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Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

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Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#61

For examples of excellent Tech. Support, I recommend GoDaddy, Infusionsoft, Managed.com (PowerDNN). These people know their stuff. And they speak English. For execrable support, see Google.

I don't know why I keep seeing this comment on HN, but Google has good support for all paid products.

Google also has consumer-facing customer service reps all around the globe. I am part of the team that builds their tools.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#62
Reminded me of Julie Snyder's ten month battle with MCI over immense charges she never incurred. Agents seemed to make up new offices and procedures to assure her that her issue had been elevated and this time it would be different.

It was only fully resolved after she put the story on This American Life.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/253/t...

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#63

For examples of excellent Tech. Support, I recommend GoDaddy, Infusionsoft, Managed.com (PowerDNN). These people know their stuff. And they speak English. For execrable support, see Google.

I don't know why I keep seeing this comment on HN, but Google has good support for all paid products.

Even Google Fiber, which is a direct competitor with the terribly rated cable companies, has excellent customer service (if you actually need to call them). I needed to migrate an account from my wife's gmail to mine and they had it changed within a few minutes. Since then the service has had 99.9% uptime (the one time it did go down was during the World Series, and they comped the entire city 2 days).

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#64
post #43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch the next episode. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.

My conspiracy theory lately has been that Netflix's search and basic UI is terrible on purpose, to make us not notice the shifts and declines in the streaming catalog quality. For the life of me I can't imagine why else they would ignore calls to improve it.

I'll just throw in Amazon Prime video as well.

Why do all these companies have such horrible UI?

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#65
post #43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch the next episode. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.

My conspiracy theory lately has been that Netflix's search and basic UI is terrible on purpose, to make us not notice the shifts and declines in the streaming catalog quality. For the life of me I can't imagine why else they would ignore calls to improve it.

It's not. It's just that most people do extremely simple searches. They experimented with more complex interfaces and while they please a minority of power-users, they reduce overall engagement by confusing the masses.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#66
post #40
post #23

Coming from a tech support background. I used to be a top performer at a support company and set most of the records for call times etc. I was hated by most of my peers, and many of my supervisors because I set numbers to low for most of the other teams and they were under preforming. I am not saying this to brag but to state how awful most support workers are. Most of my co-workers had no idea what they were doing b…

> For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch the next episode. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.

My guess is that the general audience / user base simply doesn't care.

It's similar to the experience I had when I had to look for a replacement for rdio, which was closing down last year. I was shocked to learn how inferior and lacking all other services were - yet rdio was the one that had to close shop. One of the most obvious issues is the fact that you can't filter/browse releases by label on any service but rdio. Being able to see a label's catalog and new releases is an essential feature for music enthusiasts, yet the general public apparently couldn't care less. It seems if you use these features, you're already part of a very niche crowd. I guess it's not too different from searching by actor or director on Netflix.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#67
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribe to netflix once a year and binge watch all my favorite shows during the holidays. I tried staying subscribed to them, but their UI is so bad I never know what is new and what isn't. Why can't they have a list of newly added shows that isn't a huge picture. I don't enjoy horizontal scrolling.

Instantwatcher.com is your answer, with direct links to watch on netflix.

The sliders for dates and ratings are awesome.

Now that's how you do a UI.

And they're running this for free, while Amazon and Netflix are supposed to be spending billions on this.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#68

For examples of excellent Tech. Support, I recommend GoDaddy, Infusionsoft, Managed.com (PowerDNN). These people know their stuff. And they speak English. For execrable support, see Google.

I don't know why I keep seeing this comment on HN, but Google has good support for all paid products.

Probably because there are different experiences with different Google products. Apps for Education Customers, for example, get a working product but very little in the way of support. You can submit whatever you want, but whether Google chooses to answer is another story, not always with a happy ending.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#70
post #40
post #23

Coming from a tech support background. I used to be a top performer at a support company and set most of the records for call times etc. I was hated by most of my peers, and many of my supervisors because I set numbers to low for most of the other teams and they were under preforming. I am not saying this to brag but to state how awful most support workers are. Most of my co-workers had no idea what they were doing b…

> For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch the next episode. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.

Netflix is a shining bastion of usability compared to the VOD services in my country. When replaying tv, the better one has unskippable ads (for only twice the price of netflix!), the worse one doesn't have a fast-forward and starts the replay ten minutes before the actual show.

I think the problem is due to being tv companies to start with. They're not geared towards an interactive experience with viewers and have no idea how to provide it.

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