I finally got a reply to my last request to downgrade my PayPal account. This time it was from Michelle, but I’m still not exactly sure she’s real:

Dear Ray Dotson,

Hello my name is Michelle, I will be happy to assist you with your question
regarding downgrading your account.

We appreciate that you have tried our PayPal Business/Premier account. Per
your request, your PayPal account has been downgraded from a
Business/Premier to a Personal account. Please note that with a Personal
account…

The bottom line, though, is that they did actually downgrade this account for me. For that I’m grateful, but it was a strange experience. Like telephone customer service and sales people, I’m pretty sure they use a cut and paste type script. It’s actually probably just a form that they fill out with pre-written text.

I’ll bet there’s very little opportunity for them to include any free-form text at all. The benefits of this are that customer service reps can get by with very little training and also they don’t have much opportunity to offend their customers or to say/write something that conflicts with company policies. They can also respond much more quickly and get more done in a day’s work.

The downside of this way of doing business is that responses come off as canned and don’t sound as if they’re coming from a real person. They also may not be responding to exactly what the customer needs. I’m guessing we’ll see more and more of this type of customer service in the future and it will get harder to tell if it’s really a human we’re corresponding with.

For now, though, I’m happy that my request was fulfilled. I did receive a request to fill out a survey on Mary’s performance, though. Hmmm…