4 ms·

Can anyone with experience explain why companies continue to spend money on "level 1 support"? It seems to universally make the support process worse - so why d

by Lxr 9y ago

Can anyone with experience explain why companies continue to spend money on "level 1 support"? It seems to universally make the support process worse - so why do it? Is anyone honestly helped by scripted responses that would literally be more effective if handled by bots?

Nexxxeh 9y ago
To oversimplify in a crude way, the idiots who are helped by first line are the people that can't read the support docs and can't write well enough for bots to parse what they need. Tying up more competent and thus more expensive support agent time just to handle something that a drunk monkey could manage seems at first glance like poor value. When handled correctly, that first line should make life better for everyone. It should improve availability of competent second life engineers for people that need them.
Spooky23 9y ago
Because management hits their KPIs and customers either figure it out themselves, learn something, or go away. As long as the business is growing, nobody cares which outcome happens.
tallanvor 9y ago
"Bots", although not necessarily the type that people think of today have been handling a lot of work for years. --Generally by providing a link to a possible solution. L1 support gets anything not handled by bots, and are generally able to close around 80-90% of the cases. That's why you spend money on L1 support first. L2 handles another 10-15% of the cases, and then depending on the company, L3/L4/developers handle the rest. Google either has an environment where L3 support doesn't talk to customers (which would be pretty unusual), or they have a huge backlog and just don't have resources to keep up with the cases reaching them. If the latter is the issue, there's not a quick fix - even if you have funding to higher more of them (and they usually earn quite a bit more than L1/L2 support), you have to find people with the necessary skills, or be constantly trying to get people ready to move up (L1 -> L2 -> L3, etc.), which can be difficult if you're dealing with outsourcing on one or more levels, and if the tiers are located in different locations. The other thing is that if you're one person who has reported the issue and you have an individual subscription, the truth is that it might not make sense for the company to spend as much time that is require to fix your issue - If you're spending $100/year, why should the company spend $10,000 to fix the issue? It sucks, of course, but that's a simple truth about software support.

by Lxr 9y ago

Nexxxeh 9y ago

To oversimplify in a crude way, the idiots who are helped by first line are the people that can't read the support docs and can't write well enough for bots to parse what they need. Tying up more competent and thus more expensive support agent time just to handle something that a drunk monkey could manage seems at first glance like poor value. When handled correctly, that first line should make life better for everyone. It should improve availability of competent second life engineers for people that need them.

Spooky23 9y ago

Because management hits their KPIs and customers either figure it out themselves, learn something, or go away. As long as the business is growing, nobody cares which outcome happens.

tallanvor 9y ago

"Bots", although not necessarily the type that people think of today have been handling a lot of work for years. --Generally by providing a link to a possible solution. L1 support gets anything not handled by bots, and are generally able to close around 80-90% of the cases. That's why you spend money on L1 support first. L2 handles another 10-15% of the cases, and then depending on the company, L3/L4/developers handle the rest. Google either has an environment where L3 support doesn't talk to customers (which would be pretty unusual), or they have a huge backlog and just don't have resources to keep up with the cases reaching them. If the latter is the issue, there's not a quick fix - even if you have funding to higher more of them (and they usually earn quite a bit more than L1/L2 support), you have to find people with the necessary skills, or be constantly trying to get people ready to move up (L1 -> L2 -> L3, etc.), which can be difficult if you're dealing with outsourcing on one or more levels, and if the tiers are located in different locations. The other thing is that if you're one person who has reported the issue and you have an individual subscription, the truth is that it might not make sense for the company to spend as much time that is require to fix your issue - If you're spending $100/year, why should the company spend $10,000 to fix the issue? It sucks, of course, but that's a simple truth about software support.