41–50 of 107 posts
Both Hover and Squarespace have amazing, wonderful, useful tech support. They are selling somewhat technical products to what are, at best, a "power user" level of customer. They make it work.
A solution? The good ol' government regulation. If companies 'cannot' achieve acceptable standards of customer support service, those standards should be imposed on them. This game where ordinary customers are so often the victims must be put to an end.
That's hilarious! Having run a few call centers, the costs involved in upping service levels from, say, 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds to, say, 98% in 10 seconds, grow geometrically. If regulations were passed that mandated service levels, many companies would take Google's approach and simply not offer phone support at all. And we all know how great their support is. The solution is to not use any services from…
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 b…
> 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. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.
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 b…
[1] Arthur was the escalation point. I loved Arthur. I would go to him with a messed-up customer problem and he'd say "hand it to me, you don't have to worry about this anymore". I'd hand him the paperwork and I'd never, ever see the problem again (he actually did something with it, he didn't just bin it :) ). It reminded me a bit of the jedi mind trick: "You can go about your business..."
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Really? What's the number for help with gmail? I can't find it anywhere on their site. YouTube either, if it's different. Also, I need a number to reach support at Facebook, if you have it.
Customer Gmail: 1-877-355-5787 YouTube: 1-855-500-2756 Never done business with Facebook, can't help you there sorry!
You can find contact information for your region/niche on their partner directory site: https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/
A solution? The good ol' government regulation. If companies 'cannot' achieve acceptable standards of customer support service, those standards should be imposed on them. This game where ordinary customers are so often the victims must be put to an end.
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 b…
There is also a large difference between the small fry support and the larger corporate support, especially when you consider the vendor relationship that many large companies have. In a small company the support personell can be really hit or miss but often times can have major impacts on the product or even directly submit patches to the code you are running. At a bigger company they may pay a third party to mainta…
I would later check those tickets and supervisors would just refer the customer to the customer support of the actual internet company. FFS how frustrating would that be. Call the tech support number 24/7. Then speak to a supervisor, who send you to a customer support for the local company, who pays you to solve peoples problems. It was one of the most confusing jobs on the planet.
Another side note, they rolled out a call center check list/call flow application that was developed in house. They required us to use it. I was one of the few who refused to do so. My supervisor came around and asked me what the issue was. I showed him all the problems it had and how it drastically slowed down and erased notes if the customer mislead you down the wrong path and you found out later it was a completely different issue, which happened all the time. (They literally developed this software without having a single person who answers calls on the team, not a single person...)
Supervisor said can you write it all down so I can give it to the tech department. I sat there that night(was on night shift this particular night) and wrote up a javascript(notepad) example version on my local machine that was probably 5x better than theirs. I didn't think they would understand what I was saying.
My supervisor flipped out and introduced me to the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls. Man I could go on and on about how bad tech companies and customer service companies are.
About a week later they hacked my javascript into their version of the app and rolled it out. My supervisor eventually left due to frustrations of how they ran things. He had no other skills and left a 65K a year job to do manual labor for half the amount per year. He was probably the best supervisor there. I think this is probably another reason customer service industry sucks. Good people don't like doing bad jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.
My conspiracy theory lately has been that Netflix's search and basic UI is terrible on purpose, to make us not notice the shifts and declines in the streaming catalog quality. For the life of me I can't imagine why else they would ignore calls to improve it.
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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.
Eh, 'circuits' are essentially free in these days of VoIP PBXs and you probably save money (at least in the short term) by people who get tired of waiting on the phone and just hang up.
For examples of excellent Tech. Support, I recommend GoDaddy, Infusionsoft, Managed.com (PowerDNN). These people know their stuff. And they speak English. For execrable support, see Google.