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What’s the point? To save money paying a human to man a support email. That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons.

wslh 2mo ago
And as a dark pattern it adds "positive friction" for the company reducing the number of people that will have the motivation of obtaining the real people support.
- saghm 2mo ago
  Several weeks ago I had an issue not being able to login to Verizon's website, so I tried to chat with someone. The chatbot that was gatekeeping was predictably useless said it would redirect me to a human except...it kept prompting me to log in first. It was literally impossible to differentiate from if they literally had no humans online to talk to at all.
sholladay 2mo ago
> That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons. Not really. At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering. In fact, they would have likely already heard about the new product at lunch or something.
- munk-a 2mo ago
  Most chat support people were contractors hired from third party companies that were given dossiers about their products that were often quite out of date because poor management has always been a thing.
- vntok 2mo ago
  > At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering. Of course not. The extremely vast majority of support staff aren't connected to "internal people" and certainly don't have any access to the main company's Slack. Most of all, those people are paid very little on very tight length-per-interaction targets. They can't spend any time at all looking for stuff outside the docs package or chatting with peeps outside the immediate costaff.
  - sandeepkd 2mo ago
    Its an organic cycle, as the company grows big the number of relevant areas grow too and inter team communication becomes way too costly/impractical. The big company becomes a group of informal small companies, each running in their own direction and at times competing with each other. Areas like customer support are not really good candidate for career growth so they get least resources and manpower.
  - sholladay 2mo ago
    Everything I said applies to overseas labor, too. I’ve worked at both types of companies, those that co-locate support with the product teams, and those that pay bottom dollar and don’t care at all about support. With the latter type, there’s still almost always a line of communication to corporate. And the support staff still try to help. They are decent human beings, even if the end result kind of sucks.
- sgarman 2mo ago
  Last time Coinbase had a breach I wrote in to support chat to see what I needed to do. They said there was no breach. I sent them a link to their own blogpost about it. They responded with "wow this is the fist time I'm hearing about this."
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
mihaaly 2mo ago
I could be the best money saver for them - and ask for a hefty premium for my services - by terminating all support. No costs, nada, full save! Genius, right?! Never gives false info, never! Ok, ok, need to have a tickmark next to the 'support' item in the quarterlies, let it be an eternal spinning wheel presenting on clicking the 'Our award winning instant support is HERE!' button then. Its close to the real experience anyway, right?
- claudetard 2mo ago
  To avoid wasting customer time, simply make that button close the window.
  - mihaaly 2mo ago
    That's even better! They can start a complaint about the button by contacting the support, of course.
Groxx 2mo ago
If you have no training or knowledge-base to search, sure. But then you'd be an awful support-team employer.
- saghm 2mo ago
  I mean, yes? That sounds pretty accurate for most companies before chatbots became the new hot thing
  - SoftTalker 2mo ago
    Uninformed chatbot replaces uninformed person. And the chatbot doesn't need bathroom breaks or health insurance.
  - Groxx 2mo ago
    The vast majority of people I know who have done phone/chat support have had a spreadsheet (or fancier tool) of common phrases and mandatory boilerplate answers, an overview of the company they're doing it for (sometimes just a couple pages in a word doc), and tone/tool training at a minimum. And generally that tool has a tree of common steps that are also generally mandatory, because they punish rather harshly for going off-script. It's not much, and it gets you the sort of support that people often think of with ticketing systems: impersonal and inaccurate, favoring the company. But it's rarely this inaccurate. Or if it is (e.g. missing a major product launch), it's fixed in a day or two.

wslh 2mo ago

And as a dark pattern it adds "positive friction" for the company reducing the number of people that will have the motivation of obtaining the real people support.

saghm 2mo ago
Several weeks ago I had an issue not being able to login to Verizon's website, so I tried to chat with someone. The chatbot that was gatekeeping was predictably useless said it would redirect me to a human except...it kept prompting me to log in first. It was literally impossible to differentiate from if they literally had no humans online to talk to at all.

sholladay 2mo ago

> That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons. Not really. At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering. In fact, they would have likely already heard about the new product at lunch or something.

munk-a 2mo ago
Most chat support people were contractors hired from third party companies that were given dossiers about their products that were often quite out of date because poor management has always been a thing.
vntok 2mo ago
> At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering. Of course not. The extremely vast majority of support staff aren't connected to "internal people" and certainly don't have any access to the main company's Slack. Most of all, those people are paid very little on very tight length-per-interaction targets. They can't spend any time at all looking for stuff outside the docs package or chatting with peeps outside the immediate costaff.
- sandeepkd 2mo ago
  Its an organic cycle, as the company grows big the number of relevant areas grow too and inter team communication becomes way too costly/impractical. The big company becomes a group of informal small companies, each running in their own direction and at times competing with each other. Areas like customer support are not really good candidate for career growth so they get least resources and manpower.
- sholladay 2mo ago
  Everything I said applies to overseas labor, too. I’ve worked at both types of companies, those that co-locate support with the product teams, and those that pay bottom dollar and don’t care at all about support. With the latter type, there’s still almost always a line of communication to corporate. And the support staff still try to help. They are decent human beings, even if the end result kind of sucks.
sgarman 2mo ago
Last time Coinbase had a breach I wrote in to support chat to see what I needed to do. They said there was no breach. I sent them a link to their own blogpost about it. They responded with "wow this is the fist time I'm hearing about this."

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

mihaaly 2mo ago

I could be the best money saver for them - and ask for a hefty premium for my services - by terminating all support. No costs, nada, full save! Genius, right?! Never gives false info, never! Ok, ok, need to have a tickmark next to the 'support' item in the quarterlies, let it be an eternal spinning wheel presenting on clicking the 'Our award winning instant support is HERE!' button then. Its close to the real experience anyway, right?

claudetard 2mo ago
To avoid wasting customer time, simply make that button close the window.
- mihaaly 2mo ago
  That's even better! They can start a complaint about the button by contacting the support, of course.

Groxx 2mo ago

If you have no training or knowledge-base to search, sure. But then you'd be an awful support-team employer.

saghm 2mo ago
I mean, yes? That sounds pretty accurate for most companies before chatbots became the new hot thing
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Uninformed chatbot replaces uninformed person. And the chatbot doesn't need bathroom breaks or health insurance.
- Groxx 2mo ago
  The vast majority of people I know who have done phone/chat support have had a spreadsheet (or fancier tool) of common phrases and mandatory boilerplate answers, an overview of the company they're doing it for (sometimes just a couple pages in a word doc), and tone/tool training at a minimum. And generally that tool has a tree of common steps that are also generally mandatory, because they punish rather harshly for going off-script. It's not much, and it gets you the sort of support that people often think of with ticketing systems: impersonal and inaccurate, favoring the company. But it's rarely this inaccurate. Or if it is (e.g. missing a major product launch), it's fixed in a day or two.