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Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#121

Post by mint2 »

ucm_edge wrote: post #47

For 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…

UPS phone support might as well be a chat bot for all they are allowed to do.

Also Rescheduling a package is is a nightmare. Its like they intentionally tried to make the delivery estimates and updates as unhelpful and bad as possible to mess with you.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#122

Post by sacnoradhq »

ucm_edge wrote: post #47

For 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…

The biz consulting jargon would be "empowerment."

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#123

Post by sacnoradhq »

mint2 wrote: post #121
ucm_edge wrote: post #47

For 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…

UPS phone support might as well be a chat bot for all they are allowed to do. Also Rescheduling a package is is a nightmare. Its like they intentionally tried to make the delivery estimates and updates as unhelpful and bad as possible to mess with you.

To be fair, most things are out of reach of the central retail customer service line.

Many special-case requests have to be handled locally, and it's often spitting into a hurricane trying to get someone there to pickup the phone.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#124

Post by sacnoradhq »

is_true wrote: post #54
ucm_edge wrote: post #47

For 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…

Google does this. They even tell you that they cannot help you because but you get a lot of empathy

Which part of Google? Google is run like 450 half-assed companies.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#126

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

fsckboy wrote: post #45
rcme wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

human attended email address still might mean 24 hour response time.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#127

Post by RobotToaster »

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's frustrating how many companies in the UK don't do e-mail support.

I've literally resorted to sending paper mail multiple times.

>It leaves a paper trail

I suspect many companies consider that a bug, not a feature.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#128

Post by thatgerhard »

When I worked as a inbound call centre operator in the early 2000s they used to measure your "productivity".

Productivity was the percentage of your work day that you were busy on an inbound call. The problem with this was that when you call a client back, that call wouldn't be counted towards you productivity. The other problem which is relevant to this is that when you do a large number of calls (keeping your calls short and concise) the time gaps between the one call ending and the next one starting added up quicker for fast workers translating to a lower productivity. (I should mention that a large part of your bonus was calculated from this "productivity").

So if you answer a call and you can keep that call going for as long as possible, your productivity would skyrocket. On average the number of calls per person dropped on average from roughly 150 calls per day to 90-100. (anecdotal, but I observed my teammates)

This is how I got fired. (greatest thing to ever happen to me btw) I didn't like talking to people, but I was a dumb 20 something and had no other options, so I would answer the call, with a double tap, that would put the caller on hold immediately and I would just hang on to the call for as long as they stayed on the line. The other way was to start the call, get the info of the client and then tell then you will check with whoever and then just leave them on hold. For the case that got me fired the guy was sitting and holding for more than 7 hours.

Re: Vanishing phone customer support is driving us all insane

#129

Post by zx8080 »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #86
zx8080 wrote: post #56

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.

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.

Should it be considered if the contract has any mention of service for the clients with ARR below 5000.
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