As a consumer, I hate having to call phone support. Even if they answer instantly and are helpful, it’s still 30x slower than doing what I want in the app or website.
I avoid all companies which make me call up or otherwise engage in slow communication to get things done.
Getting apps or websites right for the most amount of people most of the time is an incredible UX challenge. It’s unequivocally better to have employed experts with higher order tools (admin dashboards, etc) do a lot of these tasks.
Larger companies can afford the challenge and actually benefit on both ends: quick customer service via digital interface and decreased pressure on their employed humans (so they start spending less on them…).
But many businesses really aren’t at that scale. And you bet someone has built the SaaS platform for them that 1) insists they actually are that big and here’s the solution they need and 2) actually sucks more as time goes on and requirements are glommed onto it.
Problem is that having customer support is used as an excuse to not fix things. Companies leave obvious deficiencies in because customers can always contact support to work around it.
Having minimal support forces the company to ensure the app is fully capable.
It seems like outsourcing phone support to overseas call centers is a race to the bottom: if you answer calls onshore, your higher costs inhibit your ability to compete on price, so eventually every company (at least, those that offer any nominal "phone support" to begin with) is forced to capitulate (outsource phone support overseas).
Good for some who know how to navigate self help setups. Opens up lower cost options.
For example cheap cell phone plans exist because of mostly self service, order sim online and setup online with no physical store and only mediocre phone support.
Same with low cost airlines.
Bad for those who have trouble navigating things online, often the elderly.
Or the young. I spend so much time helping my teenagers and early 20 somethings with online tasks. They know how to use a few select websites/apps, but outside of that they are pretty much clueless about computers (despite my efforts to educate them).
That is another infuriating part of phone menus though. I am a busy person so I only resort to calling after exhausting online options. Then I have to listen to a bunch of menus and reminders about how I can do standard stuff like check my balance online. And I have to kind of “hack” my way to a real person who has the power to actually do something.
Self-service is a scam, but it takes reaching certain age to notice it. It's basically the business outsourcing its costs to you. It's tolerable when you're young and have no money, but tons of free time. It's really frustrating when you're a little bit older - when you have some disposable income but are severely time-constrained.
One thing a lot of companies are moving to is asynchronous service - where you do an online/text chat, but sometimes that’s just as aggravating.
However some companies do it well - recently had to do a warranty exchange with Apple - after I couldn’t find anything useful in their warranty webpage, I hit their Support app with the question (which essentially initiates a chat via Messages)
Within minutes I had a response, where a voice callback was scheduled (within about 10 mins since I was available), then onto an immediate escalation (by them, not me) to further verify/qualify the defect, to eventual resolution, all within 30 mins (which included me fumbling a bit to get pictures while the agent waited).
Overall I was very satisfied with the overall process, as I didn’t have to sit and wait on hold at all to start addressing my issue.
Apple can do this because they have absolute mountains of cash and users willing to pay extra for the experience and reputation. Your average business can’t do this.
Unlikely. Phone support was one of those things that was driving people insane before. Remember jokes about hold music, foreign accents and phone menus?
I personally can't stand phone support. It always takes way longer than it needs to, and I can't do anything else during it. Just firing off an email is far more efficient. Easier to do after office hours too.
the problem with menu based systems is that they often don't have a leaf for problems that they don't what to know about. I immediately try to find any way to escape a phone tree for all but the simplest things, and even then...
I find that using phone support and being genuinely nice to the other person on the line is a nice way to sometimes get benefits you don't expect, like airplane upgrades...
I purchased a used ipad and the only way to get the thing turned on was to talk to a customer support agent, who had to basically manually flip a database column for me.
Besides these days you can either set a callback, or, just plain do work while you're on hold.
Sometimes I play the game of being on hold with two vendors at the same time and hope they don't simultaneously pick up at the same time. It usually works out.
I have to do this when calling CVS. Our local CVS does not answer their phone if there’s literally anything else going on at the pharmacy. But I found that if I call from 2 phones, they will eventually pick up (after literally between 15 and 45 minutes of not answering). It’s pretty infuriating. I avoid using them, but every now and then my mail order pharmacy runs out of something, and I have to go back to using CVS for a month or two.
Physical pharmacies in general have also gone way down hill in terms of customer service. I’ve literally gone into the store and stood at the counter for like 10 minutes waiting for someone to even acknowledge my existence. It’s not that they don’t see me, they just don’t care. They are overworked, so I kind of understand not being responsive, but a simple, “We’ll be with you in a few minutes,” would be nice. It’s pretty dehumanizing to stand there being ignored. And if you speak up, they usually snap at you, and then are rude when they do get around to helping you.
My story about being nice: Once sent in a complaint that wasn't really a complaint, more of an FYI that one of their things was broken.
Lo and behold, a few months later, I get an apologetic email with a $300 credit. It was obvious they didn't even read my complaint, and therefore won't fix it, but I'll take the $300.
And no, they didn't cause me anywhere near $300 in harm by any measure.
It’s because emails continue to queue up and it’s impossible to answer them all. While people will actively avoid calling if at all possible and will drop off if it’s not important.
Sounds like shithole company behavior at its finest, who cares about responding to support queries after all? Cheaper to not backfill vacant support positions than engage with actually supporting your products.
Because you’ll find that support requests have various levels of importance. From “I’d like to change my account/billing” down to “something weird happened, can you explain this”, to “can you show me how to use this feature”.
It would cost a fortune to pay support and developers to launch a full investigation every time something funny happens. So having slow support encourages users to only call if it’s reproducible and a real problem.
Every company has finite time to give to support even if they heavily invest in it and people continually demonstrate how bad they are at basically everything. People treat emails to people they deem less important than them as asynchronous to be dealt with whenever and emails TO such folks as synchronous to be dealt with immediately. If not given immediate response they are liable to forget about it until its convenient for them to deal with it again and if the response is again not immediate they will forget about it again.
People's initial problem statement may be insufficient to even establish identity let alone nature of problem and solution. This is usually established by repeated follow up questions sometimes repeating questions to get the actual answer because it turns out they had no idea about the actual answer or indeed don't know what words mean.
Due to both of the above even simple issues are likely to become 12 step marathons with the associated cost of context switching to their problem 12 times. Worse due to the low cost of initiating an exchange they are likely to do so even when they could have resolved the issue in 10 seconds with google or even turning their head into the on position.
Your suggestion would turn a well funded support center into a team of professional shit shovelers trying to clean the Aegean stables with teaspoons.
An actual call queue intentionally and constantly drops matters too unimportant to invest 5-10 minutes in resolving and makes people do the whole shebang in one go by having them answer the follow up questions now.
The problem is that it's been replaced with either nothing or a help page that doesn't solve your problem.
I recently had a company email me saying:
> In this case, your review of___ has been flagged because we couldn’t verify its authenticity, and on that basis we’ve removed your review from our platform.
> While we’re confident that this is the right call, we appreciate that sometimes we get it wrong. If you think there’s been a mistake here, please do let us know by replying to this email and a member of our Content Integrity Team will review this decision with you.
What happens when you reply to that email as instructed?
> Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, this email address is not monitored and this is an automated reply.
Instead they direct you to some long ass form on their website asking about the URL of the review I'm contacting them about, which I have no idea (it was a response to a "how was your customer service experience, please rate us), and I'm not going to spend my time trying to find where it was. The whole experience was by email, I don't know if it even has a URL, but it's a required field on the form.
The original email thread that they told me to reply to should have all the information they need, but instead of even generating a link that pre-fills it into the contact form, they just throw all the context away and say "go to our website and fill out the form" because my time is worth nothing to them.
The extra irony is that I would complain to them about their service doing this, but there's no way to contact anyone useful with feedback.
Honestly I assume it's all on purpose because if I bothered to fill out the form it would cost them 5 minutes of someone's time to have them review it.
I was trying not to name names because it's not really the point of the broader discussion, but on second thought I wasted enough of my time trying to post a review and complain about their stupid email system that I don't really care, it's Trustpilot.
I take customer phone calls at my job so not a lot of sympathy for the companies trying to optimize helpfulness out of existence.
A friend of mine recently had an issue with PayPal and couldn't find a way through the support robots.
I think they've entirely outsourced their first line support to taxpayers via the CFPB and have no process to fix anything without you filing a complaint against them to get the ball rolling.
I have a problem with one of my stock broker accounts-it has the wrong address on it. It is my old address I lived at years ago, before I opened this particular account-I never set it, but I think it somehow got stuck deep in their computer systems from one of my other accounts and got applied to this new account when I opened it. Anyway, go to the website, I see the wrong address - yet click the “edit” button to change it, and the edit screen has the right one, and won’t let me change it to the right one because it is already set.
I call up the call centre - agent says he can see the same problem but he doesn’t have access to do anything about it. He told me to print out a paper change of address form to change my address from my current address to my current address, sign it, scan it (he emphasised it had to be signed pen to paper, and the form even says that), and email it in. I’m hoping that fixes it.
From what I understand of the rules, you have to give the provider a reasonable opportunity to fix things. And then you have to use their own complaints process. And then, if that isn’t getting anywhere in a reasonable timeframe, then you can complain to the regulator. If you file a complaint with the regulator prematurely, it just gets referred back to the provider. I hope it gets fixed before I need to go down that path. I only just sent the email a couple of days ago, I’ll give them a few more days then try calling them again.
Part of the problem seems to be - I have multiple accounts with the one broker (my domestic stock account, trust accounts for my kids, a separate account for foreign stock), and they maintain separate addresses for each account, and they can get out of synch. And the broker is owned by a bank, and I have products with the bank, and the bank also has separate addresses for each product, plus the bank and the broker’s systems are kind of half-integrated/half-not in an opaque way which contributes to this kind of problem. And the bank also owns an insurance company, and I have a policy with that insurance company, and they’ve got the same half-integrated/half-not thing going on with their insurance company too.
I love it when disliked utilities let me send in my complaints/changes/payments by snail mail. I know it costs them so much more to process, and that alone gives me comfort.
> Remember jokes about hold music, foreign accents and phone menus?
the only reason those jokes are not current is that either the phone line is now gone, or because you don't call it, knowing in advance that it's torture. The phone menu and tiered human support is worse now than it's ever been. ime the foreign accent problem is a little better, but i also rarely call so ymmv
Rising wages for more productive forms of work both pulls away workers from working in phone support - and increases its demand by giving everyone else more money to spend.
I would say a high amount of increased productivity in phone support is by using cheaper labor in developing countries.
So long as the person in the other country is capable of solving issues and can communicate clearly it doesn’t bother me. I’ve had many good experiences with American Express’ outsourced customer service. American Express seemed to have the nicer office buildings around Delhi so I presume they are recruiting really good candidates
https://www.sitejabber.com/ might be such a place. I left one review there a few months ago. I doubt it will gain network effect critical mass, and if it does, the companies being reviewed will almost certainly subvert it. Sigh.
Support chat is pretty terrible, but poor quality phone support isn‘t that great either, in my view. (High-quality phone support does exist, but is unfortunately increasingly rare.)
I wish email support was more of a thing in the US. Not chat, not a web-only form or ticketing system, just plain old email (on the frontend):
It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats are deeply disturbing to me), it works on a bad internet connection, it works asynchronously.
In the EU, having a human-attended support email address has recently been made a legal requirement, and I‘ve had great experiences with it (if only because in some companies it seems to immediately get you to a second level support due to the relatively low volume compared to the "official"/advertised means of contact).
For me, it's been mostly nightmares. I will say though that chat via a third-party messenger (e.g. WhatsApp, iMessage etc.) is significantly less frustrating than in-app or web chat, which frequently times out ("please respond within 30 seconds or we will consider your issue resolved" after having me wait for 15 minutes for an agent etc).
Do you mean that the EU mandates a generic email address (like ‘support@mycompany.com’) as distinct from whatever more personalised support address(es) they may push more publicly?
Do you have a link to the regulation? I've not been able to find anything.
Hm, on second thought this might be a German regulation. German imprints definitely do need to contain a monitored email address (which somewhat hilariously is often imprint@company.com or impressum@company.com).
This used to be the only way of reaching my phone operator for a while (they had chat support, as well as a phone number, but ironically that one would only text-to-speech read out "helpful" FAQ articles and then hang up, only forwarding callers to a support agent if they know the secret incantation producing zero FAQ hits).
I hate email support. If I’m trying to call, it means I have a problem that needs addressing right now. Email is basically a black hole. You never know when someone will respond, if ever.
> It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats are deeply disturbing to me), it works on a bad internet connection, it works asynchronously.
This one is frustrating to me as well. After telling the chatbot about your problem and waiting 20 minutes to be connected with a real person, only to have them open with "Hi! How are you today?" and then pause the script for a response is incredibly grating.
They also don't seem to be using any sort of functioning ticketing system or even hot-transfer, because being forced to re-explain the issue 3+ times to different reps on the same chat seems just as common as it was in the phone days.
On top of messages being non-persistent, it seems that chat representatives take a minimum of five minutes per reply. It’s unclear if they’re (1) helping other people simultaneously (2) performing a slow corporate policy (3) multitasking.
It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.
It's very clear that they're assisting multiple people. It would be an incredible waste otherwise, but unfortunately these agencies likely stretch their support agents far too thin.
Oh,they very much are helping multiple people at once.
I worked at a call center with a T-Mobile LOB, at which I had several friends working in their online chat dept.
Support reps and sales reps alike were both required to be on at least 7 open chat windows or face termination.
They could be shadowed at any time by an ops agent, who would ding them for not pasting proper replies (they frowned heavily upon real interactions- going 'off-script'), or having less than the 7 required chat windows.
If these companies could they would nix phone agents entirely, and this is why- one agent becomes 7.
I’ve had a very different experience with email support. It is often clear from the reply that the person didn’t even read my email. I’ll often say, “I’ve already tried x as described in your online help and it gave me the following error: <copy/pasted text of the exact error message>.” Then I’ll get a reply, “You need to try x.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve responded to email customer support with “Did you even read what I wrote? As I said, I already tried that and it did not work.” It’s incredibly frustrating because it just feels like a delaying tactic, and you wait, sometimes another 24 hours (or more), before you get to the actual answer (if it comes at all).
I think what this says is that most customer support is just awful all around.
Not out of the blue. We ran a call center and even 10 years ago, the writing was on the wall for phone support. Average time to resolution for comparable issues was 3x longer over the phone, was overwhelmingly popular for older generations (read: very unpopular for millennials), and the call infrastructure was a constant misery. It’s no surprise that businesses are winding it down because on the other side, chat and email are so much easier from the business’s perspective.
On a related note, please stop telling me about the website when I call for customer support. It's 2023, people know that websites exist. If I could do it on the website, I wouldn't be calling you.
There is a split between "could" and "will" between these two points but more importantly: if telling people they could do it on the website meaningfully worked it wouldn't need to be said anymore by now.
Alternatively, it may continue to be said because it helps. Every day, new people are born, new people age into the position of calling support, and new people need to be reminded that they have the ability to help themselves.
In the near future it will all be over discord, slack,etc... i have an idea about doing site refigistrations over matrix, bridged to all kinds of other chat platforms.
A&A (https://www.aa.net.uk/) are a UK ISP who market themselves towards technical users. It costs a small premium compared to other ISPs, but knowing that my support call was going straight to one of their engineers (and being given access to most of the same diagnostic tools that the engineer would have anyway) was always a treat. They make a point about offering any means of communication a customer prefers including, apparently, World of Warcraft in-game chat.
It felt like that one xkcd about the customer support backdoor[0] made true, and I'm surprised I've not seen any similar offerings for anything else.
Ever tried to get someone on the phone at UPS? It's impossible. If you have a problem in store, with a driver, or anything, it's impossible to get a live human being through the UPS phone number. I googled, I tried every trick, but the system assertively refuses to grant you the privilege of speaking with a human.
I truly believe that most major companies do not want their customers to talk to an individual, and use tactics to dissuade customers from calling and frustrate those who do.
> I truly believe that most major companies do not want their customers to talk to an individual, and use tactics to dissuade customers from calling and frustrate those who do.
Not in every country. In Japan, most companies have a responsive help line.
This has some serious consequences. My wife had to go on short term disability and the process was handled by a third party company. Man. After 2 years of trying, we still have only 50% of what we are owed, have paid taxes on 100% of the benefits and the other 50% has been cashed out by someone else according to the company.
Some of the weeks where she was at her worst and the most vulnerable, she spent entire days just trying to reach to customer support. We’ve spent more hours than what the money was worth. It is appalling that corporations can get away with this.
Engage with a lawyer. If you work for a mid-size or large firm that gives a hoot about their employees, they will have a disability law firm on retainer for their employees and spouses to use as a privilege.
Having seen said law firms in action, I have never seen such an expedient processing of disability claims by private insurers and Social Security.
For me the worst is you talk to someone at a company, be it phone or support chat, and it becomes clear the person wants to help but the policies of the company prevent their customer support people from doing anything meaningful. The support person has no power, may not even be employed by the company in question, etc.
Then you get the salt in the wound customer satisfaction survey of "Did X resolve your issue today?", "Was X polite to you?", etc. If you score the person low you can cost them the job. If you score the high, the company celebrates high customer satisfaction.
You almost never see the question "Did the company put our support person in a position to help you successfully?"
The most blatant offender I ran into recently was Verizon has made a number of things like updating your autopay method app/website only. You can call Verizon customer support and talk to a human and all they can do is tell you they literally cannot take your credit card and you need the app. Because someone at Verizon decided their humans can take one time payments but not update autopay.
The baby bells, especially Verizon lean heavily on automation and self serve tooling, its how they keep shedding employees year after year despite increasing revenue.
Verizon on the Wireless side has so little bloat compared to AT&T from what I saw.
I had this exact issue with at&t. They weren't honoring a promotion that we signed up for. I talked to the support people and they verbally told me that they agreed with my assessment of the situation. It took taking at&t to small claims court to reach someone with any ability to help me. The situation was quickly resolved after they received the summons to court.
In my not so humble opinion the bigger problem is the inherent complexity and opacity of billing. If buying your communication and entertainment services were similar in complexity to buying your groceries few people would have issues to resolve. If you want apples and beans the price is apples + beans and nobody pays 15c an Apple today and $7 an apple next month.
The current model makes money due to lack of options and attrition where fewer people are willing to threaten to switch the 4th time or jump ship every year. Some pay more than reasonable others jump through hoops like trained seals. It's not the best model for anyone.
Support dollars are better spent on actual problems instead of such self inflicted wounds as billing complexity.
UPS phone support might as well be a chat bot for all they are allowed to do.
Also Rescheduling a package is is a nightmare. Its like they intentionally tried to make the delivery estimates and updates as unhelpful and bad as possible to mess with you.
Not more crazy than giving it at the restaurant or store. They can easily memorize or take a picture the last secret digits and the system has written down the rest.
The whole system builds on trust and humans are pretty trustworthy. Bots are much less trustworthy, since untrustworthy humans can leverage bots or spam to contact millions of people each.
> Not more crazy than giving it at the restaurant or store
But why would you let your card leave your sight? I don’t understand.
The waiter brings over a payment terminal or you go over to it, then you tap or insert your card. When could they take a picture? How would they even use the details without your PIN number? The whole system isn’t built on trust because that would be stupid when it comes to money.
Or are you saying the trust element is that they are not using a terminal that somehow clones your card and pin?
That's the status quo for how those transactions work in the US.
> When could they take a picture, how could they even use the details without our PIN, the whole system isn't buit with trust because that woudl be stupid when it comes to money
The average person with no training can remember 8 uniformly random digits, and an hour of training bumps that up to 20 -- more than enough to recall a credit card and its PIN, even ignoring the immense amount of redundant information in how those are constructed. Plus nearly invisible video feeds are a reality. Plus pass-through broken credit card capture systems are a cheap reality, and one that claims untold billions of dollars at US gas stations, and many multiples of that amount at european ATMs. Any system that depends on the secrecy of those digits is fundamentally broken, and our payment system does, so it's fundamentally broken. The only reason it doesn't appear that way is that most people don't try to exploit it, and most of the rest leave enough breadcrumbs that after enough 10s of millions of fraud they can be arrested. The remaining few percent of fraud is baked into the prices you see and the taxes you pay.
I’d rather have online support than phone support.
I tried to reach out to Kia recently. In my case, I don’t want to call. I explained, in writing, using their online portal. They didn’t even respond. Strait-up ghosted me. Damn.
I am in Canada since early 90s and my impression that customer support and warranty just steadily degenerate. Maybe it is accelerating today but it is not something that had started recently. And yes it drives me up the wall sometime.
Not just phone support. Support, period. It feels like Covid broke things and nothing has fully recovered. Take for example the Subway app. It has no built-in support. You can't report issues with an order or the fact it never even showed up. I used their mail forms and even tried to get their attention on twitter. I got one auto response once from a form (but with a woman's name like it was a real response) and never heard back about anything.
Just one of many many many things I find are just "missing" nowadays.
The Chipotle and Wendy's apps and websites have nearly the same issue, and Chipotle won't let you even call your local store anymore, it just goes to a useless AI Chatbot.
Yeah! I tried to call Chipotle to tweak an order I placed and was met with the fact they don't have the store answer anymore and they somehow sell it as a benefit to me that their workers aren't distracted by that.
It makes sense for chipotle to not answer the phone, they make like 60% of takeaway orders wrong somehow and would rather you just ask for a replacement for their app, who will give you a coupon code for one immediately ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of my employers basically determined that clients below ~5000 ARR are not worth serving. Their issues cannot be forwarded to anything above front line support. Doesn't matter how stuck they are or what sales promised.
Just skim off the cream that don't need help and dump the rest.
Tell the employer to close up shop, because they are too incompetent to design a business model that involves serving all customers, and doing any less is just fraud :shrug:
Not just private industry. Seattle PD literally doesn't pick their phones up. Do a Google search for "seattle pd non emergency" and you'll see that everyone in the city is having this problem. Sometimes they just turn off the phone tree entirely. And no, don't talk about "defunding" - Seattle PD is lavishly funded. They just like to throw temper tantrums when they're held accountable.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadI avoid all companies which make me call up or otherwise engage in slow communication to get things done.
Larger companies can afford the challenge and actually benefit on both ends: quick customer service via digital interface and decreased pressure on their employed humans (so they start spending less on them…).
But many businesses really aren’t at that scale. And you bet someone has built the SaaS platform for them that 1) insists they actually are that big and here’s the solution they need and 2) actually sucks more as time goes on and requirements are glommed onto it.
Having minimal support forces the company to ensure the app is fully capable.
Bad for those who have trouble navigating things online, often the elderly.
However some companies do it well - recently had to do a warranty exchange with Apple - after I couldn’t find anything useful in their warranty webpage, I hit their Support app with the question (which essentially initiates a chat via Messages)
Within minutes I had a response, where a voice callback was scheduled (within about 10 mins since I was available), then onto an immediate escalation (by them, not me) to further verify/qualify the defect, to eventual resolution, all within 30 mins (which included me fumbling a bit to get pictures while the agent waited).
Overall I was very satisfied with the overall process, as I didn’t have to sit and wait on hold at all to start addressing my issue.
I personally can't stand phone support. It always takes way longer than it needs to, and I can't do anything else during it. Just firing off an email is far more efficient. Easier to do after office hours too.
I purchased a used ipad and the only way to get the thing turned on was to talk to a customer support agent, who had to basically manually flip a database column for me.
Besides these days you can either set a callback, or, just plain do work while you're on hold.
Physical pharmacies in general have also gone way down hill in terms of customer service. I’ve literally gone into the store and stood at the counter for like 10 minutes waiting for someone to even acknowledge my existence. It’s not that they don’t see me, they just don’t care. They are overworked, so I kind of understand not being responsive, but a simple, “We’ll be with you in a few minutes,” would be nice. It’s pretty dehumanizing to stand there being ignored. And if you speak up, they usually snap at you, and then are rude when they do get around to helping you.
Lo and behold, a few months later, I get an apologetic email with a $300 credit. It was obvious they didn't even read my complaint, and therefore won't fix it, but I'll take the $300.
And no, they didn't cause me anywhere near $300 in harm by any measure.
A lot of companies basically deny you service unless you call.
It would cost a fortune to pay support and developers to launch a full investigation every time something funny happens. So having slow support encourages users to only call if it’s reproducible and a real problem.
People's initial problem statement may be insufficient to even establish identity let alone nature of problem and solution. This is usually established by repeated follow up questions sometimes repeating questions to get the actual answer because it turns out they had no idea about the actual answer or indeed don't know what words mean.
Due to both of the above even simple issues are likely to become 12 step marathons with the associated cost of context switching to their problem 12 times. Worse due to the low cost of initiating an exchange they are likely to do so even when they could have resolved the issue in 10 seconds with google or even turning their head into the on position.
Your suggestion would turn a well funded support center into a team of professional shit shovelers trying to clean the Aegean stables with teaspoons.
An actual call queue intentionally and constantly drops matters too unimportant to invest 5-10 minutes in resolving and makes people do the whole shebang in one go by having them answer the follow up questions now.
I recently had a company email me saying:
> In this case, your review of___ has been flagged because we couldn’t verify its authenticity, and on that basis we’ve removed your review from our platform.
> While we’re confident that this is the right call, we appreciate that sometimes we get it wrong. If you think there’s been a mistake here, please do let us know by replying to this email and a member of our Content Integrity Team will review this decision with you.
What happens when you reply to that email as instructed?
> Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, this email address is not monitored and this is an automated reply.
Instead they direct you to some long ass form on their website asking about the URL of the review I'm contacting them about, which I have no idea (it was a response to a "how was your customer service experience, please rate us), and I'm not going to spend my time trying to find where it was. The whole experience was by email, I don't know if it even has a URL, but it's a required field on the form.
The original email thread that they told me to reply to should have all the information they need, but instead of even generating a link that pre-fills it into the contact form, they just throw all the context away and say "go to our website and fill out the form" because my time is worth nothing to them.
The extra irony is that I would complain to them about their service doing this, but there's no way to contact anyone useful with feedback.
Honestly I assume it's all on purpose because if I bothered to fill out the form it would cost them 5 minutes of someone's time to have them review it.
I take customer phone calls at my job so not a lot of sympathy for the companies trying to optimize helpfulness out of existence.
I think they've entirely outsourced their first line support to taxpayers via the CFPB and have no process to fix anything without you filing a complaint against them to get the ball rolling.
I call up the call centre - agent says he can see the same problem but he doesn’t have access to do anything about it. He told me to print out a paper change of address form to change my address from my current address to my current address, sign it, scan it (he emphasised it had to be signed pen to paper, and the form even says that), and email it in. I’m hoping that fixes it.
Part of the problem seems to be - I have multiple accounts with the one broker (my domestic stock account, trust accounts for my kids, a separate account for foreign stock), and they maintain separate addresses for each account, and they can get out of synch. And the broker is owned by a bank, and I have products with the bank, and the bank also has separate addresses for each product, plus the bank and the broker’s systems are kind of half-integrated/half-not in an opaque way which contributes to this kind of problem. And the bank also owns an insurance company, and I have a policy with that insurance company, and they’ve got the same half-integrated/half-not thing going on with their insurance company too.
(Of course, I'd hate it if this was by force)
the only reason those jokes are not current is that either the phone line is now gone, or because you don't call it, knowing in advance that it's torture. The phone menu and tiered human support is worse now than it's ever been. ime the foreign accent problem is a little better, but i also rarely call so ymmv
Rising wages for more productive forms of work both pulls away workers from working in phone support - and increases its demand by giving everyone else more money to spend.
I would say a high amount of increased productivity in phone support is by using cheaper labor in developing countries.
I wish email support was more of a thing in the US. Not chat, not a web-only form or ticketing system, just plain old email (on the frontend):
It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats are deeply disturbing to me), it works on a bad internet connection, it works asynchronously.
In the EU, having a human-attended support email address has recently been made a legal requirement, and I‘ve had great experiences with it (if only because in some companies it seems to immediately get you to a second level support due to the relatively low volume compared to the "official"/advertised means of contact).
Do you have a link to the regulation? I've not been able to find anything.
This used to be the only way of reaching my phone operator for a while (they had chat support, as well as a phone number, but ironically that one would only text-to-speech read out "helpful" FAQ articles and then hang up, only forwarding callers to a support agent if they know the secret incantation producing zero FAQ hits).
This one is frustrating to me as well. After telling the chatbot about your problem and waiting 20 minutes to be connected with a real person, only to have them open with "Hi! How are you today?" and then pause the script for a response is incredibly grating.
They also don't seem to be using any sort of functioning ticketing system or even hot-transfer, because being forced to re-explain the issue 3+ times to different reps on the same chat seems just as common as it was in the phone days.
It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.
I worked at a call center with a T-Mobile LOB, at which I had several friends working in their online chat dept.
Support reps and sales reps alike were both required to be on at least 7 open chat windows or face termination.
They could be shadowed at any time by an ops agent, who would ding them for not pasting proper replies (they frowned heavily upon real interactions- going 'off-script'), or having less than the 7 required chat windows.
If these companies could they would nix phone agents entirely, and this is why- one agent becomes 7.
Customer satisfaction? What even is that?
I think what this says is that most customer support is just awful all around.
Really! I tried several companies to fill taxes for LLC (foreign owned)(https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/11kkkn2/best...) and good luck finding a way to use email.
Chat is so bad for support of first issues!
I've literally resorted to sending paper mail multiple times.
>It leaves a paper trail
I suspect many companies consider that a bug, not a feature.
You might not. Most of my relatives over 40 will though. At my company it is incredibly common for a support ticket to be answered in the FAQ.
Still rooting for fax support though.
Hopefully it will bring low wait times, knowledgeable "representatives", and fast escalation.
It felt like that one xkcd about the customer support backdoor[0] made true, and I'm surprised I've not seen any similar offerings for anything else.
[0] https://xkcd.com/806/
I truly believe that most major companies do not want their customers to talk to an individual, and use tactics to dissuade customers from calling and frustrate those who do.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211008130458im_/https://assets...
Not in every country. In Japan, most companies have a responsive help line.
Some of the weeks where she was at her worst and the most vulnerable, she spent entire days just trying to reach to customer support. We’ve spent more hours than what the money was worth. It is appalling that corporations can get away with this.
Having seen said law firms in action, I have never seen such an expedient processing of disability claims by private insurers and Social Security.
Then you get the salt in the wound customer satisfaction survey of "Did X resolve your issue today?", "Was X polite to you?", etc. If you score the person low you can cost them the job. If you score the high, the company celebrates high customer satisfaction.
You almost never see the question "Did the company put our support person in a position to help you successfully?"
The most blatant offender I ran into recently was Verizon has made a number of things like updating your autopay method app/website only. You can call Verizon customer support and talk to a human and all they can do is tell you they literally cannot take your credit card and you need the app. Because someone at Verizon decided their humans can take one time payments but not update autopay.
Verizon on the Wireless side has so little bloat compared to AT&T from what I saw.
The current model makes money due to lack of options and attrition where fewer people are willing to threaten to switch the 4th time or jump ship every year. Some pay more than reasonable others jump through hoops like trained seals. It's not the best model for anyone.
Support dollars are better spent on actual problems instead of such self inflicted wounds as billing complexity.
Lawyers are the only people that are still allowed to make decisions in modern corporations.
Also Rescheduling a package is is a nightmare. Its like they intentionally tried to make the delivery estimates and updates as unhelpful and bad as possible to mess with you.
Many special-case requests have to be handled locally, and it's often spitting into a hurricane trying to get someone there to pickup the phone.
The whole system builds on trust and humans are pretty trustworthy. Bots are much less trustworthy, since untrustworthy humans can leverage bots or spam to contact millions of people each.
But why would you let your card leave your sight? I don’t understand.
The waiter brings over a payment terminal or you go over to it, then you tap or insert your card. When could they take a picture? How would they even use the details without your PIN number? The whole system isn’t built on trust because that would be stupid when it comes to money.
Or are you saying the trust element is that they are not using a terminal that somehow clones your card and pin?
That's the status quo for how those transactions work in the US.
> When could they take a picture, how could they even use the details without our PIN, the whole system isn't buit with trust because that woudl be stupid when it comes to money
The average person with no training can remember 8 uniformly random digits, and an hour of training bumps that up to 20 -- more than enough to recall a credit card and its PIN, even ignoring the immense amount of redundant information in how those are constructed. Plus nearly invisible video feeds are a reality. Plus pass-through broken credit card capture systems are a cheap reality, and one that claims untold billions of dollars at US gas stations, and many multiples of that amount at european ATMs. Any system that depends on the secrecy of those digits is fundamentally broken, and our payment system does, so it's fundamentally broken. The only reason it doesn't appear that way is that most people don't try to exploit it, and most of the rest leave enough breadcrumbs that after enough 10s of millions of fraud they can be arrested. The remaining few percent of fraud is baked into the prices you see and the taxes you pay.
> and one that claims untold billions of dollars at US gas stations, and many multiples of that amount at european ATMs
I’m interested in why you think this - from everything I can find US card fraud rates are at a minimum 10x compared to the EU.
The way the US makes payments seems very insecure/backwards, with a lack of chip and pin, relying on signatures and even using cheques still.
A 10x reduction in fraud by using basic measures other countries have adopted seems sensible.
Decrying them because there is no perfect system and “anyone can remember a pin” is a call to keep the status quo and the fraud that comes with it.
I tried to reach out to Kia recently. In my case, I don’t want to call. I explained, in writing, using their online portal. They didn’t even respond. Strait-up ghosted me. Damn.
Just one of many many many things I find are just "missing" nowadays.
It's sad. But it could be a rational behaviour for the companies.
Just skim off the cream that don't need help and dump the rest.
The alternative is taking losses on some clients.