Earlier quoted context omitted.
And not so lucky (I suspect the majority) can not work when on hold
Yes. I cannot work while on hold.
Housework, yardwork, folding laundry...
Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
101–110 of 149 posts
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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”.
It's very clear that they're assisting multiple people. It would be an incredible waste otherwise, but unfortunately these agencies likely stretch their support agents far too thin.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#103A website with company "support reviews" wouldn't be a bad thing.
https://www.sitejabber.com/ might be such a place. I left one review there a few months ago. I doubt it will gain network effect critical mass, and if it does, the companies being reviewed will almost certainly subvert it. Sigh.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#104Vanishing ‘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.”
Haha, imagine trying to use customer support for a product that you pay for. Honestly I'd probably ask Stack Overflow before calling in.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#105The 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.
One of my employers basically determined that clients below ~5000 ARR are not worth serving. Their issues cannot be forwarded to anything above front line support. Doesn't matter how stuck they are or what sales promised. Just skim off the cream that don't need help and dump the rest. The alternative is taking losses on some clients.
Tell the employer to close up shop, because they are too incompetent to design a business model that involves serving all customers, and doing any less is just fraud :shrug:
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#106Hope someone builds this killer app for phone support: when you call the numbr, you continue the interaction on an app on the phone, especially the “phone tree” ( Press 3 for blah etc) but other parts too.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#107I almost never want phone/voice communication, but when that's the only option and it comes with "we are experiencing a larger than expected call volume" message that occurs at any time of day or night it is maddening. That kind of BS needs to be illegal, don't pretend that I might be able to get a response if I call at another time - that's just a tool to push me outside of a response window where refunds and/or cancellation are still options.
I also find the obnoxious and relentlessly bad voice recognition that companies are introducing ("say the reason you are calling", "say your account number") to be awful. I have never had an experience where I felt like slowly and clearly enunciating something was superior to simply typing it on the keypad.
But the core issue I have with this article is wanting a voice phone calls at all. The vast majority of times I need to communicate with a company text messaging or email is clearly superior to voice. It doesn't require me committing to an half hour extended call, it doesn't get impacted by my accent, it's more accessible across the board, and when the person at the other end inevitably changes I don't have to repeat everything I have already said.
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#108Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#109i see a startup opportunity here
Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Let them struggle with it?
Go exercise. Maybe not right this second. But tomorrow when you wake up. You'll feel better. Promise.