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Such are the joys of modern "customer support" -- human beings don't scale, because they need to sleep and can only talk to one other human at a time. So you h
by username223 9y ago
Such are the joys of modern "customer support" -- human beings don't scale, because they need to sleep and can only talk to one other human at a time. So you hire the cheapest ones you can find, and instruct them to be minimally helpful. Even better, make them all "managers," so "can I please speak to your manager" will just take you to another minimum-wage employee.
If you want actual customer support these days, your best bet is to create a PR problem for the company via social media, because PR flacks are paid enough to matter.
- acdha 9y agoIn cases without competition. I live in an area with three gigabit-capable ISPs and the difference in support quality is unbelievable, even for the Comcast and Verizon customers – just calling from a competitive neighborhood gets your call processed differently.
- walrus01 9y agoWhich city?
- goldenkey 9y agoSounds like Seattle
- acdha 9y agoWashington DC - my neighborhood has Comcast, RCN, and Verizon. Our neighbors report better service on all three — and when you go a couple blocks south where the FIOS rollout stopped, regression to normal sets in for Comcast. We also have municipal fiber but they’ve chosen not to make that available for residential service which is really disappointing but … politics.
- walrus01 9y agoSo, channel bonded docsis3.0 and 3.1 on Comcast and rcn, and gpon fiber from Verizon? Or are the cable operators also doing singlemode to the house now?
- acdha 9y agoDefinitely for RCN. Comcast ads have claimed fiber but I don’t know whether that’s available or just planned since I won’t do business with Comcast.
- tialaramex 9y agoA smarter, and perhaps even more profitable way to approach this problem is "OK, we want almost everything that happens to customers to be a self-serve situation" and then make your (fewer) call centre employees highly trained troubleshooters who can figure out why _this_ customer wasn't able to self-serve and get that sorted for them. The result is a better customer experience (usually everything just works, when you need to talk to a human the human is an _expert_ who helps fix your problem, not a drone working from a fixed script) and it can be much cheaper if done right. Definitely if you think of your product/ service as "premium" this is the correct model to have.
- ryandrake 9y agoLots of people simply do not like self serve. I get that companies want to cut costs, which is why we got endless telephone menu trees, then support web sites with crappy search, then automated telephone agents, then chat bots, and on and on. And the public has devised all these various tactics to skip that crap. I just want to talk to a damned human being rather than spend 10x the time navigating your poorly thought out Customer Avoidance Systems! Sometimes I need a drone and sometimes I need an expert. I have yet to see an automated system that could successfully determine which tier support I needed.
- username223 9y agoOften I prefer "self-serve," but sometimes I like to talk to a human who knows about the system that has created my problem, and can quickly fix it. That's why there are websites dedicated to showing people how to skip through phone menus and reach actual humans, even if those humans are soundboard operators paid almost nothing to make you go away.
- jakeogh 9y agolink? I refuse to talk to computers.
- username223 9y agoThe fact that these pages exist tells you all you need to know about the fundamental user-hostility of modern tech companies: https://gethuman.com https://gethuman.com https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-to-a-Human-when-Calling-a-Business https://www.wikihow.com/Talk-to-a-Human-when-Calling-a-Busin...