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> 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

> 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.
d1sxeyes 2y ago
Support is not paid exactly if I understand correctly. According to the pricing, even the lowest tier includes '24/7 WordPress technical expertise', which includes chat support. The second tier includes phone support. I don't even see any upsell to 'premium support' or anything like that for retail users. However, probably enterprise customers do indeed get separate pricing for support. All told though, I'm not really saying that my maths was supposed to be on the money, just that the costs of running a CS team like the article suggests are high, and having an expensive CS team is only justified if they drive enough revenue, either through attracting new customers or retaining existing ones. And to be clear, having outstanding CS is indeed a differentiator. But it's not a differentiator compared to reliability/automation, it's a differentiator compared to other companies' CS teams.

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.

d1sxeyes 2y ago

Support is not paid exactly if I understand correctly. According to the pricing, even the lowest tier includes '24/7 WordPress technical expertise', which includes chat support. The second tier includes phone support. I don't even see any upsell to 'premium support' or anything like that for retail users. However, probably enterprise customers do indeed get separate pricing for support. All told though, I'm not really saying that my maths was supposed to be on the money, just that the costs of running a CS team like the article suggests are high, and having an expensive CS team is only justified if they drive enough revenue, either through attracting new customers or retaining existing ones. And to be clear, having outstanding CS is indeed a differentiator. But it's not a differentiator compared to reliability/automation, it's a differentiator compared to other companies' CS teams.