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> It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats

> It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats are deeply disturbing to me), it works on a bad internet connection, it works asynchronously. This one is frustrating to me as well. After telling the chatbot about your problem and waiting 20 minutes to be connected with a real person, only to have them open with "Hi! How are you today?" and then pause the script for a response is incredibly grating. They also don't seem to be using any sort of functioning ticketing system or even hot-transfer, because being forced to re-explain the issue 3+ times to different reps on the same chat seems just as common as it was in the phone days.

boxedadin 4y ago
On top of messages being non-persistent, it seems that chat representatives take a minimum of five minutes per reply. It’s unclear if they’re (1) helping other people simultaneously (2) performing a slow corporate policy (3) multitasking. It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.
- vinnydiehl 4y ago
  It's very clear that they're assisting multiple people. It would be an incredible waste otherwise, but unfortunately these agencies likely stretch their support agents far too thin.
  - effingwewt 4y ago
    Oh,they very much are helping multiple people at once. I worked at a call center with a T-Mobile LOB, at which I had several friends working in their online chat dept. Support reps and sales reps alike were both required to be on at least 7 open chat windows or face termination. They could be shadowed at any time by an ops agent, who would ding them for not pasting proper replies (they frowned heavily upon real interactions- going 'off-script'), or having less than the 7 required chat windows. If these companies could they would nix phone agents entirely, and this is why- one agent becomes 7. Customer satisfaction? What even is that?

boxedadin 4y ago

On top of messages being non-persistent, it seems that chat representatives take a minimum of five minutes per reply. It’s unclear if they’re (1) helping other people simultaneously (2) performing a slow corporate policy (3) multitasking. It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.

vinnydiehl 4y ago
It's very clear that they're assisting multiple people. It would be an incredible waste otherwise, but unfortunately these agencies likely stretch their support agents far too thin.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Oh,they very much are helping multiple people at once. I worked at a call center with a T-Mobile LOB, at which I had several friends working in their online chat dept. Support reps and sales reps alike were both required to be on at least 7 open chat windows or face termination. They could be shadowed at any time by an ops agent, who would ding them for not pasting proper replies (they frowned heavily upon real interactions- going 'off-script'), or having less than the 7 required chat windows. If these companies could they would nix phone agents entirely, and this is why- one agent becomes 7. Customer satisfaction? What even is that?