Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#101

Post by jmme » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

AtlasLion wrote: post #72

A differentiation should be made between b2b and b2c. B2b support is way better with much higher SLA's.

Yes. I currently work in b2b tech support (well, its my last week). The job is better and service much different that described in this article -- SLA response times are enforced, but there is expectation that some tickets will take hours over the phone, sometimes over days.

The main issues are retention and hiring people with the right knowledge and/or ability to learn. New hires are often useless for months on the phone, and the most talented people jump ship even after aggressive promotions. Both issues fundamentally come down to pay.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#102

Post by rdiddly » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

aangjie wrote: post #89

rdiddly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the scriptures: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Ermm.. I always thought while it read fine, it also assumes that you'll eventually find a way to make those things scale.(be it automation, guided voice faq ? etc..). Doing things that don't scale is a good way a to corner portions of a market with big and established players, but not enough. aka necessary but not sufficient.

The point is, as a startup, try to blow your customers' minds, including with excellent support (agrees w/parent). It acknowledges that there may be some difficulty in scaling it (agrees w/sibling), but statistically you're unlikely to get big enough to have to worry about that (especially if you don't provide excellent support), so don't worry about it, just do it. And if you ever get to that point, you might find it scales better than you thought it would (agrees with you).

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#103

Post by monocasa » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #49

monocasa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Essentially free" isn't free at large enough scale.

When compared to the cost of actual people you need on the other end to pick up the phone that scales at pretty much the same speed, yes, it's still essentially free.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#104

Post by TylerE » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:17 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #103

TylerE wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Essentially free" isn't free at large enough scale.

When compared to the cost of actual people you need on the other end to pick up the phone that scales at pretty much the same speed, yes, it's still essentially free.

But it does't, that's the entire point. If you have, say, 100 operators, and a flux of calls that sees 500 incoming calls in a 5 minute window, now you're paying for 500 simultaneous calls, even though you're only servicing 100.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#105

Post by monocasa » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 11:36 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #104

monocasa wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When compared to the cost of actual people you need on the other end to pick up the phone that scales at pretty much the same speed, yes, it's still essentially free.

But it does't, that's the entire point. If you have, say, 100 operators, and a flux of calls that sees 500 incoming calls in a 5 minute window, now you're paying for 500 simultaneous calls, even though you're only servicing 100.

A voice stream is 64Kb (yes, bits) per second for full bandwidth over SS7. So my home connection can carry around 16,384 simultaneous calls for $50 a month. That's one third of one cent per incoming call capacity. So yes, essentially free.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#106

Post by TylerE » Tue, Jul 05, 2016, 2:02 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #105

TylerE wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it does't, that's the entire point. If you have, say, 100 operators, and a flux of calls that sees 500 incoming calls in a 5 minute window, now you're paying for 500 simultaneous calls, even though you're only servicing 100.

A voice stream is 64Kb (yes, bits) per second for full bandwidth over SS7. So my home connection can carry around 16,384 simultaneous calls for $50 a month. That's one third of one cent per incoming call capacity. So yes, essentially free.

That's not the expensive bit. At some point it has to hit the legacy phone network.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#107

Post by simonebrunozzi » Thu, Jul 07, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

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…

You are the Alexey Stakhanov [1] of your era. Unfortunately, there's no love for people like you :(

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov