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Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

blogs.forrester.com

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Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#11

Post by Silhouette »

nikanj wrote: post #4

I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT! Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer. With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually…

With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually make progress towards solving the problem.

Maybe the underlying problem here is that people increasingly assume calling won't help them actually make progress towards solving the problem. Years of dealing with tedious phone menus, call centre staff who literally can't understand or speak basic English properly, and often call centre staff who don't have the authority or capabilities to do anything useful to fix the problem anyway, have taught many customers that calling will be a waste of probably significant amounts of their time.

I'm not sure how fair that really is, but phone support seems to be increasingly polarised these days. Some organisations still take it seriously, and you can speak reasonably quickly with someone helpful and knowledgeable. In these cases I often find the phone support is the fastest way to find reliable information or solve a problem. Other organisations are more like the stereotype I described above, and I confess to having very little patience with them these days. If I'm calling because an automated system already wasn't working well enough, and I don't get a confident feeling about the phone support almost immediately, I don't mess around any more: if it was an enquiry about a sale, they probably just lost that deal, and if it was a significant problem or complaint, they're probably getting a letter with verified delivery instead.

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#12

Post by PakG1 »

iofj wrote: post #9
Kenji wrote: post #2

Yeah, it's super obvious. I don't want to wait 30 min in line and then talk to someone who treats me like an imbecile but they are clueless themselves. And to get someone on the line who actually can fix the problem, I need to explain my issue 3 times more and waste another hour. Phone calls are the last resort, when everything is breaking apart and failing.

Heh, given the current quality of phone support, one wonders why they aren't replaced by scripts + voice recognition + voice synthesis. I'm pretty sure I can write a basic AI program that can beat comcast tech support agents at their job, assuming an eventual fallthrough is available.

It's happening. I interviewed a few years ago at a place where they were planning a full-scale experiment for this exactly in their call centers. Hundreds of staff in that call center.

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#13

Post by CPLX »

nikanj wrote: post #4

I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT! Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer. With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually…

I want to call a support person that's actually more knowledgable than me.

Many phone support agents are just looking at and reading from some sort of scripted FAQ, which means they are between me and the content I want. I'd much rather they just put all that text online rather than having it read to me.

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#15

Post by donperignon »

iofj wrote: post #9
Kenji wrote: post #2

Yeah, it's super obvious. I don't want to wait 30 min in line and then talk to someone who treats me like an imbecile but they are clueless themselves. And to get someone on the line who actually can fix the problem, I need to explain my issue 3 times more and waste another hour. Phone calls are the last resort, when everything is breaking apart and failing.

Heh, given the current quality of phone support, one wonders why they aren't replaced by scripts + voice recognition + voice synthesis. I'm pretty sure I can write a basic AI program that can beat comcast tech support agents at their job, assuming an eventual fallthrough is available.

With the recent improvements in voice recognition and deep learning algorithms, machine-driven support is just about to happen soon. Plus there are many companies actually working on that field, ie. http://www.artificial-solutions.com or http://www.anbotogroup.com/en/index.php

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#16

Post by pheoki »

sandebert wrote: post #8
gregpilling wrote: post #3

Anecdote: we recently made a few videos, explaining the most common tech support questions. Studio, lighting, mic, etc. and edited professionally. Calls dropped in half at least, with those specific problems almost wiped out completely. I am shipping 1000 products per month, and handling 2-3 phone calls per day to support them. Now planning on making more videos to cover the next most frequent generic questions, and…

Not to be rude or anything, but you might also had some effect if you updated the texts on your customer service page to not just be repetitions of Lorem Ipsum. :-) http://sascase.com/customer-service

It's interesting, because that immediately makes me question the QA behind the product, when I a see the web QA being poor like this. So I poked around the site, and the main picture shows "29 colours to choose from" and several of the cases have chipped paint. I guess it goes back to what my grandma used to say about girls with dirty fingernails.

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#17

Post by mannykannot »

CPLX wrote: post #13
nikanj wrote: post #4

I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT! Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer. With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually…

I want to call a support person that's actually more knowledgable than me. Many phone support agents are just looking at and reading from some sort of scripted FAQ, which means they are between me and the content I want. I'd much rather they just put all that text online rather than having it read to me.

> I want to call a support person that's actually more knowledgable than me.

Amen to that. Unfortunately, it is not a common option any more.

Leggett's article is at best ambiguous over this, and she gives the impression of not understanding the issue. Firstly, 'voice' is not a unified category: on the one hand, there is informed-human voice support, and on the other, there is the combination of voice automation and uninformed flunky. Leggett shows no sign of understanding that people are not abandoning the former out of choice, but because it is not available.

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#18

Post by zajd »

sandebert wrote: post #8
gregpilling wrote: post #3

Anecdote: we recently made a few videos, explaining the most common tech support questions. Studio, lighting, mic, etc. and edited professionally. Calls dropped in half at least, with those specific problems almost wiped out completely. I am shipping 1000 products per month, and handling 2-3 phone calls per day to support them. Now planning on making more videos to cover the next most frequent generic questions, and…

Not to be rude or anything, but you might also had some effect if you updated the texts on your customer service page to not just be repetitions of Lorem Ipsum. :-) http://sascase.com/customer-service

Well that's because you need to go to the customer support area: http://sascase.com/customer-support/

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#19

Post by my5thaccount »

Customers rarely call me, but when they do, it's fine -- I love them. It's usually because they can't figure out how to log in. It's especially painful when they call at 8:30am on the east coast and I'm on the west coast and my cell phone wakes me up and they say, "I can't log in." and they are mad at me and I don't even know who they are or which account and it turns out they've been typoing their username for days.

But I love every single one of them! "Hi, yes, sorry you're having trouble, I am happy to help. Which customer are you with? What is your username? Ah, let me send you a password reset to your email address. Did you get it?"

"Yes."

"Ok, great. Let me know if you need anything else."

And you can hear their tone of voice change immediately to, "OMG, this person was so nice and I was so mean to them and I was clearly doing something wrong, but I don't know what it was, but wow, I actually called a company on the internet today and someone answered the phone and actually solved my problem!!!!"

Nothing better than making customers happy.

Re: Customers Don't Want to Call for Support

#20

Post by TillE »

nikanj wrote: post #4

I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT! Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the same canned answer. With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually…

Good email support exists. Even a massive company like Blizzard has been consistently fast and responsive for me. I've had great support direct from the founders of small companies.

I doubt that companies with bad email support would serve up anything better over the phone.

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