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> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing t

by tjr225 6y ago

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now. This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person. I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone. I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals. On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross. Anyway- support; never again.

CarbyAu 6y ago
For me the biggest issue was authority/power on the Service Desk. The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are: - logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you. - "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket ...you feel powerless. Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..." Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.
- Gracana 6y ago
  As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe the company they represent. I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...
  - dfxm12 6y ago
    I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus. For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...
    - SeerKlein 6y ago
      I think you're on to something. I've been working for as a contractor for a big health insurance company and that seems to be the impression for the purpose of my job: "Get the customer off the phone as soon as you can." In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."
nkohari 6y ago
> even if our problems are harder and more stressful. I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)
- quelltext 6y ago
  Having experience in both roles (and some more, all on the technical end), I don't think so. Of course, it's not a simple harder/easier question and it doesn't apply to everyone but if you are good at supporting customers you naturally care about stuff and the customer's issues. You file an internal ticket, have to keep watching it but in many cases there's just no progress or even a response. Ultimately when there's a real bug you are just being an (internal) customer requiring support. The support quality of a company is not only determined by the right customer support employees or vendors but how good the internal support and escalation paths are. As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared. Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year". The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too. FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.
  - InfiniteRand 6y ago
    I work in a senior support role and I am constantly telling my juniors not to take things personally. Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that). A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane
flatline 6y ago
I was in a role to take customer calls for years, and did straight up support for a while early in my career. I found that if I took a genuine interest in their problems, and an interest in the individual, it turned a lot of bad attitudes around. Someone calls and is angry, frustrated with the thing we’ve made, it was my job to help them, not just fix the issue but feel happy with the product, too. That being said, there’s no helping some people, and some products may be too bad to rightfully support.
- eecc 6y ago
  Ah true. Last thing I did before leaving a support role - in a company that regretted hiring support people in EU and was actively driving us out of the door - was indeed this. This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse. I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow. Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)
  - danmaz74 6y ago
    Care to elaborate on why regretting customer service in the EU?
    - eecc 6y ago
      Salary. It’s much cheaper to outsource a “cost center” to a country where employees have passable proficiency in English and costs of living that are significantly lower...
deepGem 6y ago
I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high. I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas. IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve. Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.
- pbourke 6y ago
  > Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place. How companies actually do this: IVR>You can find self service options on our Customer> 0 IVR> .. site to check your ... Customer> 0 IVR> ... transfer funds and ... Customer> 000000...
  - deepGem 6y ago
    Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today. On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard. Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.
- piokoch 6y ago
  Very true, there is a very good blog post by Joel Spolsky on that: a good support person will spot recurring technical and report that to devs. Some offshore "consultant" support or badly paid "call center person" does not give a crap about product quality; more, such support has no incentives to provide any meaningful feedback, as the more support incidents gets reported, the more money they earn.
croh 6y ago
Agree with you. Apart from rude customers, sometimes you face below problems (mostly process/org related) - limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it. - have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SeerKlein 6y ago
Amen, I work in IT support and when I try to provide good customer service that is empathetic and customer-centric, which takes time, I get seen as worse than other agents who get the customer off the phone as soon as possible. After a while, I changed to be more "results-oriented", which does not help for customer focus.

by tjr225 6y ago

CarbyAu 6y ago

For me the biggest issue was authority/power on the Service Desk. The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are: - logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you. - "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket ...you feel powerless. Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..." Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.

Gracana 6y ago
As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe the company they represent. I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...
- dfxm12 6y ago
  I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus. For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...
  - SeerKlein 6y ago
    I think you're on to something. I've been working for as a contractor for a big health insurance company and that seems to be the impression for the purpose of my job: "Get the customer off the phone as soon as you can." In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."

nkohari 6y ago

> even if our problems are harder and more stressful. I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)

quelltext 6y ago
Having experience in both roles (and some more, all on the technical end), I don't think so. Of course, it's not a simple harder/easier question and it doesn't apply to everyone but if you are good at supporting customers you naturally care about stuff and the customer's issues. You file an internal ticket, have to keep watching it but in many cases there's just no progress or even a response. Ultimately when there's a real bug you are just being an (internal) customer requiring support. The support quality of a company is not only determined by the right customer support employees or vendors but how good the internal support and escalation paths are. As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared. Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year". The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too. FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.
- InfiniteRand 6y ago
  I work in a senior support role and I am constantly telling my juniors not to take things personally. Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that). A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane

flatline 6y ago

I was in a role to take customer calls for years, and did straight up support for a while early in my career. I found that if I took a genuine interest in their problems, and an interest in the individual, it turned a lot of bad attitudes around. Someone calls and is angry, frustrated with the thing we’ve made, it was my job to help them, not just fix the issue but feel happy with the product, too. That being said, there’s no helping some people, and some products may be too bad to rightfully support.

eecc 6y ago
Ah true. Last thing I did before leaving a support role - in a company that regretted hiring support people in EU and was actively driving us out of the door - was indeed this. This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse. I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow. Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)
- danmaz74 6y ago
  Care to elaborate on why regretting customer service in the EU?
  - eecc 6y ago
    Salary. It’s much cheaper to outsource a “cost center” to a country where employees have passable proficiency in English and costs of living that are significantly lower...

deepGem 6y ago

I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high. I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas. IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve. Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.

pbourke 6y ago
> Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place. How companies actually do this: IVR>You can find self service options on our Customer> 0 IVR> .. site to check your ... Customer> 0 IVR> ... transfer funds and ... Customer> 000000...
- deepGem 6y ago
  Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today. On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard. Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.
piokoch 6y ago
Very true, there is a very good blog post by Joel Spolsky on that: a good support person will spot recurring technical and report that to devs. Some offshore "consultant" support or badly paid "call center person" does not give a crap about product quality; more, such support has no incentives to provide any meaningful feedback, as the more support incidents gets reported, the more money they earn.

croh 6y ago

Agree with you. Apart from rude customers, sometimes you face below problems (mostly process/org related) - limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it. - have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SeerKlein 6y ago

Amen, I work in IT support and when I try to provide good customer service that is empathetic and customer-centric, which takes time, I get seen as worse than other agents who get the customer off the phone as soon as possible. After a while, I changed to be more "results-oriented", which does not help for customer focus.