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Unlikely. Phone support was one of those things that was driving people insane before. Remember jokes about hold music, foreign accents and phone menus? I pers

• sleepybrett 4y ago
  the problem with menu based systems is that they often don't have a leaf for problems that they don't what to know about. I immediately try to find any way to escape a phone tree for all but the simplest things, and even then...
• throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I find that using phone support and being genuinely nice to the other person on the line is a nice way to sometimes get benefits you don't expect, like airplane upgrades... I purchased a used ipad and the only way to get the thing turned on was to talk to a customer support agent, who had to basically manually flip a database column for me. Besides these days you can either set a callback, or, just plain do work while you're on hold.
  • FpUser 4y ago
    And not so lucky (I suspect the majority) can not work when on hold
    • albert_e 4y ago
      Yes. I cannot work while on hold.
      • throwawaymaths 4y ago
        Housework, yardwork, folding laundry...
  • Scoundreller 4y ago
    Sometimes I play the game of being on hold with two vendors at the same time and hope they don't simultaneously pick up at the same time. It usually works out.
    • thewebcount 4y ago
      I have to do this when calling CVS. Our local CVS does not answer their phone if there’s literally anything else going on at the pharmacy. But I found that if I call from 2 phones, they will eventually pick up (after literally between 15 and 45 minutes of not answering). It’s pretty infuriating. I avoid using them, but every now and then my mail order pharmacy runs out of something, and I have to go back to using CVS for a month or two. Physical pharmacies in general have also gone way down hill in terms of customer service. I’ve literally gone into the store and stood at the counter for like 10 minutes waiting for someone to even acknowledge my existence. It’s not that they don’t see me, they just don’t care. They are overworked, so I kind of understand not being responsive, but a simple, “We’ll be with you in a few minutes,” would be nice. It’s pretty dehumanizing to stand there being ignored. And if you speak up, they usually snap at you, and then are rude when they do get around to helping you.
  • Scoundreller 4y ago
    My story about being nice: Once sent in a complaint that wasn't really a complaint, more of an FYI that one of their things was broken. Lo and behold, a few months later, I get an apologetic email with a $300 credit. It was obvious they didn't even read my complaint, and therefore won't fix it, but I'll take the $300. And no, they didn't cause me anywhere near $300 in harm by any measure.
• yosito 4y ago
  > Just firing off an email is far more efficient. Easier to do after office hours too. A lot of companies basically deny you service unless you call.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    It’s because emails continue to queue up and it’s impossible to answer them all. While people will actively avoid calling if at all possible and will drop off if it’s not important.
    • posguy 4y ago
      Sounds like shithole company behavior at its finest, who cares about responding to support queries after all? Cheaper to not backfill vacant support positions than engage with actually supporting your products.
      • Gigachad 4y ago
        Because you’ll find that support requests have various levels of importance. From “I’d like to change my account/billing” down to “something weird happened, can you explain this”, to “can you show me how to use this feature”. It would cost a fortune to pay support and developers to launch a full investigation every time something funny happens. So having slow support encourages users to only call if it’s reproducible and a real problem.
      • michaelmrose 4y ago
        Every company has finite time to give to support even if they heavily invest in it and people continually demonstrate how bad they are at basically everything. People treat emails to people they deem less important than them as asynchronous to be dealt with whenever and emails TO such folks as synchronous to be dealt with immediately. If not given immediate response they are liable to forget about it until its convenient for them to deal with it again and if the response is again not immediate they will forget about it again. People's initial problem statement may be insufficient to even establish identity let alone nature of problem and solution. This is usually established by repeated follow up questions sometimes repeating questions to get the actual answer because it turns out they had no idea about the actual answer or indeed don't know what words mean. Due to both of the above even simple issues are likely to become 12 step marathons with the associated cost of context switching to their problem 12 times. Worse due to the low cost of initiating an exchange they are likely to do so even when they could have resolved the issue in 10 seconds with google or even turning their head into the on position. Your suggestion would turn a well funded support center into a team of professional shit shovelers trying to clean the Aegean stables with teaspoons. An actual call queue intentionally and constantly drops matters too unimportant to invest 5-10 minutes in resolving and makes people do the whole shebang in one go by having them answer the follow up questions now.
• wlesieutre 4y ago
  The problem is that it's been replaced with either nothing or a help page that doesn't solve your problem. I recently had a company email me saying: > In this case, your review of___ has been flagged because we couldn’t verify its authenticity, and on that basis we’ve removed your review from our platform. > While we’re confident that this is the right call, we appreciate that sometimes we get it wrong. If you think there’s been a mistake here, please do let us know by replying to this email and a member of our Content Integrity Team will review this decision with you. What happens when you reply to that email as instructed? > Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, this email address is not monitored and this is an automated reply. Instead they direct you to some long ass form on their website asking about the URL of the review I'm contacting them about, which I have no idea (it was a response to a "how was your customer service experience, please rate us), and I'm not going to spend my time trying to find where it was. The whole experience was by email, I don't know if it even has a URL, but it's a required field on the form. The original email thread that they told me to reply to should have all the information they need, but instead of even generating a link that pre-fills it into the contact form, they just throw all the context away and say "go to our website and fill out the form" because my time is worth nothing to them. The extra irony is that I would complain to them about their service doing this, but there's no way to contact anyone useful with feedback. Honestly I assume it's all on purpose because if I bothered to fill out the form it would cost them 5 minutes of someone's time to have them review it.
  • albert_e 4y ago
    Someone "reduced" customer complaints by 95% by implementing the new process and got promoted.
  • yareally 4y ago
    Which company? Seems like we should all be avoiding them if possible
    • wlesieutre 4y ago
      I was trying not to name names because it's not really the point of the broader discussion, but on second thought I wasted enough of my time trying to post a review and complain about their stupid email system that I don't really care, it's Trustpilot. I take customer phone calls at my job so not a lot of sympathy for the companies trying to optimize helpfulness out of existence.
• skissane 4y ago
  I have a problem with one of my stock broker accounts-it has the wrong address on it. It is my old address I lived at years ago, before I opened this particular account-I never set it, but I think it somehow got stuck deep in their computer systems from one of my other accounts and got applied to this new account when I opened it. Anyway, go to the website, I see the wrong address - yet click the “edit” button to change it, and the edit screen has the right one, and won’t let me change it to the right one because it is already set. I call up the call centre - agent says he can see the same problem but he doesn’t have access to do anything about it. He told me to print out a paper change of address form to change my address from my current address to my current address, sign it, scan it (he emphasised it had to be signed pen to paper, and the form even says that), and email it in. I’m hoping that fixes it.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Have you filed a complaint with your country’s regulator of financial service providers? I would encourage you to do so.
    • skissane 4y ago
      From what I understand of the rules, you have to give the provider a reasonable opportunity to fix things. And then you have to use their own complaints process. And then, if that isn’t getting anywhere in a reasonable timeframe, then you can complain to the regulator. If you file a complaint with the regulator prematurely, it just gets referred back to the provider. I hope it gets fixed before I need to go down that path. I only just sent the email a couple of days ago, I’ll give them a few more days then try calling them again. Part of the problem seems to be - I have multiple accounts with the one broker (my domestic stock account, trust accounts for my kids, a separate account for foreign stock), and they maintain separate addresses for each account, and they can get out of synch. And the broker is owned by a bank, and I have products with the bank, and the bank also has separate addresses for each product, plus the bank and the broker’s systems are kind of half-integrated/half-not in an opaque way which contributes to this kind of problem. And the bank also owns an insurance company, and I have a policy with that insurance company, and they’ve got the same half-integrated/half-not thing going on with their insurance company too.
• fsckboy 4y ago
  > Remember jokes about hold music, foreign accents and phone menus? the only reason those jokes are not current is that either the phone line is now gone, or because you don't call it, knowing in advance that it's torture. The phone menu and tiered human support is worse now than it's ever been. ime the foreign accent problem is a little better, but i also rarely call so ymmv