11 ms·

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a compan

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

davesque 10y ago
Yes, this. It just makes it seem like they're hoping you'll give up and go away.
Arzh 10y ago
That's because it is not a bug, it is what they want, for whatever reason...
TillE 10y ago
"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.
- 0942v8653 10y ago
  But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    This seems like a valid bug per the Reddit thread [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_onedrive_looks_at_useragent_to/df7wnk1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...
  - nathantotten 10y ago
    That doesn't sound right at all. It's been a number of years since I have been at MS, but any engineering team I worked on would have wanted this feedback and fixed the problem. Not supported officially doesn't mean a dev can't spend an hour on a likely simple fix to help a customer - depending on who saw this feedback there are certainly many devs at MS who would fix this without even being asked. I'm willing to bet that's happening right now and this will be resolved in a few days.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I was fortunate to participate in a bug fix driven by MS (for the Tedious sql adapter for node), and it was impressive. The issue was noticed by someone who worked on Azure (not Azure SQL), who upstreamed the report to appropriate people in the SQL teams who then dug in and found that there was something that wasn't being set right in the tedious adapter. It wasn't an MS product, or supported, and they still took the time to help. I'd be surprised if one didn't find similar responsiveness from at least some of the o365 developers. More often than not, something is "unsupported" not because it doesn't or shouldn't work, but because it doesn't have the dedicated testing resources and in case there is an edge case bug that would be excessively costly to fix (ex: dealing with stupid flexbox issues with the current version of Safari on mac). In any case, it doesn't matter, the response was a bad, canned response that doesn't take into account the troubleshooting the person reporting it already did.
  - rorosaurus 10y ago
    Feedback from support teams is pretty much the only way the engineering team learns what we need to improve.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    Why does a web app care about my OS? "Supported" in this context is clearly "we want more money from your despite you already having paid the agreed amount for this product".
    - krylon 10y ago
      I was wondering, too. Firefox is Firefox, no matter what OS it runs on. If OneDrive works well with Firefox on Windows, why wouldn't it on Linux or any other operating system?
- EpicEng 10y ago
  So... Just lie? This isn't going anywhere, the platform isn't supported. I'm pretty sure the powers that be remembered that Linux was a thing when they made that decision.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
    You don't have to lie. Under these circumstances, I often say to the people reporting it very directly "That's not a supported use-case, but I will make sure the relevant people know anyway". I then go and let the person who owns that product know. Half the time, they say "that's not a supported usecase and it's a pain to change, so it's not happening". The other half of the time, they shrug and say "Put a ticket in, if I can fix it easily I will, I'll take a look when I have time". Unsupported doesn't mean "no", it means "we're not going to invest noticeable effort into it, and it's lowest priority". Easy fixes may happen, but results are not guaranteed.
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      Sure... But we're talking platform support here, not some corner case no one thought about during design.
      - Sir_Substance 10y ago
        No, we're not. Read the statement again. If you fuck with the headers, you get a totally different and much higher performance result _on linux_. The charitable hypothesis someone else raised is that there's a bug in how onedrive handles unknown user agents. Neither you nor I have any idea how much effort that will take to fix. You'd hope not a lot but you should never make assumptions about another man's stack. But if it is low effort to fix, Microsoft could get a small land-slide of partial compatibility with one change, which is good PR even if they don't officially support the platforms. It's definitely worth asking nicely rather than giving up and moping about it.
- dhimes 10y ago
  But they are deliberately throttling this, in an effort to get people to have to use Windows.
  - sixothree 10y ago
    That's an assumption. There exist other explanations that are just as valid.
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      I agree that other things might be possible, but looking a the history, assuming malice is a reasonable starting point with microsoft. It has been right many times in the past.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
simias 10y ago
I don't really see it that way. I don't think Microsoft would be expected to offer support for an operating system that's not officially supported. I could see only two ways this could've turned out, either "we're planning to support linux in a future version, we'll keep you updated when that happens" or exactly what we got here. If this is actually a bug then I think it would be rather inappropriate for the support guy to escalate this to the devs when it only happens for an unsupported platform. And if they're purposefully throttling linux hosts then they won't admit to it there. So the entire exchange (including Dam Lec deciding to abandon Onedrive) seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  Obviously it works on Linux; the slow down is the direct result of OneDrive's User-Agent based code paths.
  - askmike 10y ago
    And what if some programmers are put unto fixing this, to realise the normal code path has a number of other bugs for linux? If you write web software you clearly define what you support and what you do not. I've fallen into the "I know this browser is not supported, but everything works except for X" trap. Where you first spend a month fixing other bugs that also don't work, only to end up with a more complex QA dev process since you need to make sure all new features also work in this other browser or environment.
    - dv_dt 10y ago
      It's true, but the flip side is don't offer a web based product if you can't support a wide range of web browsers on multiple OSes. This gives me flashbacks to old (hopefuly dying) "web based" enterprise apps that were browser accessible only by a one magic version of windows explorer with a giant slew of automatically downloaded browser extensions. Just produce an app if that's all that can be supported.
      - 10y ago
nkkollaw 10y ago
Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to give good tech support. It's not as if the support guy has any power to be helpful, they probably give him some copy and paste responses according to what the problem is. The best tech support that I happened to use was Apple's. The guy actually seemed to care about my problem, and bypassed the protocol to help me out when I spilled coffee on my laptop.
- plgs 10y ago
  "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team" It's not something they can say. The product is unsupported and the "tech team" won't care.
  - LamaOfRuin 10y ago
    It can always be passed on. The 'tech team' may say 'wontfix' because it's unsupported, but it's very clearly a bug that could bite them on 'supported' systems in the future as user-agent sniffing is notoriously unreliable.
  - ajford 10y ago
    Doesn't mean they can't file the issue. Then the team just checks the box on their ticket solution that says "WONT FIX" or "NOT SUPPORTED" and moves on with their lives. Customers would feel respected, the workaround would be found and used, and no one would feel ignored. It would leave a customer happier than telling them they don't warrant interest.
    - rwallace 10y ago
      Personally I'd be happier being told honestly I don't warrant interest, unsupported platform, I need to look elsewhere, than being strung along with false impressions.
avoutthere 10y ago
As the former head of a customer support department, I can tell you that the most important aspect of communication with a customer is empathy. Even more than expertise, if you can demonstrate that you care about their problem and will get to the bottom of it, the encounter will most likely result in customer retention.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Similarly, has anyone else noticed the overly fake "I want to help you." Interactions with more companies lately? I mean it couldn't be more scripted if someone tried. I applaud the effort, but actual caring/empathy is meaningful, the fake, scripted attempts at it that I've been experiencing lately feel much more condescending than anything else.
  - Gracana 10y ago
    Yep. Comcast is a big fan of this method, which is really infuriating and condescending because they pretend to understand my frustration while they fail to fix my problem and pass me off to someone else.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  Really? Because nothing grinds my gears more than fake sympathy/empathy coupled with an inability/unwillingness to understand my problem and an urgency to get me off the phone. Which is pretty much how customer support works. What I want from customer support is for someone to take the time to understand why I am calling. Not to pat me on the head and tell me things will be alright while urgently trying to get rid of me.
  - krylon 10y ago
    But that is exactly what the GP said. You want somebody to care about you and your problem and to make an effort to solve it.
    - cptskippy 10y ago
adsfqwop 10y ago
Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enormous feeling of dread. I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site.
- ionwake 10y ago
  I completely agree. Most of the time I get the impression the person writing it is a employee who is reading someone else's notes, has no idea what the answer even is, and then does the best to cover it up by using abstractions, off topic insight and buzz words. Sorry Microsoft just my opinion regarding this one area. Room to improve maybe ?
- easytiger 10y ago
  As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    I don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).
    - dnautics 10y ago
      yeah sometimes I have to check the date on the solution to make sure I really want to do that
    - mod 10y ago
      Yes. Ubuntu, you'd better be including a version. Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old. I often just scope my google search. Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for. In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.
aendruk 10y ago
When I called in about this bug a few months ago the support representative was surprisingly helpful. He didn't bat an eye when I said I was using Ubuntu, quickly researched the issue while we were talking, and suggested (while making clear that it was not an official response) that I work around it by spoofing the user agent string. Seemed genuinely sympathetic.
Nition 10y ago
After this post blew up, it seems Microsoft PR has swept in and deleted that original useless post, replacing it with a new one saying the problem has now been resolved. If only every legitimate support thread could be a top post on Hacker News!

Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.

davesque 10y ago

Yes, this. It just makes it seem like they're hoping you'll give up and go away.

Arzh 10y ago

That's because it is not a bug, it is what they want, for whatever reason...

TillE 10y ago

"Not supported" is an acceptable first half of a response, but all you really have to add is "I'll pass this on to the tech team" and the tone changes entirely.

0942v8653 10y ago
But if it's not supported, they can't pass it on to the tech team; that would be against policy. Changing policy to make companies support unsupported software is a hard sell.
- ethbro 10y ago
  This seems like a valid bug per the Reddit thread [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_onedrive_looks_at_useragent_to/df7wnk1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/60nj67/office_365_on...
- nathantotten 10y ago
  That doesn't sound right at all. It's been a number of years since I have been at MS, but any engineering team I worked on would have wanted this feedback and fixed the problem. Not supported officially doesn't mean a dev can't spend an hour on a likely simple fix to help a customer - depending on who saw this feedback there are certainly many devs at MS who would fix this without even being asked. I'm willing to bet that's happening right now and this will be resolved in a few days.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I was fortunate to participate in a bug fix driven by MS (for the Tedious sql adapter for node), and it was impressive. The issue was noticed by someone who worked on Azure (not Azure SQL), who upstreamed the report to appropriate people in the SQL teams who then dug in and found that there was something that wasn't being set right in the tedious adapter. It wasn't an MS product, or supported, and they still took the time to help. I'd be surprised if one didn't find similar responsiveness from at least some of the o365 developers. More often than not, something is "unsupported" not because it doesn't or shouldn't work, but because it doesn't have the dedicated testing resources and in case there is an edge case bug that would be excessively costly to fix (ex: dealing with stupid flexbox issues with the current version of Safari on mac). In any case, it doesn't matter, the response was a bad, canned response that doesn't take into account the troubleshooting the person reporting it already did.
- rorosaurus 10y ago
  Feedback from support teams is pretty much the only way the engineering team learns what we need to improve.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Why does a web app care about my OS? "Supported" in this context is clearly "we want more money from your despite you already having paid the agreed amount for this product".
  - krylon 10y ago
    I was wondering, too. Firefox is Firefox, no matter what OS it runs on. If OneDrive works well with Firefox on Windows, why wouldn't it on Linux or any other operating system?
EpicEng 10y ago
So... Just lie? This isn't going anywhere, the platform isn't supported. I'm pretty sure the powers that be remembered that Linux was a thing when they made that decision.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  You don't have to lie. Under these circumstances, I often say to the people reporting it very directly "That's not a supported use-case, but I will make sure the relevant people know anyway". I then go and let the person who owns that product know. Half the time, they say "that's not a supported usecase and it's a pain to change, so it's not happening". The other half of the time, they shrug and say "Put a ticket in, if I can fix it easily I will, I'll take a look when I have time". Unsupported doesn't mean "no", it means "we're not going to invest noticeable effort into it, and it's lowest priority". Easy fixes may happen, but results are not guaranteed.
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    Sure... But we're talking platform support here, not some corner case no one thought about during design.
    - Sir_Substance 10y ago
      No, we're not. Read the statement again. If you fuck with the headers, you get a totally different and much higher performance result _on linux_. The charitable hypothesis someone else raised is that there's a bug in how onedrive handles unknown user agents. Neither you nor I have any idea how much effort that will take to fix. You'd hope not a lot but you should never make assumptions about another man's stack. But if it is low effort to fix, Microsoft could get a small land-slide of partial compatibility with one change, which is good PR even if they don't officially support the platforms. It's definitely worth asking nicely rather than giving up and moping about it.
dhimes 10y ago
But they are deliberately throttling this, in an effort to get people to have to use Windows.
- sixothree 10y ago
  That's an assumption. There exist other explanations that are just as valid.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    I agree that other things might be possible, but looking a the history, assuming malice is a reasonable starting point with microsoft. It has been right many times in the past.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

simias 10y ago

I don't really see it that way. I don't think Microsoft would be expected to offer support for an operating system that's not officially supported. I could see only two ways this could've turned out, either "we're planning to support linux in a future version, we'll keep you updated when that happens" or exactly what we got here. If this is actually a bug then I think it would be rather inappropriate for the support guy to escalate this to the devs when it only happens for an unsupported platform. And if they're purposefully throttling linux hosts then they won't admit to it there. So the entire exchange (including Dam Lec deciding to abandon Onedrive) seems perfectly reasonable to me.

CodeWriter23 10y ago
Obviously it works on Linux; the slow down is the direct result of OneDrive's User-Agent based code paths.
- askmike 10y ago
  And what if some programmers are put unto fixing this, to realise the normal code path has a number of other bugs for linux? If you write web software you clearly define what you support and what you do not. I've fallen into the "I know this browser is not supported, but everything works except for X" trap. Where you first spend a month fixing other bugs that also don't work, only to end up with a more complex QA dev process since you need to make sure all new features also work in this other browser or environment.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    It's true, but the flip side is don't offer a web based product if you can't support a wide range of web browsers on multiple OSes. This gives me flashbacks to old (hopefuly dying) "web based" enterprise apps that were browser accessible only by a one magic version of windows explorer with a giant slew of automatically downloaded browser extensions. Just produce an app if that's all that can be supported.
    - 10y ago

nkkollaw 10y ago

Definitely. The guy would've probably gotten fired if he was honest: "that almost looks like it was done on purpose to force people to use Windows", but he could have avoided completely dismissing the guy. For instance, by saying: "thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team. In the meantime you can keep using your solution if it solves the problem for you". It's probably hard for a huge company to give good tech support. It's not as if the support guy has any power to be helpful, they probably give him some copy and paste responses according to what the problem is. The best tech support that I happened to use was Apple's. The guy actually seemed to care about my problem, and bypassed the protocol to help me out when I spilled coffee on my laptop.

plgs 10y ago
"thanks for reporting this, I'll pass this to the tech team" It's not something they can say. The product is unsupported and the "tech team" won't care.
- LamaOfRuin 10y ago
  It can always be passed on. The 'tech team' may say 'wontfix' because it's unsupported, but it's very clearly a bug that could bite them on 'supported' systems in the future as user-agent sniffing is notoriously unreliable.
- ajford 10y ago
  Doesn't mean they can't file the issue. Then the team just checks the box on their ticket solution that says "WONT FIX" or "NOT SUPPORTED" and moves on with their lives. Customers would feel respected, the workaround would be found and used, and no one would feel ignored. It would leave a customer happier than telling them they don't warrant interest.
  - rwallace 10y ago
    Personally I'd be happier being told honestly I don't warrant interest, unsupported platform, I need to look elsewhere, than being strung along with false impressions.

avoutthere 10y ago

As the former head of a customer support department, I can tell you that the most important aspect of communication with a customer is empathy. Even more than expertise, if you can demonstrate that you care about their problem and will get to the bottom of it, the encounter will most likely result in customer retention.

tracker1 10y ago
Similarly, has anyone else noticed the overly fake "I want to help you." Interactions with more companies lately? I mean it couldn't be more scripted if someone tried. I applaud the effort, but actual caring/empathy is meaningful, the fake, scripted attempts at it that I've been experiencing lately feel much more condescending than anything else.
- Gracana 10y ago
  Yep. Comcast is a big fan of this method, which is really infuriating and condescending because they pretend to understand my frustration while they fail to fix my problem and pass me off to someone else.
cptskippy 10y ago
Really? Because nothing grinds my gears more than fake sympathy/empathy coupled with an inability/unwillingness to understand my problem and an urgency to get me off the phone. Which is pretty much how customer support works. What I want from customer support is for someone to take the time to understand why I am calling. Not to pat me on the head and tell me things will be alright while urgently trying to get rid of me.
- krylon 10y ago
  But that is exactly what the GP said. You want somebody to care about you and your problem and to make an effort to solve it.
  - cptskippy 10y ago

adsfqwop 10y ago

Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enormous feeling of dread. I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site.

ionwake 10y ago
I completely agree. Most of the time I get the impression the person writing it is a employee who is reading someone else's notes, has no idea what the answer even is, and then does the best to cover it up by using abstractions, off topic insight and buzz words. Sorry Microsoft just my opinion regarding this one area. Room to improve maybe ?
easytiger 10y ago
As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  I don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).
  - dnautics 10y ago
    yeah sometimes I have to check the date on the solution to make sure I really want to do that
  - mod 10y ago
    Yes. Ubuntu, you'd better be including a version. Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old. I often just scope my google search. Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for. In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.

aendruk 10y ago

When I called in about this bug a few months ago the support representative was surprisingly helpful. He didn't bat an eye when I said I was using Ubuntu, quickly researched the issue while we were talking, and suggested (while making clear that it was not an official response) that I work around it by spoofing the user agent string. Seemed genuinely sympathetic.

Nition 10y ago

After this post blew up, it seems Microsoft PR has swept in and deleted that original useless post, replacing it with a new one saying the problem has now been resolved. If only every legitimate support thread could be a top post on Hacker News!