Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane • Hacker News Board

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#91

Post by AlotOfReading » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:37 AM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #79

A quick practical tip: when asked what you want, tell the bot 'sales' (or anything else that brings in $$ for the business). That way you're likely to get you access to a human or phone number. It worked for me recently contacting Apple.

Usually sales or other cash generating areas are handled by entirely different departments. Once you get on with them, they'll simply transfer you (if they even have the correct number) and you'll end up at the back of the same queue you would otherwise have already been in.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#92

Post by Grothendank » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:41 AM UTC

This is definitely one of the drivers of anti-capitalist extremism, and as an anti-capitalist extremist and recruiter, I can only say, "thanks!"

Remember capitalism's job is to provide zero value for nonzero cost. Therefore, we must work to end capitalism at any cost! <3

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#93

Post by boxedadin » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:42 AM UTC

ghostpepper wrote: post #73

lxgr wrote: post #22

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…

> It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats are deeply disturbing to me), it works on a bad internet connection, it works asynchronously. This one is frustrating to me as well. After telling the chatbot about your problem and waiting 20 minutes to be connected with a real person, only to have them open…

On top of messages being non-persistent, it seems that chat representatives take a minimum of five minutes per reply. It’s unclear if they’re (1) helping other people simultaneously (2) performing a slow corporate policy (3) multitasking.

It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#94

Post by hd95489 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:42 AM UTC

abigail95 wrote: post #18

Phone support is a baumol cost. Rising wages for more productive forms of work both pulls away workers from working in phone support - and increases its demand by giving everyone else more money to spend. I would say a high amount of increased productivity in phone support is by using cheaper labor in developing countries.

Yeah but labor in the 3rd world hasn’t gotten significantly more expensive but somehow support dropped to 0

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#95

Post by hd95489 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:44 AM UTC

gavinhoward wrote: post #70

Just recently switched banks to a bank whose selling point is that you always get a human on the phone. They don't even have a phone tree. It's glorious!

What bank is that

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#96

Post by hd95489 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

GianFabien wrote: post #5

As consumers we could stop buying from corporations who treat us with contempt.

No you can’t, they monopolize the market place and you dont have any other options.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#97

Post by cagey » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:47 AM UTC

GianFabien wrote: post #5

As consumers we could stop buying from corporations who treat us with contempt.

It seems like outsourcing phone support to overseas call centers is a race to the bottom: if you answer calls onshore, your higher costs inhibit your ability to compete on price, so eventually every company (at least, those that offer any nominal "phone support" to begin with) is forced to capitulate (outsource phone support overseas).

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#98

Post by Grothendank » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:47 AM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #91

nomilk wrote: post #79

A quick practical tip: when asked what you want, tell the bot 'sales' (or anything else that brings in $$ for the business). That way you're likely to get you access to a human or phone number. It worked for me recently contacting Apple.

Usually sales or other cash generating areas are handled by entirely different departments. Once you get on with them, they'll simply transfer you (if they even have the correct number) and you'll end up at the back of the same queue you would otherwise have already been in.

Often you can guilt trip sales into acting as your advocate to other departments of the org.

"I know it's not your job, but can you please make sure the person you'll transfer me to can help, uwu? I'm just a poor helpless customer, owo!"

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#99

Post by nomilk » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:47 AM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #91

nomilk wrote: post #79

A quick practical tip: when asked what you want, tell the bot 'sales' (or anything else that brings in $$ for the business). That way you're likely to get you access to a human or phone number. It worked for me recently contacting Apple.

Usually sales or other cash generating areas are handled by entirely different departments. Once you get on with them, they'll simply transfer you (if they even have the correct number) and you'll end up at the back of the same queue you would otherwise have already been in.

When I did this with Apple recently, I was speaking to a human (albeit a sales person) within 2 minutes and got told which number to call, at what time in my timezone, and even what numbers to press to get through to the right people without having to listen though all the prompts.

It might have turned a 10 minute job into a 2 minute one, but I appreciate that a lot, mostly because of how much I despise wasting time and mental energy on navigating labyrinthine and sometimes ambiguous customer support channels.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#100

Post by QuarterReptile » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #81

Vanishing ‘support’ is driving us insane. I could care less about getting it on the phone. 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.”

> I could care less about getting it on the phone.

couldn't