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I've worked for large and small companies, and I've never understood the outsourcing/robot-ting of your phone customer care people. First and sometimes last lin

I've worked for large and small companies, and I've never understood the outsourcing/robot-ting of your phone customer care people. First and sometimes last line of defense in gaining or keeping a customer. Best Buy was probably the most egregious example of this.

3814058 6y ago
Having worked in a call center for Internet, Telephone, and TV about 3 years ago. In my experience most people have the same stupid question. 1. Do I plug in the green wire in the green port or in the red port (They call before they have even tried to connect things). 2. My TV isn't working when they haven't pressed "Source". 3. Something is wrong, restart router. 4. My WiFi is slow when they have one router for 200 m2 in a house of concrete. 5. A few % of the costumers make up the majority of the calls because of how they are.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The simple answer could be to charge a fee for support calls. Either a flat fee per minute, or a fee applied to the account that gets refunded if it ends up being an issue on their side that can't be self-solved. They would reach a "sweet spot" where the fee would still be affordable but dissuasive enough to cut down on the amount of stupid calls, and would actually allow them to hire less, but more skilled support advisors.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  In the mid-90s, I probably spent > 50 hours on my ISP’s support. Would call most days after school. Turned out to be a UART issue: the 8250 would error on 9/10 packets and we needed to get a 16550 serial card. Took a very long time to get someone to determine that. They probably lost money for a couple years on our account.
- supergeek133 6y ago
  Yeah, of course you're going to have a majority bucket of calls. The issue is when it goes above and beyond that. There isn't critical thinking. - This customer called 3 times in the past two days and we told them to reboot their router. Maybe it's something else. (I've had personal experience with this and it took over a month to get someone to replace my line from the pole to the house). - In the case of retail, it is much more complex (returns, repairs, warranty, pricing, etc). It turns from an "OK" experience to a very bad one pretty quick when the script doesn't solve it.

3814058 6y ago

Having worked in a call center for Internet, Telephone, and TV about 3 years ago. In my experience most people have the same stupid question. 1. Do I plug in the green wire in the green port or in the red port (They call before they have even tried to connect things). 2. My TV isn't working when they haven't pressed "Source". 3. Something is wrong, restart router. 4. My WiFi is slow when they have one router for 200 m2 in a house of concrete. 5. A few % of the costumers make up the majority of the calls because of how they are.

Nextgrid 6y ago
The simple answer could be to charge a fee for support calls. Either a flat fee per minute, or a fee applied to the account that gets refunded if it ends up being an issue on their side that can't be self-solved. They would reach a "sweet spot" where the fee would still be affordable but dissuasive enough to cut down on the amount of stupid calls, and would actually allow them to hire less, but more skilled support advisors.
Scoundreller 6y ago
In the mid-90s, I probably spent > 50 hours on my ISP’s support. Would call most days after school. Turned out to be a UART issue: the 8250 would error on 9/10 packets and we needed to get a 16550 serial card. Took a very long time to get someone to determine that. They probably lost money for a couple years on our account.
supergeek133 6y ago
Yeah, of course you're going to have a majority bucket of calls. The issue is when it goes above and beyond that. There isn't critical thinking. - This customer called 3 times in the past two days and we told them to reboot their router. Maybe it's something else. (I've had personal experience with this and it took over a month to get someone to replace my line from the pole to the house). - In the case of retail, it is much more complex (returns, repairs, warranty, pricing, etc). It turns from an "OK" experience to a very bad one pretty quick when the script doesn't solve it.