Hmmm, I know it’s anecdotal, but I’ve never had an issue with Amazons customer service. In fact, quite the opposite. Anytime I’ve had an issue they have been quick to resolve. YMMV.
I'd make a distinction between two kinds of customer service: "easy", which is what I'd call Amazon, and
good.
Good is the experience I had recently with the New York Times. I hadn't been receiving papers for a couple weeks after starting a subscription and called in. Within about 40 seconds I was talking to a real person (despite "higher than usual call volumes"), and within 90 seconds I had explained exactly what was going on, had confirmed the required information, and the agent was already writing a message to the local distributor to figure out what was wrong. We were done in under 5 minutes.
"Easy" is great for resolving little issues. Every time I've had a simple order- or service-related issue on Amazon, they've solved it promptly and usually issued some sort of credit in addition to the refund. The difference:
- Beyond picking out what order, item, and/or service I had an issue with and the broad category of issue, I rarely get the impression that Amazon representatives really even comprehend the issue I'm contacting them about. This is born out whenever I've had a request that was not so simple it should have been solvable online; there's a real language barrier, and when you hit it, you hit it hard.
- Amazon clearly makes an active effort to divert people away from support. They've all but entirely hidden the email option, leaving only chat and phone options which are needlessly time-consuming for resolving simple order-related issues.
- Nearly every issue I've contacted Amazon support about is something that should have been solvable online. For instance, on multiple occasions they've shipped me the wrong trail bar; for whatever reason refunds can't be issued online for this sort of item. I've also had multiple issues with items being marked delivered one night and only showing up the next morning, none of which I could report without a lengthy interaction with customer service.
- The real kicker was when I ordered something from what turned out to be a fraudulent listing. As it turns out Amazon's A-to-z "Guarantee" is a complete joke.
In this last case, I ordered a new electronics item from a third-party seller and received one that had obviously been used and wasn't even quite what I had ordered. The return address was not readable (possibly intentionally so), so I contacted the seller who first asked me to return the opened package to USPS (which is not allowed) and then provided a clearly fake address and asked me to ship at my expense. USPS wouldn't even let me buy postage to the address (not that I had any intention of doing so).
In over a week of back and forth, Amazon's A-to-z team did nothing but tell me to follow the seller's instructions (which was literally impossible, at least via USPS), some of which directly violated Amazon's own policy and would have, per their own terms of service, made me ineligible for a refund. Ultimately I was only able to get my money back after spending well over an hour on the phone and
eventually getting to someone based in the US who could both speak English fluently and who actually bothered to understand the situation. Even then, they were only able to issue a refund on several other sold-by-Amazon items amounting to the same total. The A-to-z claim was literally never resolved.
