Customer honeypots

A honeypot is a decoy system. It has been set up just for hackers to discover it and hack it. It has no access to real systems and does not contain any valuable data.

A customer honeypot is a system meant to trap customers that want to contact a company. The company doesnt have any other contact points. There is only the honeypot, but there is no way to get through it. The goal is that the customers give up and blame themselves for it.

Customer honey pots consist of large multilayered menu systems, that let you narrow down an answer you dont need. The menus have a precision high enough for you to think you can get help if you just proceed, and simultaneously low enough for you to think you made the wrong choice along the way, and thus ought to go back and choose differently. The menu systems can be supplied with a chatbot that is just as unhelpful, but without giving you the impression that all options have been exhausted.

The first customer honeypot I was trapped in was on the support pages of Amazon webshops. It worked on me for more time than I want to admit. And so it surely did on many of their other webshop customers.

I dont know if these honeypots are an Amazon invention, but I feel pretty sure they have their roots in the webshop sector. In any case, they were hugely successful, so they spread to many other companies.

The one that I have the hardest time with, is a regional carrier. It has happened multiple times that they claim they could not deliver a packet even though I was home at the time they write they tried. They have even succeeded in loosing packets. If I want to complain, their menu system is of course no help. It points me to their chatbot, which is a particularly sinister version. You have to install their app to chat with it, and not getting any help.

Signal

When you realise that you are in a honeypot, what signal do you realize that the company is sending to you?

A honeypot tells you that the company sees customers as a problem. That is why it implemented a technical fix for it, in the first place. Amazon sees their webshop customers as a problem. The carrier sees the recipients as a problem.

When you, as a "problem", want to send the company a signal, and help them see things differently, I know people that will suggest this: Get hold of the highest ranked manager that you can. Preferrably one that has responsibility for customer service, but otherwise just the one you can get hold of. Send your complaint to that person. If enough customers do this, that manager will make sure that someone else will take care of the complaints. That way the stream of complaints will shape the organization, and create a path to a customer service.

That is naive corporate absolutism, though. Reality is, a CEO for a webshop, that sees there are 0 incoming complaints, knows perfectly well what is going on. Namely that the company has chosen to ignore complaints. If you should succeed in getting hold of a manager, that you can send your complaint to, it will be met with indifference. The manager will not gain any points by taking care of it. The most likely outcome is that you end up in a spam filter.

A company that wont take feedback, is inevitably heading towards its downfall, no matter how succesful it is right now. But it can unfortunately take decades. While you are hoping for it to happen, the best thing you can do is to avoid the company as much as it is possible, and tell others what attitude it has towards its customers.