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Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

85 points by kanamekun 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
beyondcompute 10y ago
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.
- katzgrau 10y ago
  Yay, another set of regulations for business owners to navigate (it's pretty hard to keep up with the existing ones) and another government agency to manage and enforce them. I'm more than happy to let the free market work this one out.
  - toodlebunions 10y ago
    What specific regulations do you have trouble navigating?
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    Yeah. My internet tech support has been incredible. I have many amazing stories. All possible because the big telecoms were forced to wholesale, allowing competitors to exist in at least a limited capacity. I will never go back to rogers or Bell again simply because of how amazing the support is at teksavvy.
- toodlebunions 10y ago
  Or the "free market" solution would be to allow those calling tech support to pay an extra $50 per hour fee for priority service with a knowledgable human
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    This is my employer's support model, and it works pretty well - all customers get unlimited ticket/email support, and you can upgrade to phone and live chat support for a percentage of your monthly bill. It's like the saying that 20% of your customers use 80% of your support. This way you can incentivize those customers to pay a premium for even more of the support package they obviously want. Everyone else can have the minimal support interaction they prefer.
  - andyjdavis 10y ago
    Although if I encountered that as a customer I would be suspicious that the free support is being made deliberately bad to artificially drive revenue of the premium support team.
- sverige 10y ago
  That's hilarious! Having run a few call centers, the costs involved in upping service levels from, say, 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds to, say, 98% in 10 seconds, grow geometrically. If regulations were passed that mandated service levels, many companies would take Google's approach and simply not offer phone support at all. And we all know how great their support is. The solution is to not use any services from monopolies, as the article points out. But of course, that's impossible for most people.
  - Trundle 10y ago
    Google offers customer support by phone.
    - sverige 10y ago
      Really? What's the number for help with gmail? I can't find it anywhere on their site. YouTube either, if it's different. Also, I need a number to reach support at Facebook, if you have it.
      - Trundle 10y ago
        Customer Gmail: 1-877-355-5787 YouTube: 1-855-500-2756 Never done business with Facebook, can't help you there sorry!
        marksc 10y ago
        Facebook outsources support to certified regional specialists. You can find contact information for your region/niche on their partner directory site: https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/ https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/
      - cornellwright 10y ago
        If you pay for Google Apps they do. I've had to call them a few times, and they were actually fairly helpful, even calling me back the next day to make sure the problem was resolved. Judging by the number they called me from their call center is in Ireland.
- baddox 10y ago
  Ever interacted with the equivalent of tech support for government processes or services? I have, and it doesn't inspire me to put government on the list of potential ways to solve tech support.
- prostoalex 10y ago
  Seems like extending 30-day return policies further out might achieve this. Random commoditized tech I get off Amazon/eBay frequently has a note asking to contact them first to resolve any issues before returning and/or submitting negative feedback. I'd imagine the sellers would not be as accommodating, were it not for Amazon's no-questions-asked-customer-is-always-right return policy.
- douche 10y ago
  Hah. I would give my left nut to have competent helpdesk people on the other end, and I'm a vendor who's dealing with the higher-level management and IT people in these organizations. I can't imagine how poorly trained and skilled the front-line techs are.
- smm2000 10y ago
  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.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    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.
- KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
  Perhaps said regulator could start by regulating the IRS and the DMV.
- pkaye 10y ago
  They do need a regulation that we can cancel a service using the same methods as ordering the service. If I can order a service online, I should be able to cancel it online.
- vmarsy 10y ago
  Which companies would be subject to such regulation? For instance, a startup without an established customer support center would be fined and forced to shut down because of those fines or because of the money spent on customer center ? What would be the kpi for customer service? Time spent on the wait line? Customer ratings?! Business days before an email reply? What if someone malicious starts DDoS me with fake customer service requests just to make me unable to deliver an "acceptable standard of customer support service"?
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
The article focuses mostly on big incumbents. If you're in more of a startup mindset doing awesome support has tremendous ROI.
- notatoad 10y ago
  >doing awesome support has tremendous ROI. But diminishing returns. If support had a great ROI, everybody would do a good job of it. It really only has a good ROI if you're a new entrant in a competitive market.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  From the scriptures: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
  - aangjie 10y ago
    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.
    - rdiddly 10y ago
      The point is, as a startup, try to blow your customers' minds, including with excellent support (agrees w/parent). It acknowledges that there may be some difficulty in scaling it (agrees w/sibling), but statistically you're unlikely to get big enough to have to worry about that (especially if you don't provide excellent support), so don't worry about it, just do it. And if you ever get to that point, you might find it scales better than you thought it would (agrees with you).
Animats 10y ago
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.
- techsupporter 10y ago
  Microsoft still does though it hasn't been $195 in quite some time. The offering you're thinking of is called Professional Pay-Per-Incident (instead of Premier). Current price is $499 though you're guaranteed to spend virtually the entirety of your incident on the phone with an outsourcer in India. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/offerprophone https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/offerprophone
  - rincebrain 10y ago
    FWIW, the one time I had to use this service, they were extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and effective (and in India).
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Most of the Premier engineers are in India as well. If they're outsourced, they are a very good outsourcer. I have had many good experiences with them.
    - yardie 10y ago
      The turnover in call centers in India I quite high. If you are getting a knowledgable engineer in India they are probably getting near US wages.
- TylerE 10y ago
  Some companies (I know Amazon does for one, and I'm pretty sure GEICO does too) now have "call me when an operator is available" functionality. I suspect this is relatively trivial to implement in a modern phone system, and probably saves money since you aren't tieing up circuits with people sitting on hold.
passenger 10y ago
A smaller response time actually leads to more requests from customers IMHO. Customers are more likely to contact you for "mundane" tasks when they are assured of a quick response.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  This might be true. When I worked at a helpdesk, I was given praise for having the fastest call times on the floor. In the same review though, I was critiqued just as strongly for not being personal enough. It was and telling.
97s 10y ago
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 besides reading off a script, any question outside of the box and boom, off to tier 2. One problem is: I found that the quicker I answered questions the more questions I received. If the customer knew that I knew what I was doing and I was able to help them efficiently they had more questions. This led me to ponder how to solve the problem. I ended up getting my supervisor to create a FAQ page based on a ton of the questions that I was constantly asked. I was then able to refer customers to this page and actually say honestly that it would answer their questions. A lot of the problem with these tech giants like ATT, Comcast, etc, they have horrible interfaces. 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. It's horrible. I called multiple times trying to figure out how to get around this. They said there is no fix and it is how the system works. I googled it and millions of people have the same issue. It's absurd, yet they haven't fixed it. I don't think they even care, or it cost them money for customers to watch on demand so they want to make it as aggravating as possible. Another interesting aspect of being able to help people quickly is you never get good reviews or people asking to speak to your supervisor. People are so pleased that they were able to get their answer solved in a manner they could understand in a really fast time they just breath a big sigh of relief and say "thank you so much", and then get off the phone. I had co-workers who would spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with someone sitting there trying to explain something to them, and since they were so patient, the customer always asked to speak to supervisor to thank them for their patience. For some reason the customer always thinks they are the problem in this situation. It really boggles my mind. Just a view.
- simonebrunozzi 10y ago
  You are the Alexey Stakhanov [1] of your era. Unfortunately, there's no love for people like you :( [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov
madebysquares 10y ago
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.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>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 fixes.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    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 :-(
Zigurd 10y ago
Both Hover and Squarespace have amazing, wonderful, useful tech support. They are selling somewhat technical products to what are, at best, a "power user" level of customer. They make it work.
- nathancahill 10y ago
  Rackspace is amazing as well. Which they advertise, but it's 100% true.
arbuge 10y ago
"“It’s utterly maddening because the thing about conversations is that when I say something to you, I believe I’m having influence on the conversation,” .... "AT&T, Comcast and Verizon Communications did not respond to requests for comment."
GnarfGnarf 10y ago
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.
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  I don't know why I keep seeing this comment on HN, but Google has good support for all paid products.
  - cjslep 10y ago
    Google also has consumer-facing customer service reps all around the globe. I am part of the team that builds their tools.
  - wincy 10y ago
    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).
  - csydas 10y ago
    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.
michaelbuddy 10y ago
Clever headline. Almost makes you think the NYTimes is telling the truth. But the places I've worked, the desire was always to resolve the phone calls one and done. Get the answer, get them resolved so they don't have to call back. The conspiracy theory the NYT is cooking up is clickbait.
- elbrownos 10y ago
  Not such a clever headline; the only people who say 'purposely' are toddlers and Americans.
- yardie 10y ago
  That hasn't been my experience. Worked a few tech support jobs and the big ones wanted the call finished in 8 minutes no matter the outcome. Now, they would tell you to resolve the issue, wink wink, but your performance was based only on call time.
brownbat 10y ago
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/the-middle-of-nowhere?act=2 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/253/t...
sllabres 10y ago
Reading the article and comming accross the obviously true line of “Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service” this came to my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkPcTNnGNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkPcTNnGNk
AtlasLion 10y ago
A differentiation should be made between b2b and b2c. B2b support is way better with much higher SLA's.
- jmme 10y ago
  Yes. I currently work in b2b tech support (well, its my last week). The job is better and service much different that described in this article -- SLA response times are enforced, but there is expectation that some tickets will take hours over the phone, sometimes over days. The main issues are retention and hiring people with the right knowledge and/or ability to learn. New hires are often useless for months on the phone, and the most talented people jump ship even after aggressive promotions. Both issues fundamentally come down to pay.
keithpeter 10y ago
"The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support." UK: significant problem with adsl broadband, kept going round in circles over a period of weeks, was advised by the tech support to phone the sales number and ask to cancel contract. Issue escalated in minutes and solved in an hour. Apparently customer retention has higher priority to customer support.
ranveeraggarwal 10y ago
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.
- tallanvor 10y ago
  One of the reasons I stopped buying Apple products was this type of interaction. I had a Macbook Air, and it would freeze up randomly for several seconds at a time. There were no error messages or anything, and finally found out when I tried to upgrade the OS that it wouldn't install on the drive because it was failing. Eventually I figured out how to find the SMART status, and took it in since it was under warranty. The rep kept trying to get me to reinstall the OS since "if that's the problem, they'd have to charge me for it". Never mind that the installer wouldn't run... After about 15 minutes of this back and forth with him trying to prove that nothing was wrong and me showing the SMART status, he finally went in back and asked someone who told him to take it in.
wccrawford 10y ago
>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.

85 points by kanamekun 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

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.

katzgrau 10y ago
Yay, another set of regulations for business owners to navigate (it's pretty hard to keep up with the existing ones) and another government agency to manage and enforce them. I'm more than happy to let the free market work this one out.
- toodlebunions 10y ago
  What specific regulations do you have trouble navigating?
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  Yeah. My internet tech support has been incredible. I have many amazing stories. All possible because the big telecoms were forced to wholesale, allowing competitors to exist in at least a limited capacity. I will never go back to rogers or Bell again simply because of how amazing the support is at teksavvy.
toodlebunions 10y ago
Or the "free market" solution would be to allow those calling tech support to pay an extra $50 per hour fee for priority service with a knowledgable human
- stephengillie 10y ago
  This is my employer's support model, and it works pretty well - all customers get unlimited ticket/email support, and you can upgrade to phone and live chat support for a percentage of your monthly bill. It's like the saying that 20% of your customers use 80% of your support. This way you can incentivize those customers to pay a premium for even more of the support package they obviously want. Everyone else can have the minimal support interaction they prefer.
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  Although if I encountered that as a customer I would be suspicious that the free support is being made deliberately bad to artificially drive revenue of the premium support team.
sverige 10y ago
That's hilarious! Having run a few call centers, the costs involved in upping service levels from, say, 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds to, say, 98% in 10 seconds, grow geometrically. If regulations were passed that mandated service levels, many companies would take Google's approach and simply not offer phone support at all. And we all know how great their support is. The solution is to not use any services from monopolies, as the article points out. But of course, that's impossible for most people.
- Trundle 10y ago
  Google offers customer support by phone.
  - sverige 10y ago
    Really? What's the number for help with gmail? I can't find it anywhere on their site. YouTube either, if it's different. Also, I need a number to reach support at Facebook, if you have it.
    - Trundle 10y ago
      Customer Gmail: 1-877-355-5787 YouTube: 1-855-500-2756 Never done business with Facebook, can't help you there sorry!
      - marksc 10y ago
        Facebook outsources support to certified regional specialists. You can find contact information for your region/niche on their partner directory site: https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/ https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/
    - cornellwright 10y ago
      If you pay for Google Apps they do. I've had to call them a few times, and they were actually fairly helpful, even calling me back the next day to make sure the problem was resolved. Judging by the number they called me from their call center is in Ireland.
baddox 10y ago
Ever interacted with the equivalent of tech support for government processes or services? I have, and it doesn't inspire me to put government on the list of potential ways to solve tech support.
prostoalex 10y ago
Seems like extending 30-day return policies further out might achieve this. Random commoditized tech I get off Amazon/eBay frequently has a note asking to contact them first to resolve any issues before returning and/or submitting negative feedback. I'd imagine the sellers would not be as accommodating, were it not for Amazon's no-questions-asked-customer-is-always-right return policy.
douche 10y ago
Hah. I would give my left nut to have competent helpdesk people on the other end, and I'm a vendor who's dealing with the higher-level management and IT people in these organizations. I can't imagine how poorly trained and skilled the front-line techs are.
smm2000 10y ago
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.
- majewsky 10y ago
  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.
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
Perhaps said regulator could start by regulating the IRS and the DMV.
pkaye 10y ago
They do need a regulation that we can cancel a service using the same methods as ordering the service. If I can order a service online, I should be able to cancel it online.
vmarsy 10y ago
Which companies would be subject to such regulation? For instance, a startup without an established customer support center would be fined and forced to shut down because of those fines or because of the money spent on customer center ? What would be the kpi for customer service? Time spent on the wait line? Customer ratings?! Business days before an email reply? What if someone malicious starts DDoS me with fake customer service requests just to make me unable to deliver an "acceptable standard of customer support service"?

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

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

notatoad 10y ago
>doing awesome support has tremendous ROI. But diminishing returns. If support had a great ROI, everybody would do a good job of it. It really only has a good ROI if you're a new entrant in a competitive market.
rdiddly 10y ago
From the scriptures: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- aangjie 10y ago
  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.
  - rdiddly 10y ago
    The point is, as a startup, try to blow your customers' minds, including with excellent support (agrees w/parent). It acknowledges that there may be some difficulty in scaling it (agrees w/sibling), but statistically you're unlikely to get big enough to have to worry about that (especially if you don't provide excellent support), so don't worry about it, just do it. And if you ever get to that point, you might find it scales better than you thought it would (agrees with you).

Animats 10y ago

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.

techsupporter 10y ago
Microsoft still does though it hasn't been $195 in quite some time. The offering you're thinking of is called Professional Pay-Per-Incident (instead of Premier). Current price is $499 though you're guaranteed to spend virtually the entirety of your incident on the phone with an outsourcer in India. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/offerprophone https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/offerprophone
- rincebrain 10y ago
  FWIW, the one time I had to use this service, they were extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and effective (and in India).
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Most of the Premier engineers are in India as well. If they're outsourced, they are a very good outsourcer. I have had many good experiences with them.
  - yardie 10y ago
    The turnover in call centers in India I quite high. If you are getting a knowledgable engineer in India they are probably getting near US wages.
TylerE 10y ago
Some companies (I know Amazon does for one, and I'm pretty sure GEICO does too) now have "call me when an operator is available" functionality. I suspect this is relatively trivial to implement in a modern phone system, and probably saves money since you aren't tieing up circuits with people sitting on hold.

passenger 10y ago

A smaller response time actually leads to more requests from customers IMHO. Customers are more likely to contact you for "mundane" tasks when they are assured of a quick response.

bpchaps 10y ago
This might be true. When I worked at a helpdesk, I was given praise for having the fastest call times on the floor. In the same review though, I was critiqued just as strongly for not being personal enough. It was and telling.

97s 10y ago

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 besides reading off a script, any question outside of the box and boom, off to tier 2. One problem is: I found that the quicker I answered questions the more questions I received. If the customer knew that I knew what I was doing and I was able to help them efficiently they had more questions. This led me to ponder how to solve the problem. I ended up getting my supervisor to create a FAQ page based on a ton of the questions that I was constantly asked. I was then able to refer customers to this page and actually say honestly that it would answer their questions. A lot of the problem with these tech giants like ATT, Comcast, etc, they have horrible interfaces. 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. It's horrible. I called multiple times trying to figure out how to get around this. They said there is no fix and it is how the system works. I googled it and millions of people have the same issue. It's absurd, yet they haven't fixed it. I don't think they even care, or it cost them money for customers to watch on demand so they want to make it as aggravating as possible. Another interesting aspect of being able to help people quickly is you never get good reviews or people asking to speak to your supervisor. People are so pleased that they were able to get their answer solved in a manner they could understand in a really fast time they just breath a big sigh of relief and say "thank you so much", and then get off the phone. I had co-workers who would spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with someone sitting there trying to explain something to them, and since they were so patient, the customer always asked to speak to supervisor to thank them for their patience. For some reason the customer always thinks they are the problem in this situation. It really boggles my mind. Just a view.

simonebrunozzi 10y ago
You are the Alexey Stakhanov [1] of your era. Unfortunately, there's no love for people like you :( [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov

madebysquares 10y ago

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.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>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 fixes.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  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 :-(

Zigurd 10y ago

Both Hover and Squarespace have amazing, wonderful, useful tech support. They are selling somewhat technical products to what are, at best, a "power user" level of customer. They make it work.

nathancahill 10y ago
Rackspace is amazing as well. Which they advertise, but it's 100% true.

arbuge 10y ago

"“It’s utterly maddening because the thing about conversations is that when I say something to you, I believe I’m having influence on the conversation,” .... "AT&T, Comcast and Verizon Communications did not respond to requests for comment."

GnarfGnarf 10y ago

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.

chipperyman573 10y ago
I don't know why I keep seeing this comment on HN, but Google has good support for all paid products.
- cjslep 10y ago
  Google also has consumer-facing customer service reps all around the globe. I am part of the team that builds their tools.
- wincy 10y ago
  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).
- csydas 10y ago
  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.

michaelbuddy 10y ago

Clever headline. Almost makes you think the NYTimes is telling the truth. But the places I've worked, the desire was always to resolve the phone calls one and done. Get the answer, get them resolved so they don't have to call back. The conspiracy theory the NYT is cooking up is clickbait.

elbrownos 10y ago
Not such a clever headline; the only people who say 'purposely' are toddlers and Americans.
yardie 10y ago
That hasn't been my experience. Worked a few tech support jobs and the big ones wanted the call finished in 8 minutes no matter the outcome. Now, they would tell you to resolve the issue, wink wink, but your performance was based only on call time.

brownbat 10y ago

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/the-middle-of-nowhere?act=2 http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/253/t...

sllabres 10y ago

Reading the article and comming accross the obviously true line of “Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service” this came to my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkPcTNnGNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkPcTNnGNk

AtlasLion 10y ago

A differentiation should be made between b2b and b2c. B2b support is way better with much higher SLA's.

jmme 10y ago
Yes. I currently work in b2b tech support (well, its my last week). The job is better and service much different that described in this article -- SLA response times are enforced, but there is expectation that some tickets will take hours over the phone, sometimes over days. The main issues are retention and hiring people with the right knowledge and/or ability to learn. New hires are often useless for months on the phone, and the most talented people jump ship even after aggressive promotions. Both issues fundamentally come down to pay.

keithpeter 10y ago

"The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support." UK: significant problem with adsl broadband, kept going round in circles over a period of weeks, was advised by the tech support to phone the sales number and ask to cancel contract. Issue escalated in minutes and solved in an hour. Apparently customer retention has higher priority to customer support.

ranveeraggarwal 10y ago

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.

tallanvor 10y ago
One of the reasons I stopped buying Apple products was this type of interaction. I had a Macbook Air, and it would freeze up randomly for several seconds at a time. There were no error messages or anything, and finally found out when I tried to upgrade the OS that it wouldn't install on the drive because it was failing. Eventually I figured out how to find the SMART status, and took it in since it was under warranty. The rep kept trying to get me to reinstall the OS since "if that's the problem, they'd have to charge me for it". Never mind that the installer wouldn't run... After about 15 minutes of this back and forth with him trying to prove that nothing was wrong and me showing the SMART status, he finally went in back and asked someone who told him to take it in.

wccrawford 10y ago

>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.