4 ms·

This is the problem with treating every customer similarly. Frankly, considering the user data and customer segmentation that a company like Comcast (or other p

by kosei 12y ago

This is the problem with treating every customer similarly. Frankly, considering the user data and customer segmentation that a company like Comcast (or other providers) should have, you'd think that it would actually be a significant cost savings for them to be able to tag customers as "tech-savvy" or not. This way when tech-savvy customers call, you don't waste their time (increase chance for churn) or the Tier 1 CS rep's time (hard hourly wage cost).

chimeracoder 12y ago
They'd rather you just not call at all (and waste your own time figuring out how to fix it yourself or get around it). Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. They even told me once that their billing department couldn't take a credit card over the phone (I kid you not!) so I had to go to their in-person store the next day[1]. They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow that much - they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? I'm fairly certain they actively increase the minimum length of support calls specifically to discourage people from calling unless things are really serious (impossible to fix themselves). [0] This may not be everywhere, but I've received the message when I've called [1] To be more complete: it actually required several phone transfers, and when I finally went in-person, they told me that I should have just done it over the phone. EDIT Changed "at all" to "that much" - obviously they do in some cases, but the question is how much effort (and therefore money) are they going to spend on what is essentially a work-free cash cow?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow at all Sure they do -- they don't care about optimizing your workflow. > they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? Even without a monopoly, deliberately driving away the section of the customer base that has the highest support cost is one way of maximizing profits, especially when you can't conveniently establish a pricing structure that effectively segments pricing so that those people pay more (because otherwise you have to subsidize their support costs out of the general pricing level.) There've been many articles over many years discussing strategies firms in many markets (some very competitive, some less so) take to do this.
  - kosei 12y ago
    Exactly. Communications companies generate significant savings by driving people to self-help on their website or through chat reps (where they can handle 10 customers at a time). Also, longer wait times helps increase the barrier to frivolous calls and complaints. That said, my point was that there are likely some additional ways that they can target customers to improve customer service in a way that optimizes both their own workflow as well as that of the customer. The important part is to get both parties on the same incentive structure.
- __david__ 12y ago
  > Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. Having just done this a couple weeks ago, the message was more like "$5 for talking to a human for anything that can be done with the automated system". For my case it was paying the bill with a credit card. You can type it into the automated system, but if you insist on tying up a human just to dictate your card number to them, then they charge you the $5. When I talked to the human to explain something on the bill that I wasn't understanding, they were helpful and didn't charge me the $5, even when we discovered I needed to pay a little more and I paid it through him. This is similar to banks who charge people for doing ATM class transactions with a human teller. Personally, those types of things don't bother me at all, since I'm the type of personality that pretty much always chooses the automated way over talking to humans.
jauer 12y ago
Might work if there's a way to filter out the tech-savvy posers from the people that are actually tech-savvy. More charitably there's a wide range of tech to be savvy in. I've had a customer tell me they were a expert in last-mile access systems because they "are a expert WinSock programmer". People that think they are tech-savvy but actually aren't tend to do things that are worse than the normal user and have a attitude about it. You can't afford to waste your Tier 2 rep's time or burnout points on them. On the business side we do tag customers as tech-savvy but it's based a bit on trick questions. E.g. When assigning static IPs do they understand CIDR or do they insist on talking in terms of Class A/B/C subnets? Do they throw a fit about /31 subnets not being valid? Do they insist that a /32 subnet mask on their PPPoE connection is invalid and that the gateway can't be outside the subnet? There's nothing worse than a IT consultant that presumes to know more than the ISP about running a network (they almost never do). To a degree we use how much they pay for their connection as a proxy for knowledge. It seems like customers that optionally pay for higher end service or business products have a understanding of the business value of the connection and are pretty reasonable about their expectations. Example: customer with a $3k Dedicated IP+BGP link that's called in for a outage and the call went "oh, outage? how long? ok, call me if you think it will take longer than that". Customer with a $60 DSL calls in yelling and screaming about losing thousands of dollars in sales and such. We're like, really? Thousands of dollars a minute and you didn't see business value in a backup link, redundancy, or a SLA? When I have a problem with my cable connection at home I focus on helping them get through their script as quickly as possible to reach the escalation or dispatch stage. If this means I'm dragging out a Windows 7 laptop because that's the fast path through their script, so be it.
- na85 12y ago
  I do this too, but I just lie about any windows-specific steps. I always power-cycle my gear and run pings/traceroutes before calling tech support anyways, so when they ask me to restart windows I just tell them what they want to hear.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  > Might work if there's a way to filter out the tech-savvy posers from the people that are actually tech-savvy. More charitably there's a wide range of tech to be savvy in. I've had a customer tell me they were a expert in last-mile access systems because they "are a expert WinSock programmer". Actual tech support call: "Now, before we start, I've got four Microsoft degrees." That to someone with an actual degree.

by kosei 12y ago

chimeracoder 12y ago

They'd rather you just not call at all (and waste your own time figuring out how to fix it yourself or get around it). Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. They even told me once that their billing department couldn't take a credit card over the phone (I kid you not!) so I had to go to their in-person store the next day[1]. They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow that much - they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? I'm fairly certain they actively increase the minimum length of support calls specifically to discourage people from calling unless things are really serious (impossible to fix themselves). [0] This may not be everywhere, but I've received the message when I've called [1] To be more complete: it actually required several phone transfers, and when I finally went in-person, they told me that I should have just done it over the phone. EDIT Changed "at all" to "that much" - obviously they do in some cases, but the question is how much effort (and therefore money) are they going to spend on what is essentially a work-free cash cow?

dragonwriter 12y ago
> They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow at all Sure they do -- they don't care about optimizing your workflow. > they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? Even without a monopoly, deliberately driving away the section of the customer base that has the highest support cost is one way of maximizing profits, especially when you can't conveniently establish a pricing structure that effectively segments pricing so that those people pay more (because otherwise you have to subsidize their support costs out of the general pricing level.) There've been many articles over many years discussing strategies firms in many markets (some very competitive, some less so) take to do this.
- kosei 12y ago
  Exactly. Communications companies generate significant savings by driving people to self-help on their website or through chat reps (where they can handle 10 customers at a time). Also, longer wait times helps increase the barrier to frivolous calls and complaints. That said, my point was that there are likely some additional ways that they can target customers to improve customer service in a way that optimizes both their own workflow as well as that of the customer. The important part is to get both parties on the same incentive structure.
__david__ 12y ago
> Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. Having just done this a couple weeks ago, the message was more like "$5 for talking to a human for anything that can be done with the automated system". For my case it was paying the bill with a credit card. You can type it into the automated system, but if you insist on tying up a human just to dictate your card number to them, then they charge you the $5. When I talked to the human to explain something on the bill that I wasn't understanding, they were helpful and didn't charge me the $5, even when we discovered I needed to pay a little more and I paid it through him. This is similar to banks who charge people for doing ATM class transactions with a human teller. Personally, those types of things don't bother me at all, since I'm the type of personality that pretty much always chooses the automated way over talking to humans.

jauer 12y ago

Might work if there's a way to filter out the tech-savvy posers from the people that are actually tech-savvy. More charitably there's a wide range of tech to be savvy in. I've had a customer tell me they were a expert in last-mile access systems because they "are a expert WinSock programmer". People that think they are tech-savvy but actually aren't tend to do things that are worse than the normal user and have a attitude about it. You can't afford to waste your Tier 2 rep's time or burnout points on them. On the business side we do tag customers as tech-savvy but it's based a bit on trick questions. E.g. When assigning static IPs do they understand CIDR or do they insist on talking in terms of Class A/B/C subnets? Do they throw a fit about /31 subnets not being valid? Do they insist that a /32 subnet mask on their PPPoE connection is invalid and that the gateway can't be outside the subnet? There's nothing worse than a IT consultant that presumes to know more than the ISP about running a network (they almost never do). To a degree we use how much they pay for their connection as a proxy for knowledge. It seems like customers that optionally pay for higher end service or business products have a understanding of the business value of the connection and are pretty reasonable about their expectations. Example: customer with a $3k Dedicated IP+BGP link that's called in for a outage and the call went "oh, outage? how long? ok, call me if you think it will take longer than that". Customer with a $60 DSL calls in yelling and screaming about losing thousands of dollars in sales and such. We're like, really? Thousands of dollars a minute and you didn't see business value in a backup link, redundancy, or a SLA? When I have a problem with my cable connection at home I focus on helping them get through their script as quickly as possible to reach the escalation or dispatch stage. If this means I'm dragging out a Windows 7 laptop because that's the fast path through their script, so be it.

na85 12y ago
I do this too, but I just lie about any windows-specific steps. I always power-cycle my gear and run pings/traceroutes before calling tech support anyways, so when they ask me to restart windows I just tell them what they want to hear.
davidgerard 12y ago
> Might work if there's a way to filter out the tech-savvy posers from the people that are actually tech-savvy. More charitably there's a wide range of tech to be savvy in. I've had a customer tell me they were a expert in last-mile access systems because they "are a expert WinSock programmer". Actual tech support call: "Now, before we start, I've got four Microsoft degrees." That to someone with an actual degree.