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Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#71

Post by web007 »

wtbob wrote: post #40
97s wrote: post #23

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.

These queries and "show me where I can find show X across broadcast, cable, on-demand, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or other" are the reason I bought a Tivo. Their UX is still not what I'd like as far as efficiency, but they get the table stakes 100%.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#73

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

thirdsun wrote: post #66
wtbob wrote: post #40

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 guess is that the general audience / user base simply doesn't care. It's similar to the experience I had when I had to look for a replacement for rdio, which was closing down last year. I was shocked to learn how inferior and lacking all other services were - yet rdio was the one that had to close shop. One of the most obvious issues is the fact that you can't filter/browse releases by label on any service but rdi…

On Spotify you can search for labels like this:

label:Stax

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#74

Post by andyjdavis »

vacri wrote: post #53
97s wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy isn't it. Did your higher-ups think he was doing a better job because he was working more on calls all day, where you were off them quick? In my job as soon as you got off a call you got right back on another one with a new customer. So I would have like 2-3x the calls per day of another person. I think that is one of the reasons the other people took so long, they figured whats the point, this person is n…

I think that part of it is that number of calls is the only quantitative KPI that can be relied upon. And not only do talented people not like to stay in the callcenter on the phones, talented managers also don't want to manage callcenters (very high staff turnover, cost-center department, not much sense of achievement when you solve problems, no political power to change the company's product when it's causing probl…

>the talented people cycle in and back out for the most part, and the less-talented people remain.

This is known as the dead sea effect http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#75

Post by andyjdavis »

toodlebunions wrote: post #5
beyondcompute wrote: post #3

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.

Or the "free market" solution would be to allow those calling tech support to pay an extra $50 per hour fee for priority service with a knowledgable human

Although if I encountered that as a customer I would be suspicious that the free support is being made deliberately bad to artificially drive revenue of the premium support team.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#76

Post by dothis9 »

sverige wrote: post #8
beyondcompute wrote: post #3

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…

I recently had to call to pay a highway toll because their system for accepting payments online was broken.

The IVR was an endless tree of options, and at each option, it would point out how much time I would save if I paid online. It took several minutes to navigate the phone tree before being placed on hold. Pressing 0 didn't help.

I made a point of spending time with the agent talking about the problems with the phone tree. I did so very politely but also very slowly and verbosely - it took several minutes.

I think if we were able to create a social convention where people waste n or 2n minutes of the agent's time when the company has wasted n minutes of their times, it could change the incentives.

Right now companies save money by having long times. If we could create a movement to do this, leaving customers on hold too long would lead to congestive collapse. Long hold times would end up costing more money than simply having adequate staffing.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#77

Post by majewsky »

Joeri wrote: post #70
wtbob wrote: post #40

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.

Netflix is a shining bastion of usability compared to the VOD services in my country. When replaying tv, the better one has unskippable ads (for only twice the price of netflix!), the worse one doesn't have a fast-forward and starts the replay ten minutes before the actual show. I think the problem is due to being tv companies to start with. They're not geared towards an interactive experience with viewers and have n…

> They're not geared towards an interactive experience with viewers and have no idea how to provide it.

This can't be the full answer. Starting an on-demand stream 10 minutes before the actual show is so mind-boggingly stupid that I cannot imagine incompetence to be the root cause. In other words, Hanlon's Razor does not apply, and malice on their part should be assumed.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#78

Post by majewsky »

97s wrote: post #47
hobs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. The company I worked for was a huge customer support company that developed the firmware that went on most of the modems that rural internet companies used. Some of the smaller companies paid on per a call resolution basis. The other's just had large contracts for us to help them no matter how many calls we got. It was a major problem when customers called in for simple questions that were outside of what we…

> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls

So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#79

Post by keithpeter »

"The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support."

UK: significant problem with adsl broadband, kept going round in circles over a period of weeks, was advised by the tech support to phone the sales number and ask to cancel contract. Issue escalated in minutes and solved in an hour.

Apparently customer retention has higher priority to customer support.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#80

Post by majewsky »

Nullabillity wrote: post #17
sverige wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Uh, if there were mandated service levels then Google would have to live up to those too...? Presumably this would be an acceptable-or-you-get-fined deal, not an acceptable-or-nothing-at-all deal.

It will be hard to argue (esp. in front of judges) for SLAs on free services.
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