Pet Peeves in Customer Service

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

Sometimes it's not the big mistakes companies make that alienate customers. It's the little mysteries.

You order a piece of furniture, and the store tells you to expect the delivery between 9 and 5.

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Why can't they be more precise than that? Why do you have to wait around all day? Or let's say you deposit a check at your bank and it takes days to clear. Why the delay? Then there are cellphones, where you get charged for calls you receive on your cellphone as well as calls you make. Why are the phone companies double-dipping?

Answering those kinds of questions is a crucial test of a company's customer service. Yet more often than not, customers who ask for answers come away with vague explanations that leave them even more frustrated.

With that in mind, we decided to find the real answers behind consumers' biggest pet peeves. Here are 10 of the most popular gripes, and the explanation -- or excuse -- that lies behind them.

1. When you call a customer-service line, an automated voice often asks you to punch in your account information. So why does the live operator ask you for that information all over again?

There are a host of reasons. Sometimes there's a simple technical glitch, and your information doesn't appear on the operator's screen. In other cases, there's a method behind the questioning. You may punch in your account number incorrectly and not realize it, so the operator will ask you to confirm the information.

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Or you may have two accounts listed under one code number, and the operator will need to determine which one you're calling about. Let's say your utility identifies you by your phone number. If you relocate, but keep your old phone number, the utility may show two accounts for that number -- an active one for your current residence and an inactive one for your previous home.

Banks, meanwhile, generally ask for additional information -- such as a callback number -- to establish your identity no matter what you've punch in.

That's largely because of guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In 2001, the comptroller's office advised banks to lay down safeguards to protect their customers' information from "pretexting," where criminals use pieces of your personal data, such as a Social Security number and address, to impersonate you on the phone and try to gain access to your account information.

-- Lyneka Little

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2. Why can't stores ever deliver an appliance or piece of furniture when they say they will? And why do I have to sit around all day waiting for them to show up?

Stores usually don't like to give a specific time for a shipment because there are so many variables involved. Delivery trucks typically set out carrying orders for multiple homes in a wide area, and along the way, they can encounter any number of pitfalls. These range from all the regular headaches -- such as getting lost or stuck in traffic, or not being able to find a parking space -- to more specific delivery issues. For instance, discovering that a 12-person dining-room table can't fit through the front door. All of which adds up to customers sitting around on their floor for hours waiting for their new chairs.

Now that's starting to change as stores try to keep an edge in an increasingly competitive market. Many outlets are taking a page from delivery giants United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp., using technology to guide their drivers and streamline warehouse operations.

Global positioning systems in trucks, for instance, help drivers get where they're going without a hitch, and the latest software can estimate the time between each stop. And improved logistics in warehouses means that items can be loaded faster and in the order in which they are going to be taken off the truck. Beyond that, many companies now offer drivers financial incentives for timely dropoffs.

Williams-Sonoma Inc.'s Pottery Barn recently shrank the window of delivery waiting time to two hours from four thanks to increased efficiency among its delivery vendors. Customers of New York electronics and appliance retailer P.C. Richard & Son can track their delivery via the company's Web site. Some places, such as Gallery Furniture in Houston, even offer same-day delivery, dropping off items past midnight if the customer requests.

-- Sara Schaefer Muñoz

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3. Why are public-address systems frequently inaudible? This isn't just a problem with antiquated speakers in subway stations. Brand-new sound systems in airports and other transportation hubs can also be impossible to hear.

Blame it on simple acoustics. Airports and train platforms generally aren't built with sound in mind. Many feature large, open spaces and high ceilings, which cause sound to echo endlessly. They also use hard materials such as concrete, glass and tile that don't absorb sound well, causing it to reverberate further and become distorted, says Gary McAuliffe, a partner at Pelton Marsh Kinsella, a Dallas firm that advises airports and other locales on acoustics. "No sound system can overcome a bad acoustical environment," he says.

On top of that, many transportation hubs don't implement their sound systems effectively. At airports, for instance, a public-address system at one gate often competes with those at nearby gates, as well as with television broadcasts, broader airport-wide announcements and crowd noise. Sometimes speakers are just aligned and set poorly, pointing at the walls instead of the crowds. Plus, there's human error. Announcers may hold the microphone too close or simply make no sense.

Some airports and transit agencies are working to make their public addresses heard. The sound system at Reagan National Airport in Arlington County, Va., for instance, has ambient-noise sensors, so announcement volume is adjusted based on crowd noise. (New York's subway system has a similar feature in its newer cars.) The airport also has sound-absorbing material around the skylights, and speakers are directed toward the floor space, rather than the walls, in ticketing and other areas.

Among the other sound-system features being installed at hubs, announcements are queued up in order of priority, so you're not bombarded with multiple announcements from different speakers at the same time. Some hubs use digitized public-address systems with recorded announcements that are clearer than regular voices. Some even use visual displays instead of, or along with, audio announcements.

-- Jennifer Saranow

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4. Why can't you buy a nonproprietary cellphone and use it with any carrier, the way you can do with a land line?

Cellphone companies usually lock the devices for a couple of reasons. For one, they want you to stick to your contract. The carriers heavily subsidize the cost of the phone, so they want to make sure they're repaid in the form of service revenue. They also want to make sure they recoup the cost of testing the cellphones and applications.

Then there's compatibility. Companies optimize cellphones and applications to work on their own networks. So a handset designed to work with a single carrier may not work well on another.

To be sure, you can buy a nonproprietary cellphone, but it's not very easy or convenient to use, says John Jackson, formerly an analyst at Boston-based Yankee Group and now vice president of consulting services at M:Metrics Inc. He says Nokia Corp., for example, has opened a store in Chicago and will open another in New York that will sell customers an "unlocked" GSM phone -- the standard used by Cingular and T-Mobile in the U.S.

Here's how you make it work. Let's say you have a two-year contract with Cingular or T-Mobile, and you received a phone for about $50 in the deal. You can pop out the SIM card from that phone -- a device that lets your phone get on your carrier's network -- and plug it into a fancier model you've purchased from the Nokia store. So you've upgraded your phone, but your current contract still applies.

Mr. Jackson says he expects carriers will experiment a bit with unlocked phones, but not much. The current system, he says, has been critical to ensuring customer satisfaction and delivering optimized voice and data services. "I expect that we'll see pockets of enlightenment, but for now, there's no reason to think that nonproprietary phones will become a mainstream component of the U.S. cellular landscape," says Mr. Jackson.

-- Sarmad Ali

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5. How come banks immediately take money out of your account for debit- card transactions, but when it comes to depositing money it can take as long as five days for a check to clear and be posted to your account?

While a debit is frequently an online transaction, "the process of depositing a check is typically not an online transaction," says Fritz Elmendorf of the Consumer Bankers Association, a trade group based in Arlington, Va. "For the most part, the paper check is physically carried back to the bank of origination." And that takes time.

Also, your bank may be able to, say, take a photo of every check it receives and email it to the bank of origin for clearing. But that bank may not have the ability to receive and open the image.

Beyond that, banks take a long time "because they can," says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a watchdog group in Washington. The time frame for clearing checks is covered under a 1987 law called the Expedited Funds Availability Act. Banks typically have two business days to clear local checks and five business days to clear nonlocal checks. (But there are exceptions to the rules; for more information, check out consumersunion.org.)

For the time being, there's no change in sight. A bill introduced in Congress last year by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) to shorten the deposit time has stalled. But there may be some reason for optimism on the technological front, as community banks adopt electronic check image clearing that may accelerate the process. According to a study by the Independent Community Bankers of America, 14% of community banks already clear checks using a digital image of the check, and 58% plan to adopt this method in the next 18 months.

-- Lyneka Little

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6. Why do you have to pay for incoming and out- going minutes on cellphones? Essentially, a cellphone carrier is collecting twice for one call -- from the caller and from the person receiving the call. Shouldn't only outgoing calls cost money?

Look at it this way, telecom experts say: Carriers aren't collecting double the revenue on each call. They're collecting half the cost of the call from each party.

In Europe, the caller pays the entire cost of the call -- but calls can cost twice as much as in the U.S. If U.S. carriers charged only one customer for the call, the average per-minute cost would effectively double. That would bring the average rate per minute in the U.S. to 13 cents rather than the six and a half cents customers have today.

The lower cost is why the monthly minutes of use here are so high, says Marina Amoroso, an analyst at Yankee Group. The average in the U.S. is 800, compared with 300 to 400 in European markets.

However, most carriers offer in-network calling free to their customers, often for an extra $3 or $4 a month. Meanwhile, some carriers have packaged their plans to allow for free incoming calls. This marketing tactic, of course, costs carriers money, but they are hoping it will make them look more attractive and competitive in the market. Sprint Nextel Corp., for example, offers Sprint Free Incoming plans that charge only for outgoing minutes on cellphones. This plan starts at $49.99 for 300 outgoing minutes, plus unlimited incoming minutes and unlimited night and weekend minutes.

-- Sarmad Ali

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7. Why do rental-car companies charge so much money to put gas in the tank, forcing travelers to drive around near airports looking for a normal gas station so they don't get gouged? Also, why is rental-car insurance so confusing? You already have insurance through your credit- card company or your own auto insurer, so why do they try to sell you double coverage?

"You aren't paying for fuel," says Neil Abrams, president of the car-rental consultancy Abrams Consulting Group Inc. in Atlanta. Rental agencies set the price high to deter clients from bringing back vehicles with an empty tank and thus offset the steep cost of refueling.

Rental agencies don't have efficient systems for shipping and storing fuel and gassing up vehicles en masse, says Mr. Abrams. Some companies don't even keep gas on site, so an employee has to drive the car to another location to fill it up. And a rental agency's goal is to get the car out to the next customer as quickly as possible; if the agency has to take time to refuel a car, the lost revenue and labor costs are huge, Mr. Abrams says.

Still, most rental agencies do offer a pre-pay refuel option at the time of rental so the customer can bring back the car empty and pay for a tank of gas at a price close to local market rates. Those few additional cents on each gallon can help to offset labor costs, since the average renter never brings back a tank bone dry, says Michael Kane, president of Vehicle Replacement Consulting Group Inc. in Royal Oak, Mich.

Why do rental agencies push insurance so hard? Largely, it comes down to boosting revenue. Agencies can't really afford to give you a car for $17 a day, says Mr. Kane. The companies need to offer that kind of low rental price to stay competitive, but they then need to make up the lost revenue. So they turn to extras like insurance -- which is highly profitable if most people don't get in accidents.

Rental insurance is confusing for another reason: Lots of people actually do want it, so rental agencies offer lots of different policies to cover their needs. For instance, says Mr. Abrams, many people do in fact come to the counter without their own car insurance and need coverage. Others buy the protection so they can minimize the hassle of dealing with their insurance company or the car-rental company if they're involved in an accident, says Richard Broome, a spokesman for Hertz Corp.

Mr. Abrams says many of the companies he works with are focusing on training employees to explain insurance options more clearly. But he recommends knowing exactly how you are covered by your own car insurance or credit card when you arrive at the counter, and buy accordingly. "Buyer beware," he says.

-- Sarah Nassauer

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8. If companies are allowed to sell personal information about you to third-party marketers, even without your consent, why can't you just sell your own information directly to marketers?

It's a matter of scale. Marketers are hungry for aggregate data on hundreds of thousands -- or millions -- of customers which they slice and dice to create subscriber mailing lists or use to conduct market research. While hunting for big trends or attempting to reach a massive population -- such as everyone who just graduated from high school or who recently finalized a mortgage -- one person's personal information is useless, and companies won't pay for it.

Instead, marketers turn to middlemen, whose activities are largely invisible to the consumer. Marketers purchase the records from big database companies like ChoicePoint Inc. or Acxiom Corp., which get their data from public records, credit bureaus or other companies consumers do business with.

While individuals can't profit from brokering their own information, they sometimes have control over the degree to which others can. Financial-services companies, for instance, are required by law to allow customers to opt out of having nonpublic personal information -- which could include their Social Security number and income -- shared with nonaffiliated third parties. Many businesses, particularly online businesses that require registration, allow their customers to specify the types of information they don't want shared with partners and affiliates, including marketers.

Consumers can also give businesses a "disposable" email address, which forwards to a main address and can be disabled if it starts sending spam. You can obtain such email addresses through a broad range of spam-filtering companies and leading email services like Yahoo.

-- Jessica E. Vascellaro

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9. Why is mobile directory assistance so unreliable? It seems that when you call from your cellphone, they can never find the number you need.

Two big reasons. First, most cellphone companies outsource directory assistance to different companies. The accuracy of the answer you get is limited by the accuracy of the database the company uses for its lookups. And these can vary dramatically. Michael King, an analyst at Gartner Inc., suggests there should be a single directory that all the companies use.

Second, directory assistance may be hampered by the poor quality of cellphone connections. There's often a lot of static and drops, which means the operator may end up guessing what listing you want.

-- Sarmad Ali

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10. Why are items in hotel minibars so expensive? Do candy bars and bottles of water really have to cost $5? While we're at it, why do cheap and midprice hotels often provide wireless access free, while expensive hotels charge for it?

Hotels price minibar goodies competitively with other items within the hotel, not with a convenience store down the road. So if a Coke is $8 at the hotel lounge, it will be close to that price in the minibar.

Moreover, the traditional minibar carries high overhead. An employee must check what has been removed every day and refill accordingly. And many people take items and then try to avoid paying -- by, say, replacing a snack with a similar item from a store -- which boosts the cost for everyone else.

The high prices are driving the minibar out of midprice hotels; most budget-minded travelers just won't pay $7 for a bag of peanuts anymore. The service is usually replaced by a small store near the front desk or enhanced vending machines. But high-end hotels are keeping minibars, which are seen as a premium service that clients are willing to shell out for. "It's like paying $28 for a steak that cost the restaurant $10," says Richard Williams, president of HVS International Food & Beverage Services, an industry consultancy in New York.

As for Wi-Fi: Midprice hotels are usually in newer buildings than expensive hotels, so they can be wired for Internet from the start. This means start-up money can be set aside for the project, while existing hotels have to raise the capital. And it costs less to incorporate wiring into a new building than to retrofit an old one.

In addition, most business travelers -- the primary Wi-Fi users -- stay in midprice hotels, so operators can justify the cost with room sales. More-expensive hotels rent fewer rooms to business travelers, but host more business conferences, so Wi-Fi users will generate only as much revenue as they spend while visiting the hotel for the conference -- maybe a cup of coffee.

But competition is the defining element. The midprice-hotel market in North America is highly competitive. If one hotel chain offers free Wi-Fi, everyone else has to, says Mr. Williams. High-end hotels aren't feeling the pressure just yet, but Mr. Williams predicts it is on the way as more people get used to free Wi-Fi in cafes and other public places.

Corrections & Amplifications:

Abrams Consulting Group Inc. is in Purchase, N.Y. This article incorrectly said the firm is based in Atlanta.

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