4 ms·

1). Phones are really expensive to answer. Budget $7~12 a call for competently designed call centers staffed by Middle American housewives, probably 10x that i

by patio11 14y ago

1). Phones are really expensive to answer. Budget $7~12 a call for competently designed call centers staffed by Middle American housewives, probably 10x that if you have e.g. engineers doing things ad hoc. That's about an order of magnitude more than email support and, um, "a whole lot" more than a blended, scalable FAQ > self serve tool > email system. (You see this pattern all the time for a reason.) 2) "Insufficiently technical skill to use email forbids customer from successfully reaching support" is a feature not a bug. (For a software business.) 3) Ask me about the six calls I got from a customer a) arguing over the color of text on my page (grey vs. black) b) asking how to operate a third party's voicemail, c) confirming receipt of an email five minutes after it was sent... all happening on my emergency line between 2 and 6 AM. 4) Customers frequently perceive negative value from phone support. Think of companies with excellent phone staffing like banks or insurance firms. How happy are online reviews for those numbers? (Terrible, largely because the state machine on the phone is enforcing business rules that the customer does not care for. You know what the #1 call Facebook would get? OK, password resets, not a great example. #N? "Why does Facebook let X do Y?" "<That's a product decision>" "Can you change it?" "No." "It causes me social problems! I will now abuse you personally!" "Still no." "I have a lawyer." "No, in six minute increments." "Pretty please?" "No, I don't even have a button to do it.")

droithomme 14y ago
We have gotten phone calls from people wanting help running and installing completely unrelated software, in some cases on platforms we don't even develop for. We don't publish a phone number for tech support anymore and this sort of service request is more common than actual tech support on our own products, which is nearly always done through email. The people telephoning fairly often will say something like: "I didn't want to waste your time with an email, I just have a quick question that won't take a moment. I am having trouble installing Outlook 97 on a computer I got at an auction, it's an SGI Workstation?" "I'm not sure why you're calling, we don't produce or support Outlook, that version has been obsolete for many years, and was not written for SGI." "You were so helpful getting your software installed before, I really appreciate it, and no one else has been able to help me with this." "We don't support that, also it's not possible." "Surely there is some way. Let me read you the serial number of the computer plate. Do you need the Outlook license key?" "I can't help you." This goes on for a while. I stay on the line mostly because I am amazed by the call. Anyway the basic insight I have is that anyone with a reasonable request understands the information we have about email and forum support and uses that. It's only the unreasonable customers who feel sufficiently motivated to track down the phone number and make a call. As the parent post mentions, these sorts of calls often come in at weird early morning hours and weekends. We also get calls from people wanting advice in their life about non-support related things like where to go to university to learn to write software like we do or whether to buy a new car. Again, reasonable people understand that support is by email, unreasonable people don't and this explains why most phone calls are unreasonable requests. I still handle these politely, perhaps so I can later tell the stories to people as I am now. Maybe also I am a bit of a sucker for whackos!
- spitfire 14y ago
  ... it's an SGI Workstation. "Good choice sir! Do you have a support contract with us?" SGI's were such cool machines I might actually talk to that person and explain what they are and why you can't help.
  - droithomme 14y ago
    Oh I did that! This particular guy worked in a machine shop, he was in charge of the warehouse. He would watch the local classifieds for estate and defunct business auction notices and go and buy weird random stuff for no reason. That's how he got the SGI, but he didn't know what it was and thought it was a weird sort of PC that someone had installed Linux on. He was hoping to get Windows on it, and he had an installer for Entourage someone had given him or he had found at Goodwill or who knows, and his work used Entourage so he thought he would get that working for some reason. No one could help him but we had provided such helpful service in the past for our products he thought he'd give us a call at weird hours and see what we thought about his problem. This was not the only call from him, he made several over the years, he had my private line number because of a previous legitimate call that had gotten escalated to development. He's just one example and one of the more unusual ones. There's also the calls from somebody that wants you to write custom software that only they could possibly ever use for them for free, they'll even be willing to forgo their royalty! Those ones are more frustrating. Having a public phone number for Twitter to take random calls from free customers who are too impatient to wait 2 days for an email response since their fundraising twitter account was suspended for (quite reasonably) looking like a violation of service terms sounds like a nightmare. It's quite bizarre that the NYT was taking their side in this in the referenced article, or even writing an article about it at all. The people mentioned have a crazy level of entitlement and insane expectations from a free service serving tens of millions of people. Their bad attitude and whining at the end was infuriating even to me as a bystander observing the story.
loumf 14y ago
If you charge enough (and in a recurring way), you learn to like calls from insufficiently technically skilled people. It's a kind of lock-in -- surely, no one else would put up with this. You also learn how to deal with it efficiently. The trick is to not worry about any 1 particular person, but the whole burden. The average for us isn't bad -- if I could, I'd want to get more calls. Also, if you have the kind of product with addons, you possibly get a chance to offer them (softly). In any case, they usually are the ones that promptly pay the maintenance contract (or can easily be shown the value of it if a manager asks -- here's your call log).

by patio11 14y ago

droithomme 14y ago

We have gotten phone calls from people wanting help running and installing completely unrelated software, in some cases on platforms we don't even develop for. We don't publish a phone number for tech support anymore and this sort of service request is more common than actual tech support on our own products, which is nearly always done through email. The people telephoning fairly often will say something like: "I didn't want to waste your time with an email, I just have a quick question that won't take a moment. I am having trouble installing Outlook 97 on a computer I got at an auction, it's an SGI Workstation?" "I'm not sure why you're calling, we don't produce or support Outlook, that version has been obsolete for many years, and was not written for SGI." "You were so helpful getting your software installed before, I really appreciate it, and no one else has been able to help me with this." "We don't support that, also it's not possible." "Surely there is some way. Let me read you the serial number of the computer plate. Do you need the Outlook license key?" "I can't help you." This goes on for a while. I stay on the line mostly because I am amazed by the call. Anyway the basic insight I have is that anyone with a reasonable request understands the information we have about email and forum support and uses that. It's only the unreasonable customers who feel sufficiently motivated to track down the phone number and make a call. As the parent post mentions, these sorts of calls often come in at weird early morning hours and weekends. We also get calls from people wanting advice in their life about non-support related things like where to go to university to learn to write software like we do or whether to buy a new car. Again, reasonable people understand that support is by email, unreasonable people don't and this explains why most phone calls are unreasonable requests. I still handle these politely, perhaps so I can later tell the stories to people as I am now. Maybe also I am a bit of a sucker for whackos!

spitfire 14y ago
... it's an SGI Workstation. "Good choice sir! Do you have a support contract with us?" SGI's were such cool machines I might actually talk to that person and explain what they are and why you can't help.
- droithomme 14y ago
  Oh I did that! This particular guy worked in a machine shop, he was in charge of the warehouse. He would watch the local classifieds for estate and defunct business auction notices and go and buy weird random stuff for no reason. That's how he got the SGI, but he didn't know what it was and thought it was a weird sort of PC that someone had installed Linux on. He was hoping to get Windows on it, and he had an installer for Entourage someone had given him or he had found at Goodwill or who knows, and his work used Entourage so he thought he would get that working for some reason. No one could help him but we had provided such helpful service in the past for our products he thought he'd give us a call at weird hours and see what we thought about his problem. This was not the only call from him, he made several over the years, he had my private line number because of a previous legitimate call that had gotten escalated to development. He's just one example and one of the more unusual ones. There's also the calls from somebody that wants you to write custom software that only they could possibly ever use for them for free, they'll even be willing to forgo their royalty! Those ones are more frustrating. Having a public phone number for Twitter to take random calls from free customers who are too impatient to wait 2 days for an email response since their fundraising twitter account was suspended for (quite reasonably) looking like a violation of service terms sounds like a nightmare. It's quite bizarre that the NYT was taking their side in this in the referenced article, or even writing an article about it at all. The people mentioned have a crazy level of entitlement and insane expectations from a free service serving tens of millions of people. Their bad attitude and whining at the end was infuriating even to me as a bystander observing the story.

loumf 14y ago

If you charge enough (and in a recurring way), you learn to like calls from insufficiently technically skilled people. It's a kind of lock-in -- surely, no one else would put up with this. You also learn how to deal with it efficiently. The trick is to not worry about any 1 particular person, but the whole burden. The average for us isn't bad -- if I could, I'd want to get more calls. Also, if you have the kind of product with addons, you possibly get a chance to offer them (softly). In any case, they usually are the ones that promptly pay the maintenance contract (or can easily be shown the value of it if a manager asks -- here's your call log).