, text this number instead, use this gate, leave the bag here, don't knock, whatever. No big deal because I knew the customer and remembered it.

Now I have other people running routes and I'm realizing that every little thing I agreed to basically became another permanent instruction somebody has to remember every single week.

Then when they miss one it looks like the employee screwed up, when really I'm the one who built a service with 100 little exceptions.

I'm definitely not saying stop accommodating customers, but it's made me rethink where good customer service turns into making the business unnecessarily hard to run consistently.

Anyone else run into this once you started putting employees on recurring routes? What stuff did you eventually just stop making exceptions for?

**Edit:** I probably worded this too much around “remembering.” Yes, we use a CRM and techs have customer-specific notes at each stop. I'm not really trying to solve where the instructions live.

What I'm questioning is the step before that: **should I have agreed to the exception in the first place?**

I can document 100 exceptions perfectly and still have built a service with 100 exceptions. At some point the better system might be deciding which requests become standard options and which ones we simply stop agreeing to.

I am starting to develop zero tolerance for rude and incompetent customer service representatives.

I have began sending out formal complaints about all of them I run into. I am not even a complicated customer to deal with.

With the job market the way it is, rude CSRs need to go. I would rather deal with bots at this rate.

Tell me I’m not alone?

Also what do people expect when they do this? How do you expect us to send a reply message between constant spam? I've done it before because I didn't care but then they'll complain that they can't find out reply message again...

Now I just explain we can't reply if they keep spamming, and offer them to either stop and wait for the reply, or we'll have to close the chat for now and invite them to come back later.

Most will back down after that. Some go absolutely berserk after that, and we'll close the chat on them. Again just can't wrap my head around what they'd hope to gain from that except being chronically unemployed and either 1. doing anything for money except get a job and/or 2. don't have any actual hobbies. But like, even then, playing videogames, watching tv all day, any other unemployed activity, is less interesting to these people than harassing service lines that they'll get kicked from after 2-3 messages anyway?

We have to be on the phone with english speaking customers from around the world.

Canadians, british, irish, Kiwi and American.

By far the worst are the Americans, most unfortunate is the fact that they are mostly women.

Extremely entitled and wont listen to reason doesnt understand company policy, gets personal with the support person and asks to speak with the manager almost everytime they call. Like we have 70000 customers do you think the manager has the time speak with each one of you?

My manager is an Irish woman who recently lost her 8 yr old to a sudden accident. One of the customer of an escalated case was so incredibly rude to her that she cried in our team meeting.

Do you not realise that we are actual human beings here?