If it weren't for the pseudo-monopoly Uber has on this type of service, or at least the publicity, I don't think people would be so happy. It will forever beat the crap out of Cleveland taxi companies and is convenient if everything is going smoothly but they are unwilling to accommodate anything at all out of ordinary.
I have been a driver for six months and use both Uber and Lyft, this is not a review of the riders but of the Uber company specifically.
I got a call this morning from a rider that I supposedly picked up yesterday looking for a wallet. The rider left a number but no name. I searched my vehicle top to bottom and there was no wallet, so I go to open the message again so I can call the gentleman's personal number and inform him. By happenstance, my phone somehow deleted the message and now I have only the 'Uber Forwarding Number' assigned to the single use of the rider's outbound call.
I have spent half a day looking for a way to contact this rider but the line I drew was cold calling passengers(by finagling the lost item feature which makes it worse than the line I was already refusing to cross).
There is no way to return the call automatically through uber, there is no way to contact uber when the local office is closed(ALL Saturday and ALL Sunday, every week). When the office is open, they want you to show up in person as the number goes to a robot with no live help option. In fact the robot says there's no live help offered at all and suggests trying help.uber.com. Which is very obviously the first place I tried... how would I have found their local phone-number first if I knew anything about the company at all?
I spend the next half-hour scouring the site, again, for any query or help submission option. I find a note at the bottom of the page saying 'DM us on twitter'... seriously? Regardless I didn't get a response in any timeframe that would feasibly help(or at all before this review).
Desperate I start thinking about the dozens of places around the website where it says "NEED HELP?" then doesn't offer any, and I type in the search bar 'Help.' The page doesn't refresh so I try to resubmit a couple of times, eventually a drop-down list shows up(in the fashion of suggested searches... but they're actually links, with no info, to individual content pages, many of which are titled identically) I click the most sensible looking title and wouldn't you know? It's an offer for live chat, gives me opperating hours(which I am well within) and a link.
I click the live-chat link, this also takes multiple attempts, and then the new tab opens. My day is saved.
I immediately recognize the text on the new page as being in Mandarin... I don't speak mandarin and even many of the immigrants I know who do don't read(let alone type in) it. No big deal, they're here to help. If I can get the chat started I can type in English and at least someone will finally know I'm trying to contact the company... and most live-chat companies can see the account you're signed in to(meaning they would be immediately able to forward my chat to the proper locale) though I have my doubts this is the case with uber unless they got a really good contractor to program that function without them having ever thought about it. No such luck. There is no typing table, the button that is designed to look like a 'submit' button isn't active unless you click text at the top of the page. Clicking said text simply opens another line of text and some city names in English... including Hong Kong... none of this is making sense, and none of the new text is clickable. The apparent submit button, having now activated, only takes me back to the previous page. "That's probably what the Mandarin states" I immediately think. I have tried to resolve multiple other things that uber hasn't thought of by contacting them in the past and at least got a working email address... three day response time but at least it existed in the past. Many other things that people would not put up with if they knew there were other options(which there are now.) and now I've wasted hours that I could have been driving trying to figure out the system not only for today but so I know what to do in the future.
If I wait until tomorrow to show up on the east-side or somehow get my phone company to recover the original message, then it will be entirely too late to help this rider with the current situation
Why am I giving only one star when I can only not go out of my way to help someone with something they will be just as equipped to handle without me? I ask in turn
What if I HAD found the wallet? read more
