231–240 of 249 posts
Sound terrible but they’ve probably tried everything imaginable to reduce their call volume and weed out the lazy folk who could just read their website. Call centers are expensive.
Not as expensive as having no customers.
The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.
Is this bad though?
The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old. The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustr…
I have not however seen it used structurally as a disincentive to calling for support. I mean it has that effect obviously but in the cases where it was implemented I have not seen that be the actual goal. That's a different level of nasty again.
As a former callcenter consultant, it was usually the bad companies that didn't care about their customers that wanted this implemented. The good ones just wanted the best they could offer and considered a 15 minute wait (even when it was simply due to high call volumes) a massive fail and an immediate need to upscale the team. As it should be. The biggest issue is often customers calling during lunch time when many agents themselves are out to lunch too. This can often be mitigated with good shifting and follow the sun support.
Ps this is completely bullshit:
> influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”
The reason they want customers to self serve is not because it's faster. It's because it's wildly cheaper.
The cheapest support interaction is a customer self reading the documentation/kbase. Then come the AI agents, then chat with a real agent. Then far on top in terms of cost is a live call with an agent. This is because chat agents can and do handle multiple chats at the same time and often have the benefit of premade answer snippets. A live agent doesn't have any of that.
However if the customer decides they want to speak to an agent it's definitely impacting their satisfaction trying to steer them elsewhere. The "it's faster" reasoning is just spin on what is essentially just poor bottom of the barrel customer service.
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One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue. But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
> Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers They explicitly do, even among their own customers and plans. If you Google the carrier name plus QCI, you’ll find tables where people have documented, which plans are in which priority group
I've also seen MVNOs be denied frequency bands or cells that were in the highest demand, leading to worse connectivity despite being on the same network.
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Mint works well until it doesn't. I travel a lot and use voice over ip(VoIP). One day I called and got an automated message that my account needed funds. It didn't, my annual payment was months away. My call to tech support was the generic worst. He insisted there was trouble with my current cell tower and I should reboot my phone. (ignoring the fact that I was able to get automated message). I explained I was using…
Insisting on saying VoIP to the Mint rep instead of WiFi Calling (the term used by Apple, Google, Mint, and practically everyone else) is asking for a bad time.
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Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers. The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because onl…
With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.
> leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot Is this bad though?
Yes
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eSIM transfers are an absolute nightmare on T-Mobile. I recently did two of them and both times, the transfer started but never finished, so I ended up with no service on either device. That means no ability to call their support line and no ability to receive the confirmation SMS they use to verify you are the correct person. They also immediately permanently nuke your physical SIM card so the only way to go back to…
Wow. That really sucks. As a counterpoint (not sure if this was t-mobile, apple, or both), I just upgraded from an iPhone 11 with physical sim, to iPhone 17 with esim. All I had to do was hold the new phone next to the old one, and it just transferred the line over and deactivated the old sim automatically. I wasn't even in the US (so not even on their network), and it was stupidly seamless. It sounds like t-mobile s…
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> When you request a QR code, even though you provide the EID, they will ask for an IMEI number. Everything else you say is accurate but they do not require this, T-Mobile is the only major in the US that doesn’t match EID to IMEI. I know because I use a removable esim (esim.me) euicc with multiple phones. I have to read the super long eid off to support to activate it. I cannot activate service on this card with ver…
I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not saying T-Mobile locks the EID and IMEI together. I'm saying their tech support will completely ignore any EID you send them and instead look up an EID in their database based on the IMEI you send them. If you manage to convince the tech support to actually listen to you and use the correct EID then yes, everything will work out fine and you'll be able to move the card across d…
Call during day or you get the Philippines and they don’t understand specific requests like this as well. If you must do it at night use the chat route.