Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

>Of course just clicking spam is far easier than trying to fix the problem

From your perspective, you have solved the problem. Gmail will no longer display emails from them.

The greater problem is also one step closer to being solved. The spammers, in this case Ubisoft, have been correctly identified as spam by you.

Even if you were an Ubisoft customer, if you couldn't get them to stop emailing you, that would be spam.

Typical Forrester bullshit (I've been wading hip-deep through their crap for 20 years).

Yes, offer defense in depth, more below.

But when your customers DO call you, it's because other avenues are clearly failing, and their reasonable expectation is for excellent, clear, fast, appropriate, and effective service. That expectation is usually observed in the breech.

I loathe phone support calls because of:

1. busy signals

2. long, and worse, unpredictable wait times.

3. utterly counterproductive wait queue practices -- if there's music, which always renders like crap on digitally compressed lines, then I'm waiting for a voice, and repeated patently insincere protestations that my call is important *frustrate my waiting for that voice to come on.

4. Clueless CSRs clearly working from scripts which haven't themselves been tested.

5. Further insincere protestations from those same CSRs.

6. Far too often: failure to satisfactorily resolve the problem.

7. A product design and/or quality which necessitated the call in the first place. Much such damage is self-inflicted.

TL;DR: If your customers are calling you, you've done messed up good, and better fix it. Fast and right.

I'm old (33).

I LOVE talking to my friends. Family. Interesting folks at the pub. People of all sorts on the bus.

I don't particularly love talking to somebody about why their system isn't working or how some bizarre thing I need to do is a corner case they never addressed. I doubt most people do.

Re: local stores Keep in mind that "5 minutes away" to you might be 30 minutes away for someone else, since we don't all have the same means of getting around. I prefer a bicycle - but if you live in suburban sprawl that means you can't really do much of anything in 5 minutes.

Also, most people underestimate how long it takes to make a run to the store. If you do drive, it can easily be a minute or two getting to the car, buckled in, etc. . It's 5 (more likely 10-15 minutes) minutes getting there, and then you're in the store and have to find the thing, if it's even in stock. Wait in line to buy it. Drive home. It adds up. The next time you think you're making a 5 or 10 minute trip to the store, time how long the whole process takes and see how long it actually is.

If I don't need something immediately and I can't walk or cycle to a familiar store for it I probably am buying it online.

> I'm training Gmail that Ubisoft is a spammer

Spam data is shared, it would be better to create a specific filter instead.

By the way, what's preventing you from resetting the password and deleting the account in this case? Username? Secondary authentication?

What frustrates me most about Comcast is that so many common tasks that one would think would be solved by checking a box on their site requires making a call to customer service. They are not incentivized to provide decent self-help options because they WANT you to have to call, because phone support is another sales channel. I don't think I've ever called Comcast about anything where they didn't make me listen to (recorded or otherwise) pitches about other services you could sign up for.

My few experiences with live chat weren't much better. It was always a 45 minute ordeal, where 90% of the time was spent with me staring at the chat window waiting to move on to the next step of the process, with periodic assurances from the rep (or a bot, who knows!) that they were still there and were just waiting for some request to "make it through the system" or whatever. Meanwhile there was a constant stream of Comcast marketing messages and, uh, "special offers" being presented to me in the chat window.

If they had more useful self-help options, it would reduce phone support calls, which would reduce their ability to leverage support as a sales and marketing tool. If their phone support system was more efficient with fewer transfers, shorter hold times, etc., it would also reduce their captive audience for sales and marketing.

I'm not so cynical as to think it's all a conspiracy, but they do have an incentive to not improve customer service, and when it's been so comically terrible for so long it's hard to not think that some faction within the company has the power and motivation to hobble their support offerings in the interest of generating some teensy amount of additional revenue in exchange for customer frustration.