As someone what worked in the Customer service/care industry, my two cent: Honestly the ability to talk to a human will not solve much if anything, most proble

As someone what worked in the Customer service/care industry, my two cent: Honestly the ability to talk to a human will not solve much if anything, most problem could be solved by extremely automatic system, not even ticket system are really needed. The main problem is the lack of the ABILITY of solve a problem. A very simple example: one common problem that user have is not having access to some kind of documentation, like bills, contract, recepits etc... now this is very simple problem to solve, except that as operator i didnt have access to the system to recover this kind of documentation! So, i could not help them, keep in mind that i could see the documentation just we did not have the ability to send it to the customer. I wasn't even a security problem since we could verify the identity of the costumer (to the point that we could make administrative changes to their contract) simply the software did not have the button "Send copy to customer". This is just a very simple example, but i could write here an entire book of situation like that. Most of the time i know how to solve a problem but i can't. NOW, how we solve this? From my point of view we need two thing, the first one is more money put into the customer service/care department, right now is a race to the bottom to a unsustainable point. But also we need to rethink HOW we handle support from the ground up, right now is often a complete separate department, often outsourced, that cannot in any way "talk" to the rest of the company!! This make solving problems often impossible, since we don't have an "API"(way) to solve a specific problem, (i asked for MONTHS... to have the ability to see some configurations of customer account, i could already see every form of personal information, including numbers and the european-equivalent of a social security number, but not the language selected for the UI) the support functions need to be bake-in into the product from the initial design, not as an afterthought. Until we change how we think about support functionality and consider the support agent job with the same "respect" (i'm not sure this is the right word) as the one of an engineer the ability to talk with a human will not help you. edit: Also the number of times i was talked-down from the Engineering department that blame everything on the "stupid-user" is infuriating!! Sometimes user make mistake, YOUR software/service NEED to be able to handle that! edit: grammar