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While the sentiment is lovely, the conclusions ignore business reality. I did some back-of-an-envelope calculations. A CS rep who “truly cares” is gonna set yo

While the sentiment is lovely, the conclusions ignore business reality. I did some back-of-an-envelope calculations. A CS rep who “truly cares” is gonna set you back around 50K[0] in salary, call it 75K total cost to employ. I don’t know what their average customer value is, but seems they start doing phone support at 40USD, and 24x7 chat support for all customers. Let’s be generous and assume 50USD/customer average. That means it takes at least 125 average customers to pay a CS rep’s salary. Now bear in mind it’s 24x7, so you need at least 8 CS reps. That means you need to be retaining 1000 customers per year just to break even on your CS team. That’s around 20 a week. The best customer support is the one your users never have to contact. If you can automate fixes (bonus points for automated pro-rated credits on bills based on downtime impact), or improve reliability, the customers with the highest value to you will stick with you. That’s not to say “give a shitty support experience because it doesn’t matter”, it’s just that it’s a solution to a different problem than the one presented here.

petsfed 2y ago
I think your math is not quite right here. You can probably get away with 1-2 good CS reps, provided the lower tiers have the right tools to triage things effectively. Put another way, if you have 1 CS rep that really cares, that does the followup calls, then you can employ 7-8 front-line CS reps at half the cost who just take diligent notes, and handle the common errors that customers make. I sincerely doubt that the person I have to call to help me connect my cable modem to my ISP makes even 40K a year. But all they have to do is follow a script, write down my answers to their questions, and escalate if the script calls for it. I agree, completely, however, that ideally, every real issue happens precisely once and results in a change in the automated failure response.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  > I sincerely doubt that the person I have to call to help me connect my cable modem to my ISP makes even 40K a year. That’s sort of my point… do you feel as though that rep really cares? Is that an outstanding customer support experience for you? Many folks would say ISPs and telcos have the worst customer service. You’re not wrong though that a good script can help a lot of users with simple issues, and as it turns out, that’s the kind of thing that’s actually pretty easy and effective to automate.
  - petsfed 2y ago
    It was actually one of the best Telco CS experiences I've ever had, and I think its because the gist of the call was "here are the numbers from my modem, so that you can authorize it to talk to your network, do you see it? Yes? Ok, we're done now". The main reason bad customer service happens is because the customer has a problem that the CS rep is not empowered to fix or escalate the problem. Its not a question of "caring", its a question of results. Its really hard to care about your job when faced with unrealistic expectations from the customer, and insufficient resources from the employer. A lot of folks with customer service departments could save a bundle on labor and earn a lot of goodwill if they would recognize that.
- deathanatos 2y ago
  > then you can employ 7-8 front-line CS reps at half the cost who just take diligent notes … the actual reality is that companies employ 7-8 front-line CS reps that can't even read the ticket, and end up asking questions already asked & answered by the form I was required to fill out during the ticket! I'm not buying upthreads' math either, though. Either the support plan is paid, or not. In the case of paid support plans. AFAICT given the support vs. the pricing for plans I've been a part of, a customer is just profitable. I don't get a full time, 40h/wk support agent, I only get them for the duration of time they're attending my tickets, and that proportional yearly salary cost is < the support plan's price in the cases I've seen; support plans are just ludicrously expensive, but so many companies feel they're obligated to have them, whether for DR, compliance, or whatever, that they don't question it. There are some companies that just do support as part of the included purchase (this is the right way, IMO), in which case, yeah, it takes a few customers. But in this case, how many customers/support rep is dependent on how much you can or are spending on operating costs. > I agree, completely, however, that ideally, every real issue happens precisely once and results in a change in the automated failure response. Today's customer support zeitgeist is utterly opposed to this idea. I agree that it's the correct response, but support's goal — that is, the metric which they are apparently measured by, in nearly every case I've seen is, is to close the ticket as fast as possible. This means not waiting around for permanent fixes: if a problem can be kludged around & the ticket closed faster, that wins. But then the extra due diligence of leaning on the engineering side becomes optional, extra … and just doesn't happen. I've literally had tickets closed because "there hasn't been a response on this ticket for some time" — with the ticket plainly in the provider's court — and "we don't want to waste time your time with long running tickets" — nor a fix to my problem, clearly. Customer Support is Goodhart's Law. The latest change is that now I have to fight an LLM that cannot address my problem to get to that front-line rep who won't read my problem. Yay, progress! /s
  - petsfed 2y ago
    >Today's customer support zeitgeist is utterly opposed to this idea. I agree that it's the correct response, but support's goal — that is, the metric which they are apparently measured by, in nearly every case I've seen is, is to close the ticket as fast as possible. First, I can't believe its taken me this long to start italicizing when I quote somebody. I'm going to do that for all future quotations. Second, I can't easily imagine a better illustration of Goodhart's law than this. I can certainly see how they got to "average time to close", even though obviously the important metric is "how many customers eventually reached a satisfactory conclusion". Its just that its hard to answer that without bugging a bunch of people, reminding them of that time when the product shit the bed and they had to call support. And "time to close" is not a bad metric, but it can't be the only metric. This reminds me of something that seems like a corollary of Goodhart's law: the easier it is to measure something, the less likely it is to be useful as a metric.
eszed 2y ago
I agree with the sibling posts about escalation and so forth, but your numbers also don't capture customer recruitment. I'm fortunate enough to live within Sonic's catchment area in the Bay Area, and have just moved the company for which I'm responsible over to 100% Sonic. My advocacy for them is 85% based on their superlative tech support, and our new business account will pay for half of one of those "truly cares" engineers. I'm damn happy to do it. Incidentally, I think I've persuaded three or four neighbors to switch to (residential) Sonic, and one professional contact to set up a business account for his company. I think good customer support/relations has to be committed to for reasons that don't immediately show up on spreadsheets, with the trust that they will pay long-term dividends. I realize that is antithetical to The Way Things Work Now, but in both my personal and professional lives I try only to do business with companies that agree.

petsfed 2y ago

I think your math is not quite right here. You can probably get away with 1-2 good CS reps, provided the lower tiers have the right tools to triage things effectively. Put another way, if you have 1 CS rep that really cares, that does the followup calls, then you can employ 7-8 front-line CS reps at half the cost who just take diligent notes, and handle the common errors that customers make. I sincerely doubt that the person I have to call to help me connect my cable modem to my ISP makes even 40K a year. But all they have to do is follow a script, write down my answers to their questions, and escalate if the script calls for it. I agree, completely, however, that ideally, every real issue happens precisely once and results in a change in the automated failure response.

d1sxeyes 2y ago
> I sincerely doubt that the person I have to call to help me connect my cable modem to my ISP makes even 40K a year. That’s sort of my point… do you feel as though that rep really cares? Is that an outstanding customer support experience for you? Many folks would say ISPs and telcos have the worst customer service. You’re not wrong though that a good script can help a lot of users with simple issues, and as it turns out, that’s the kind of thing that’s actually pretty easy and effective to automate.
- petsfed 2y ago
  It was actually one of the best Telco CS experiences I've ever had, and I think its because the gist of the call was "here are the numbers from my modem, so that you can authorize it to talk to your network, do you see it? Yes? Ok, we're done now". The main reason bad customer service happens is because the customer has a problem that the CS rep is not empowered to fix or escalate the problem. Its not a question of "caring", its a question of results. Its really hard to care about your job when faced with unrealistic expectations from the customer, and insufficient resources from the employer. A lot of folks with customer service departments could save a bundle on labor and earn a lot of goodwill if they would recognize that.
deathanatos 2y ago
> then you can employ 7-8 front-line CS reps at half the cost who just take diligent notes … the actual reality is that companies employ 7-8 front-line CS reps that can't even read the ticket, and end up asking questions already asked & answered by the form I was required to fill out during the ticket! I'm not buying upthreads' math either, though. Either the support plan is paid, or not. In the case of paid support plans. AFAICT given the support vs. the pricing for plans I've been a part of, a customer is just profitable. I don't get a full time, 40h/wk support agent, I only get them for the duration of time they're attending my tickets, and that proportional yearly salary cost is < the support plan's price in the cases I've seen; support plans are just ludicrously expensive, but so many companies feel they're obligated to have them, whether for DR, compliance, or whatever, that they don't question it. There are some companies that just do support as part of the included purchase (this is the right way, IMO), in which case, yeah, it takes a few customers. But in this case, how many customers/support rep is dependent on how much you can or are spending on operating costs. > I agree, completely, however, that ideally, every real issue happens precisely once and results in a change in the automated failure response. Today's customer support zeitgeist is utterly opposed to this idea. I agree that it's the correct response, but support's goal — that is, the metric which they are apparently measured by, in nearly every case I've seen is, is to close the ticket as fast as possible. This means not waiting around for permanent fixes: if a problem can be kludged around & the ticket closed faster, that wins. But then the extra due diligence of leaning on the engineering side becomes optional, extra … and just doesn't happen. I've literally had tickets closed because "there hasn't been a response on this ticket for some time" — with the ticket plainly in the provider's court — and "we don't want to waste time your time with long running tickets" — nor a fix to my problem, clearly. Customer Support is Goodhart's Law. The latest change is that now I have to fight an LLM that cannot address my problem to get to that front-line rep who won't read my problem. Yay, progress! /s
- petsfed 2y ago
  >Today's customer support zeitgeist is utterly opposed to this idea. I agree that it's the correct response, but support's goal — that is, the metric which they are apparently measured by, in nearly every case I've seen is, is to close the ticket as fast as possible. First, I can't believe its taken me this long to start italicizing when I quote somebody. I'm going to do that for all future quotations. Second, I can't easily imagine a better illustration of Goodhart's law than this. I can certainly see how they got to "average time to close", even though obviously the important metric is "how many customers eventually reached a satisfactory conclusion". Its just that its hard to answer that without bugging a bunch of people, reminding them of that time when the product shit the bed and they had to call support. And "time to close" is not a bad metric, but it can't be the only metric. This reminds me of something that seems like a corollary of Goodhart's law: the easier it is to measure something, the less likely it is to be useful as a metric.

eszed 2y ago

I agree with the sibling posts about escalation and so forth, but your numbers also don't capture customer recruitment. I'm fortunate enough to live within Sonic's catchment area in the Bay Area, and have just moved the company for which I'm responsible over to 100% Sonic. My advocacy for them is 85% based on their superlative tech support, and our new business account will pay for half of one of those "truly cares" engineers. I'm damn happy to do it. Incidentally, I think I've persuaded three or four neighbors to switch to (residential) Sonic, and one professional contact to set up a business account for his company. I think good customer support/relations has to be committed to for reasons that don't immediately show up on spreadsheets, with the trust that they will pay long-term dividends. I realize that is antithetical to The Way Things Work Now, but in both my personal and professional lives I try only to do business with companies that agree.