81–90 of 149 posts
I recently had my first bad experience with AWS support, where the agent immediately wanted to jump on a call to have me explain the problem I’d just written down to them.
It’s not that hard to understand “Can you explain to me how to get your provisioned concurrency lambdas to keep track of system time correctly.”
On a related note, please stop telling me about the website when I call for customer support. It's 2023, people know that websites exist. If I could do it on the website, I wouldn't be calling you.
You might not. Most of my relatives over 40 will though. At my company it is incredibly common for a support ticket to be answered in the FAQ.
Support 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 think what this says is that most customer support is just awful all around.
This led to a fun AI call when I insisted on getting a technician. Hearing "Let's try that again." over and over in an angry AI voice, was just the best.
She asks me to reboot, and I say technician. *Let's try that again. Please let me know when you've rebooted your Gateway.*
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The problem is that it's been replaced with either nothing or a help page that doesn't solve your problem. I recently had a company email me saying: > In this case, your review of___ has been flagged because we couldn’t verify its authenticity, and on that basis we’ve removed your review from our platform. > While we’re confident that this is the right call, we appreciate that sometimes we get it wrong. If you think…
Which company? Seems like we should all be avoiding them if possible
I take customer phone calls at my job so not a lot of sympathy for the companies trying to optimize helpfulness out of existence.
The money is their already. Why doing anything to support customers. Unless someone sues them. It's sad. But it could be a rational behaviour for the companies.
Just skim off the cream that don't need help and dump the rest.
The alternative is taking losses on some clients.
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As a consumer, I hate having to call phone support. Even if they answer instantly and are helpful, it’s still 30x slower than doing what I want in the app or website. I avoid all companies which make me call up or otherwise engage in slow communication to get things done.
Getting apps or websites right for the most amount of people most of the time is an incredible UX challenge. It’s unequivocally better to have employed experts with higher order tools (admin dashboards, etc) do a lot of these tasks. Larger companies can afford the challenge and actually benefit on both ends: quick customer service via digital interface and decreased pressure on their employed humans (so they start sp…
Having minimal support forces the company to ensure the app is fully capable.
Good for some who know how to navigate self help setups. Opens up lower cost options. For example cheap cell phone plans exist because of mostly self service, order sim online and setup online with no physical store and only mediocre phone support. Same with low cost airlines. Bad for those who have trouble navigating things online, often the elderly.
Or the young. I spend so much time helping my teenagers and early 20 somethings with online tasks. They know how to use a few select websites/apps, but outside of that they are pretty much clueless about computers (despite my efforts to educate them).
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I find that using phone support and being genuinely nice to the other person on the line is a nice way to sometimes get benefits you don't expect, like airplane upgrades... I purchased a used ipad and the only way to get the thing turned on was to talk to a customer support agent, who had to basically manually flip a database column for me. Besides these days you can either set a callback, or, just plain do work whil…
Sometimes I play the game of being on hold with two vendors at the same time and hope they don't simultaneously pick up at the same time. It usually works out.
Physical pharmacies in general have also gone way down hill in terms of customer service. I’ve literally gone into the store and stood at the counter for like 10 minutes waiting for someone to even acknowledge my existence. It’s not that they don’t see me, they just don’t care. They are overworked, so I kind of understand not being responsive, but a simple, “We’ll be with you in a few minutes,” would be nice. It’s pretty dehumanizing to stand there being ignored. And if you speak up, they usually snap at you, and then are rude when they do get around to helping you.
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It’s because emails continue to queue up and it’s impossible to answer them all. While people will actively avoid calling if at all possible and will drop off if it’s not important.
Sounds like shithole company behavior at its finest, who cares about responding to support queries after all? Cheaper to not backfill vacant support positions than engage with actually supporting your products.
It would cost a fortune to pay support and developers to launch a full investigation every time something funny happens. So having slow support encourages users to only call if it’s reproducible and a real problem.