Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#81

Post by majewsky » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:26 AM UTC

smm2000 wrote: post #46

beyondcompute wrote: post #3

A solution? The good ol' government regulation. If companies 'cannot' achieve acceptable standards of customer support service, those standards should be imposed on them. This game where ordinary customers are so often the victims must be put to an end.

The government can start with improving customer support at DMV Currently, it's 4 months wait to schedule a driving test and 2 months wait to schedule an office appointment. Of course, if you have an urgent issue you can just visit DMV without an appointment but you should be ready to spend 3+ hours waiting in line.

If you're not satisfied with the amount of personnel at DMV, then you should vote the guys out who cut their personnel budget time and time again.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#82

Post by ranveeraggarwal » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 9:29 AM UTC

It's worse when you have the exact problem laid out and the customer support guy knows less about the product than you do. Two years ago, I talked to the Dell Customer Support about my failing hard drive and showed him the tests I ran to verify it.

He: What do you mean by failing hard drive? Is it not booting?

I showed him bad sectors in my hard drive.

He: Is the problem solved?

I: No! You have done literally nothing to solve my problem.

He: But your laptop is booting now, right?

I: Yes, it is, for now. But it won't in a few days.

He: I think your laptop has no problem. Have a good day.

I did take a backup and my hard drive did fail completely a week later. So much for tech support.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#83

Post by tonyedgecombe » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:36 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #13

I like "Fast Customer", which waits on hold for you. I was thinking of something like that years ago, and was going to call it "Holdmaster". It makes sense as an app; pre-smartphone, it would have required a box attached the phone line. Microsoft once had customer support lines where you could call in for about $195, but if it was their bug, you got a refund. Fun gamble.

You used to get a couple of incidents with an MSDN subscription, the one time I used it the service was appalling, it took them weeks to respond.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#84

Post by wccrawford » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:41 AM UTC

>To get better service by phone, dial the prompt designated for “sales” or “to place an order,” which almost always gets you an onshore agent, while tech support is usually offshore with the associated language difficulties.

I ended up doing something similar the other day. I wanted to cancel my TV service, and was considering upgrading my internet speed. I called in and chose the option to cancel a service. I was on hold for 30 minutes.

I had to hang up and then called back a little later, but this time I asked for "upgrades". I got someone immediately. He was a little non-plussed when I immediately asked to cancel a service, but didn't scold me. I did then upgrade my speed.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#85

Post by FollowSteph3 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:54 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #78

97s wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The company I worked for was a huge customer support company that developed the firmware that went on most of the modems that rural internet companies used. Some of the smaller companies paid on per a call resolution basis. The other's just had large contracts for us to help them no matter how many calls we got. It was a major problem when customers called in for simple questions that were outside of what we…

> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)

He said he had a prototype in JavaScript, that's still s long way from a multi-user production system. The problem generally is that management doesn't understand this.

There's concurrency issues, as in what happens if two technicians are accessing the same ticket. There's the backend system which will also include user details etc. there's the whole account management portion. And so on.

A prototype is great but there's still a good a lot of work left to productize something ;)

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#86

Post by mikekchar » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:56 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #77

Joeri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> They're not geared towards an interactive experience with viewers and have no idea how to provide it. This can't be the full answer. Starting an on-demand stream 10 minutes before the actual show is so mind-boggingly stupid that I cannot imagine incompetence to be the root cause. In other words, Hanlon's Razor does not apply, and malice on their part should be assumed.

My non-malice potential answer is that they are broadcast streaming to save bandwidth. They wait until either they have a certain number of people or 10 minutes elapses and then start showing it. They may not be realising that they never meet the required number and always wait 10 minutes.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#87

Post by mikekchar » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 11:02 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #30

madebysquares wrote: post #24

I worked tech support for 6 years for a large telco in the northeast it was the most miserable, mundane part of my life. They were so poorly managed and so focused on bottom line that customers wants and needs were not important. Helping customers was the least important thing as long as you didn't talk to them for more than 8 minutes and you didn't appear to be rude.

>>They were so poorly managed and so focused on bottom line that customers wants and needs were not important. That's because tech support is regarded as a "cost center", where the primary goal is always to keep costs to a minimum. This is why most support centers prioritize making the customer go away rather than actually solving their problems, documenting the issues and working with other teams to find permanent f…

And this is why shrink wrapped software sucks. Having worked in that industry, customer service gets a call: "The application crashed and corrupted my save file!", "How many seats have you purchased?", "Seat? I just bought one copy for myself.", "Thank you for reporting the bug. Please buy the next version to see if the bug is fixed". Of course, developers never even get the bug because the customer only bought 1 copy. I never saw a bug from a customer that bought less than 200 copies :-(

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#88

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 11:30 AM UTC

snowmaker wrote: post #65

thearn4 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In other words they reimplemented network tv.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#89

Post by aangjie » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 11:48 AM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #33

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #12

The article focuses mostly on big incumbents. If you're in more of a startup mindset doing awesome support has tremendous ROI.

From the scriptures: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Ermm.. I always thought while it read fine, it also assumes that you'll eventually find a way to make those things scale.(be it automation, guided voice faq ? etc..). Doing things that don't scale is a good way a to corner portions of a market with big and established players, but not enough. aka necessary but not sufficient.

Re: Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

#90

Post by majewsky » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

FollowSteph3 wrote: post #85

majewsky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)

He said he had a prototype in JavaScript, that's still s long way from a multi-user production system. The problem generally is that management doesn't understand this. There's concurrency issues, as in what happens if two technicians are accessing the same ticket. There's the backend system which will also include user details etc. there's the whole account management portion. And so on. A prototype is great but the…

I know, that's why I added the smiley.