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I have used those chats, talked to humans, and had my issues resolved - but I can't say it was a great experience. I had to keep the relevant tab open and acti

I have used those chats, talked to humans, and had my issues resolved - but I can't say it was a great experience. I had to keep the relevant tab open and actively watch it because there is no sane method to get the notification if it's in background. Can't get distracted for too long, gotta actively watch that stupid chat for when someone comes in or replies after "I need a few minutes to do something for you, please hold on". Also, I was nervous that any accidental navigation actions (like clicking on some page link) I take in my browser would lead to loss of that chat session. Basically, I was trying to not breathe in the direction of that chat and hope that it would work. I mean, it shouldn't, but I've seen it happen. Honestly, I'd rather see a bunch of links to various messaging platforms. Or a phone number I can send a text to. Humans or machines, short or long response times - at least I know the underlying technologies are reliable.

quadrifoliate 4y ago
I have had the same feeling – "this is okay, but could be way better"; I think a big part is in the lack of context. Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? I am logged in to the website, they should be able to see that I am Account # 820914 and currently viewing Order # 788321. Ensuring that this sort of context communication as the lowest bar for an in-app chat would go a long way towards making me prefer it to a conversation where I have to gather and route relevant information.
- eropple 4y ago
  > Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? Because their integration isn't very good. Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    > Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system. Be scared of those. They typically use client side JavaScript to read a cookie to know which username is active. There is usually no verification of that info, so obviously it could be faked by a malicious client. The docs say that, but it's way too easy to just trust the info rather than setup a properly secure solution.
    - eropple 4y ago
      This is a good point. You can definitely verify a user off of context (signed tokens, etc.), but you're probably right that a lot of folks don't do a great job of that!
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I could see that being really bad... A 'social engineer' could talk support people into helping them hijack an account.
      - RulerOf 4y ago
        I would love to watch the inevitable presentation we'll be seeing at some security convention within the next few years.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?"
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?" But presumably you are talking to customer-service agents, not representatives, and what are they supposed to do about it? I share your frustration, but this seems to be just a recipe for spreading that frustration, not for resolving it. (Unless you meant something else, e.g., you are professionally involved in call-center design, in which case I applaud your being a voice of sense in that domain, and thank you for it!)
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I am polite but firm most of the time with agents, but I do get chances to talk with people who have the authority to change things. Raising a stink and ‘let me talk to your supervisor’ really can lead to tickets getting forwarded to people who can fix the process or at least give agents training in how to avoid or manage ‘lights on nobody home’ situations. Lately I have been facing a breakdown in business processes with my local electric utility that first disconnected my electricity because one of my tenants made a mistake. I think they finally understand that I have three services at two houses at one address, but I went through two periods since then of getting no electric bill for months (which I won’t let slide because the last time they stopped billing me I got disconnected.) Getting that fixed involved waiting three hours on hold which got me talking to regulators again. The crew building the new deck at the other house has also deferred work because they have been unable to get through to anyone there who can turn the service off temporarily so they can work near where the wire comes in.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I'd say sometimes those services are successful but sometimes they aren't. It's not unusual for those things to claim "I am a human" but the human is nowhere to be found. For me it is a general pet peeve that everybody wants to open up UI elements that cover up whatever it is I want to interactive. There's a bad idea which keeps coming back which are attempts to replace asynchronous communications (web forums, emails, ...) with more synchronous communications such as chat sessions, discord, etc. I can't wait until somebody tries making you go to a waiting area in "the metaverse" and spend an hour looking like a dork waiting for help. Lately I have been appreciating how you can a question to a site like https://www.dpreview.com/forums https://www.dpreview.com/forums probably get a bogus answer in an hour but have multiple great answers in two weeks.
elondaits 4y ago
I agree. I also had to use a chat that put you on hold until an operator became free, while the site itself had a auto-logout if you didn’t click a box after X minutes waiting.
CaptainZapp 4y ago
> Or a phone number I can send a text to. Or a phone number that you can actually call and which is picked up by a human within a reasonable time frame and who is actually empowered to solve your problem. And to my surprise that actually still exists. Just recently I had a stellar experience with the support of my hosting provider. 30 seconds wait, a person who knew what I'm talking about. Solving the problem instantly by mailing the relevant form, while we still chatted. All resolved in less than 5 minutes. For what it's worth: that was hostpoint.ch. I'm not invested in any way. Just a very happy customer after 2 really good support experiences (one by email)
- drdaeman 4y ago
  > Or a phone number that you can actually call Of course, but I skipped this because I had tried to stay in scope of a text chatting. Personally, I'd love to see more businesses accepting texts (SMS/Signal/Matrix 3PIDs/WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever works for them - just clearly indicating that they do). I'm an US resident but not a native English speaker - and while I've chatted online a lot, I have relatively limited experience talking to other people. So I have some difficulty talking to people, especially if my and their accents make conversation... less smooth than we both would prefer. Or at least I feel some non-negligible amounts of uneasiness before having to make an actual call. It's not too bad and I'm trying to improve as much as I can, but for some important conversations I'd rather use more reliable methods if those are available. And to extend on this example, due to family matters I'm currently overseas in Mexico - and I only know very basic Spanish that is nowhere sufficient for any intelligible conversation beyond ordering food or asking for directions. Thankfully, almost every business seem to have a WhatsApp number so with a help of translation software I was able to do quite a bunch of non-trivial requests. And while my case is maybe not that important (except for me), there are always folks with genuine speech and/or hearing disabilities who could be unable to use voice communication channels at all. Oh, and texts allow asynchronous communications. I love that I can text my dentist office and schedule an appointment. I don't expect them to reply immediately (they won't if I text off-hours), but I know that they would receive my message and respond when they have a moment. Which is all I need, and my phone will notify me when they reply back.

quadrifoliate 4y ago

I have had the same feeling – "this is okay, but could be way better"; I think a big part is in the lack of context. Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? I am logged in to the website, they should be able to see that I am Account # 820914 and currently viewing Order # 788321. Ensuring that this sort of context communication as the lowest bar for an in-app chat would go a long way towards making me prefer it to a conversation where I have to gather and route relevant information.

eropple 4y ago
> Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? Because their integration isn't very good. Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  > Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system. Be scared of those. They typically use client side JavaScript to read a cookie to know which username is active. There is usually no verification of that info, so obviously it could be faked by a malicious client. The docs say that, but it's way too easy to just trust the info rather than setup a properly secure solution.
  - eropple 4y ago
    This is a good point. You can definitely verify a user off of context (signed tokens, etc.), but you're probably right that a lot of folks don't do a great job of that!
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I could see that being really bad... A 'social engineer' could talk support people into helping them hijack an account.
    - RulerOf 4y ago
      I would love to watch the inevitable presentation we'll be seeing at some security convention within the next few years.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?"
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?" But presumably you are talking to customer-service agents, not representatives, and what are they supposed to do about it? I share your frustration, but this seems to be just a recipe for spreading that frustration, not for resolving it. (Unless you meant something else, e.g., you are professionally involved in call-center design, in which case I applaud your being a voice of sense in that domain, and thank you for it!)
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I am polite but firm most of the time with agents, but I do get chances to talk with people who have the authority to change things. Raising a stink and ‘let me talk to your supervisor’ really can lead to tickets getting forwarded to people who can fix the process or at least give agents training in how to avoid or manage ‘lights on nobody home’ situations. Lately I have been facing a breakdown in business processes with my local electric utility that first disconnected my electricity because one of my tenants made a mistake. I think they finally understand that I have three services at two houses at one address, but I went through two periods since then of getting no electric bill for months (which I won’t let slide because the last time they stopped billing me I got disconnected.) Getting that fixed involved waiting three hours on hold which got me talking to regulators again. The crew building the new deck at the other house has also deferred work because they have been unable to get through to anyone there who can turn the service off temporarily so they can work near where the wire comes in.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I'd say sometimes those services are successful but sometimes they aren't. It's not unusual for those things to claim "I am a human" but the human is nowhere to be found. For me it is a general pet peeve that everybody wants to open up UI elements that cover up whatever it is I want to interactive. There's a bad idea which keeps coming back which are attempts to replace asynchronous communications (web forums, emails, ...) with more synchronous communications such as chat sessions, discord, etc. I can't wait until somebody tries making you go to a waiting area in "the metaverse" and spend an hour looking like a dork waiting for help. Lately I have been appreciating how you can a question to a site like https://www.dpreview.com/forums https://www.dpreview.com/forums probably get a bogus answer in an hour but have multiple great answers in two weeks.

elondaits 4y ago

I agree. I also had to use a chat that put you on hold until an operator became free, while the site itself had a auto-logout if you didn’t click a box after X minutes waiting.

CaptainZapp 4y ago

> Or a phone number I can send a text to. Or a phone number that you can actually call and which is picked up by a human within a reasonable time frame and who is actually empowered to solve your problem. And to my surprise that actually still exists. Just recently I had a stellar experience with the support of my hosting provider. 30 seconds wait, a person who knew what I'm talking about. Solving the problem instantly by mailing the relevant form, while we still chatted. All resolved in less than 5 minutes. For what it's worth: that was hostpoint.ch. I'm not invested in any way. Just a very happy customer after 2 really good support experiences (one by email)

drdaeman 4y ago
> Or a phone number that you can actually call Of course, but I skipped this because I had tried to stay in scope of a text chatting. Personally, I'd love to see more businesses accepting texts (SMS/Signal/Matrix 3PIDs/WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever works for them - just clearly indicating that they do). I'm an US resident but not a native English speaker - and while I've chatted online a lot, I have relatively limited experience talking to other people. So I have some difficulty talking to people, especially if my and their accents make conversation... less smooth than we both would prefer. Or at least I feel some non-negligible amounts of uneasiness before having to make an actual call. It's not too bad and I'm trying to improve as much as I can, but for some important conversations I'd rather use more reliable methods if those are available. And to extend on this example, due to family matters I'm currently overseas in Mexico - and I only know very basic Spanish that is nowhere sufficient for any intelligible conversation beyond ordering food or asking for directions. Thankfully, almost every business seem to have a WhatsApp number so with a help of translation software I was able to do quite a bunch of non-trivial requests. And while my case is maybe not that important (except for me), there are always folks with genuine speech and/or hearing disabilities who could be unable to use voice communication channels at all. Oh, and texts allow asynchronous communications. I love that I can text my dentist office and schedule an appointment. I don't expect them to reply immediately (they won't if I text off-hours), but I know that they would receive my message and respond when they have a moment. Which is all I need, and my phone will notify me when they reply back.