Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

Some companies (I know Amazon does for one, and I'm pretty sure GEICO does too) now have "call me when an operator is available" functionality. I suspect this is relatively trivial to implement in a modern phone system, and probably saves money since you aren't tieing up circuits with people sitting on hold.

Coming from a tech support background. I used to be a top performer at a support company and set most of the records for call times etc. I was hated by most of my peers, and many of my supervisors because I set numbers to low for most of the other teams and they were under preforming. I am not saying this to brag but to state how awful most support workers are. Most of my co-workers had no idea what they were doing besides reading off a script, any question outside of the box and boom, off to tier 2.

One problem is: I found that the quicker I answered questions the more questions I received. If the customer knew that I knew what I was doing and I was able to help them efficiently they had more questions. This led me to ponder how to solve the problem. I ended up getting my supervisor to create a FAQ page based on a ton of the questions that I was constantly asked. I was then able to refer customers to this page and actually say honestly that it would answer their questions.

A lot of the problem with these tech giants like ATT, Comcast, etc, they have horrible interfaces. For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch the next episode. It's horrible. I called multiple times trying to figure out how to get around this. They said there is no fix and it is how the system works. I googled it and millions of people have the same issue. It's absurd, yet they haven't fixed it. I don't think they even care, or it cost them money for customers to watch on demand so they want to make it as aggravating as possible.

Another interesting aspect of being able to help people quickly is you never get good reviews or people asking to speak to your supervisor. People are so pleased that they were able to get their answer solved in a manner they could understand in a really fast time they just breath a big sigh of relief and say "thank you so much", and then get off the phone.

I had co-workers who would spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with someone sitting there trying to explain something to them, and since they were so patient, the customer always asked to speak to supervisor to thank them for their patience. For some reason the customer always thinks they are the problem in this situation. It really boggles my mind.

Just a view.

If you pay for Google Apps they do. I've had to call them a few times, and they were actually fairly helpful, even calling me back the next day to make sure the problem was resolved.

Judging by the number they called me from their call center is in Ireland.

>doing awesome support has tremendous ROI.

But diminishing returns. If support had a great ROI, everybody would do a good job of it. It really only has a good ROI if you're a new entrant in a competitive market.

Google does offer phone support (and email etc), with SLAs - however this is for their paid offerings (I.e. Google Apps, which is like Gmail/Calendar/Docs/Drive etc). Google Apps start at $5 a month, so the entry price isn't astronomical.

For free products, there's support on official forums.