Adventures in Customer DisService

Spent most of today beating my head against a wall over bad user interfaces online.

Allegheny County Real Estate - their database on properties, assessments and taxes is very good and easy to figure out. But if you want to actually talk to anyone, you're screwed. Went to different phone numbers, and the first real estate number I reached said that the person hadn't been in since April 5 and no you could not leave a message. Really helpful. On a fairly random page, I found the phone number that should've pointed me in the right direction. But no one answered and there was no way to leave a message.

Yes, I know that agencies/companies really don't want to talk to customers. And this would be OK if they had a lot of useful information online that was searchable. These days, they just add "AI" to the end of a search as if they were really using Artificial Intelligence. The two "AIs" I've used recently (Meta AI on Facebook and the one on Ancestry.com that writes your life story based on genealogical facts a few weeks ago) were worse than the existing search and, Meta AI chats endlessly to you. AncestryAI can't figure out the difference between facts and errors. At least you can turn Meta AI off if you want and AncestryAI is optional.

So on the Real Estate questions I had, I had to open an account in order to send them a question. Also documented the many problems I had just getting that far. [[A month later - I still haven't heard back from them.]]

Next issue - my bank. Again, no real search online, but also no claim that AI was available. Found a number labelled CONTACT, used it...and, within a minute, had suspended access to my account because it said I gave them the wrong info. Tried again but pressed 0 right away. Got a nice guy and we chatted about my frustration. It turned out there was another page of phone numbers beyond the CONTACT Robot (and it sounded like he was getting a lot of complaints about that). But he answered my question and removed my suspension from my account. Two problems solved reasonably quickly!

I've used Quicken for nearly 35 years, mostly because I hated mailing out checks and wanted a record of where our money went. It's pretty easy to attach banks and other financial institutions to Quicken...except for the company that holds Jim's 401k. I went to their Website and found info about attaching the 401k account to Quicken. But following their instructions did not work. I called one person and made the mistake of calling the account an IRA account. That took me around in circles for a while with a guy who insisted they knew nothing about Quicken. Tried again and got a person attached to 401ks. He, too, knew nothing about Quicken. I was extremely unhappy and sad I could not hang up on him as definitely as we could back in the old phone days. For this one account only, I have to manually update the amount in the 401k in Quicken every few weeks.

Yes, first world problems. But computers and the online world have been available for over nearly 40 years now. Why can't online customer service improve????