Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
blogs.forrester.com
Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
1–10 of 64 posts
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#2Yeah, it's super obvious. I don't want to wait 30 min in line and then talk to someone who treats me like an imbecile but they are clueless themselves. And to get someone on the line who actually can fix the problem, I need to explain my issue 3 times more and waste another hour. Phone calls are the last resort, when everything is breaking apart and failing.
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#3Anecdote: we recently made a few videos, explaining the most common tech support questions. Studio, lighting, mic, etc. and edited professionally.
Calls dropped in half at least, with those specific problems almost wiped out completely. I am shipping 1000 products per month, and handling 2-3 phone calls per day to support them.
Now planning on making more videos to cover the next most frequent generic questions, and then on to a dedicated video per product (143 products).
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#4I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT!
Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer.
With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually make progress towards solving the problem.
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#5I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT! Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer. With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually…
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Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#6She leaves out the primary benefit of agent-assisted digital channels... they are asynchronous like some sort of people epoll(1). They maximize throughput. The friction comes from the synchronicity of voice communication. With that said some things require voice communication so I doubt eliminating them entirely will ever be an option.
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#7I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT! Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer. With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually…
But I'd rather find the answer in a well-written FAQ than for there to be no FAQ and have to call.
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#8Anecdote: we recently made a few videos, explaining the most common tech support questions. Studio, lighting, mic, etc. and edited professionally. Calls dropped in half at least, with those specific problems almost wiped out completely. I am shipping 1000 products per month, and handling 2-3 phone calls per day to support them. Now planning on making more videos to cover the next most frequent generic questions, and…
Not to be rude or anything, but you might also had some effect if you updated the texts on your customer service page to not just be repetitions of Lorem Ipsum. :-)
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#9Yeah, it's super obvious. I don't want to wait 30 min in line and then talk to someone who treats me like an imbecile but they are clueless themselves. And to get someone on the line who actually can fix the problem, I need to explain my issue 3 times more and waste another hour. Phone calls are the last resort, when everything is breaking apart and failing.
Heh, given the current quality of phone support, one wonders why they aren't replaced by scripts + voice recognition + voice synthesis.
I'm pretty sure I can write a basic AI program that can beat comcast tech support agents at their job, assuming an eventual fallthrough is available.
Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
#10This is ridiculous. I absolutely want to talk to a person when something has gone wrong. Too many systems are poorly designed, and you can get your account into an invalid state. I'm paying for a service, and part of that service should be to allow me to contact someone when their system breaks. Spending a day researching on forums is wasting my time. It isn't that I don't want to call for support, it's the company that doesn't want to pay qualified individuals to provide that support.