Personally, I'm really excited for the era of generative AI powered customer support.
Hopefully it will bring low wait times, knowledgeable "representatives", and fast escalation.
Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#42Support chat is pretty terrible, but poor quality phone support isn‘t that great either, in my view. (High-quality phone support does exist, but is unfortunately increasingly rare.) I wish email support was more of a thing in the US. Not chat, not a web-only form or ticketing system, just plain old email (on the frontend): It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced supe…
I hate email support. If I’m trying to call, it means I have a problem that needs addressing right now. Email is basically a black hole. You never know when someone will respond, if ever.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#43A&A (https://www.aa.net.uk/) are a UK ISP who market themselves towards technical users. It costs a small premium compared to other ISPs, but knowing that my support call was going straight to one of their engineers (and being given access to most of the same diagnostic tools that the engineer would have anyway) was always a treat. They make a point about offering any means of communication a customer prefers including, apparently, World of Warcraft in-game chat.
It felt like that one xkcd about the customer support backdoor[0] made true, and I'm surprised I've not seen any similar offerings for anything else.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#44Ever tried to get someone on the phone at UPS? It's impossible. If you have a problem in store, with a driver, or anything, it's impossible to get a live human being through the UPS phone number. I googled, I tried every trick, but the system assertively refuses to grant you the privilege of speaking with a human.
I truly believe that most major companies do not want their customers to talk to an individual, and use tactics to dissuade customers from calling and frustrate those who do.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211008130458im_/https://assets...
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#45Support chat is pretty terrible, but poor quality phone support isn‘t that great either, in my view. (High-quality phone support does exist, but is unfortunately increasingly rare.) I wish email support was more of a thing in the US. Not chat, not a web-only form or ticketing system, just plain old email (on the frontend): It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced supe…
I hate email support. If I’m trying to call, it means I have a problem that needs addressing right now. Email is basically a black hole. You never know when someone will respond, if ever.
I'm pretty sure when he said "having a human-attended support email address" would rule out black holing.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#46This has some serious consequences. My wife had to go on short term disability and the process was handled by a third party company. Man. After 2 years of trying, we still have only 50% of what we are owed, have paid taxes on 100% of the benefits and the other 50% has been cashed out by someone else according to the company.
Some of the weeks where she was at her worst and the most vulnerable, she spent entire days just trying to reach to customer support. We’ve spent more hours than what the money was worth. It is appalling that corporations can get away with this.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#47For me the worst is you talk to someone at a company, be it phone or support chat, and it becomes clear the person wants to help but the policies of the company prevent their customer support people from doing anything meaningful. The support person has no power, may not even be employed by the company in question, etc.
Then you get the salt in the wound customer satisfaction survey of "Did X resolve your issue today?", "Was X polite to you?", etc. If you score the person low you can cost them the job. If you score the high, the company celebrates high customer satisfaction.
You almost never see the question "Did the company put our support person in a position to help you successfully?"
The most blatant offender I ran into recently was Verizon has made a number of things like updating your autopay method app/website only. You can call Verizon customer support and talk to a human and all they can do is tell you they literally cannot take your credit card and you need the app. Because someone at Verizon decided their humans can take one time payments but not update autopay.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#48I’d rather have online support than phone support.
I tried to reach out to Kia recently. In my case, I don’t want to call. I explained, in writing, using their online portal. They didn’t even respond. Strait-up ghosted me. Damn.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#49I am in Canada since early 90s and my impression that customer support and warranty just steadily degenerate. Maybe it is accelerating today but it is not something that had started recently. And yes it drives me up the wall sometime.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#50Unlikely. Phone support was one of those things that was driving people insane before. Remember jokes about hold music, foreign accents and phone menus? I personally can't stand phone support. It always takes way longer than it needs to, and I can't do anything else during it. Just firing off an email is far more efficient. Easier to do after office hours too.
> Remember jokes about hold music, foreign accents and phone menus?
the only reason those jokes are not current is that either the phone line is now gone, or because you don't call it, knowing in advance that it's torture. The phone menu and tiered human support is worse now than it's ever been. ime the foreign accent problem is a little better, but i also rarely call so ymmv