
A Plea For Companies To Provide Support Via Text - newy
http://blog.euwyn.com/a-plea-for-companies-to-provide-support-via-text
======
NamTaf
Text of any form is not good for support because it amplifies the back-and-
forth duration required to actually determine the issue and walk them through
the resolution. The key here is bi-directional conversation - that is, you can
talk to them and they can talk to you at the same time.

Think of someone helping Grandpa with using his email. On the phone, most of
the time is spent in back-and-forth, explaining a concept multiple ways until
he understands the request. The information he gives back may be vague and
incomplete, so you can discuss it with him to get instant further
clarification and context. You can then walk him through the solution in a bi-
directional conversation, whereby you say a step and then he asks for
clarification about certain aspects, before you proceed to the next step.

Now consider email/text/etc. Focus even on the solution stage. You send 5
steps to perform to complete the task. He gets stuck on step 2, and so
responds. He doesn't know if he'll get stuck on steps 3, 4 and 5 either
because he can't get past step 2. That's potentially 8 emails back and forth
to get the problem resolved.

By not having instantaneous bi-directional communication, it is a hell of a
lot harder to debug and walk someone through the solution particularly if
they're not technically adept. For us on HN it may be fine - we can stumble
our way through blanks relatively easily - but for Grandpa, he has no hope of
doing that and so phone support is by far the most time-efficient method.

~~~
Dysiode
I can see there being a happy medium here as no all support requests are task
oriented. Either a) asynchronous support for support inquiries like "When will
product x be in stock?" or "What does policy y mean to me?" where as "How do I
setup email on my phone?" could be handle synchronously. or b) begin
asynchronously and move to synchronous communication as needed.

At the very least both options should be offered. I almost exclusively use
text-based communication unless it's a time-restricted request. This works
well for Simple (the bank) where I tend to have a lot of financial questions
that I don't need answered -right now- so I shoot off a quick message and
follow up if needed; however I've had a couple of situations that required
immediate answers and response and those times I absolutely picked up the
phone.

Having worked in tech support for two major telecomm companies though, I'm
convinced it's most commonly a problem of formatting. The discrepancy between
instruction and reality is what throws non-technical people off. Given
accurate instructions your grandpa could figure it out at least 75% of the
time. One of the companies placed extreme emphasis on their resources with the
reasoning "They'll figure it out." and according to them and their metrics
they seemed to think most people did figure it out by braille if you will.

Just my two (or more) cents.

~~~
tkfu
I think the problem with offering both options is that you can't count on your
customers to choose the right one, and they'll blame you when they choose the
wrong one.

Customer (via SMS): hey, the whole internet on my phone crashes when i use
feature x. wtf???

Customer Support Rep A: Hey, we'd be happy to help you with that. What
platform/version/subscription do you have?

Customer (7.5 hours later): its the latest version, and i have a verizon. why
can't you guys fix this???

CSR B: [lists some possible troubleshooting steps, asks customer to call]

Customer, the next day on Twitter and Facebook: [Company] has the worst
support! They broke my phone, and they say they'll help you by text, but then
when you ask them anything they just ignore your problem or tell you to call
anyway. FUCK [COMPANY] AND DON'T BUY THEIR CRAP!!!

~~~
Dysiode
That's absolutely valid, CR exists because customers don't know what to do
next. That said, there's a lot that could be done to mitigate that.

\- High phone support visibility on how-to pages: Don't link to chat if it's
not going to an ideal experience \- Focus on customer facing how-to resources:
I'm confident every minute spent making the thorny aspects of phones (e.g.
moving photos from internal storage) rock-solid is worth no less than an hour
of CSR time. \- Proactively making recommendations on more ideal support
scenarios if applicable: "Hey, before we get started, this part can be tricky
and I'd love to walk you through it, it'll only take a few minutes and I can
schedule a time to call you if you're busy right now. <details of next
steps>." \- Perhaps most importantly (I just noticed from your interaction)
CSR A should handle (and be given the freedom to handle) the problem from
start to finish OR it should be made -very- easy for CSR B to pick up where it
was left off (either a great CRM or an honest "I've got a family to go home
to, I'm going to hand you off to So-and-So or I'll be back and available at").
That said, Simple lacks consistent CSR interaction but I haven't encountered a
problem with the hand-off, most of the time I never notice.

When I was a CSR 99% of the time the customer wasn't my enemy, it was my
coworkers (or my CRM).

That said, I don't believe SMS literally is a reasonable form of support and
should never be marketed that way, but chat, even in-app chat could
substitute. Additionally, providing these methods gives people a chance to ask
questions and get resolutions that may be nagging them but not enough to call
someone, it also opens up lines of communication to people like myself who get
anxious thinking about calling people.

------
greenyoda
This article only thinks about what the caller's experience is, and doesn't
consider at all what it would take to implement this on the call center side.

How would you guarantee responsiveness? With a voice call, the representative
is on the line with you until your problem is resolved. With a text message,
the rep would have to start helping somebody else if you took too long to
reply, and may not be able to get back to you for a long time. Since they have
no way of knowing how soon you'll reply, or if you'll reply at all, they can't
just sit there idly waiting for your reply for a couple of minutes. And if a
rep gets a large number of slow repliers queued up at once, he'd have to
mentally juggle several different conversations and couldn't give any of them
his full attention. Which caller gets priority? The one who you're currently
texting with or the one who just came back after five minutes? What if a
caller hasn't replied for a while and it's the end of the rep's shift?

Also, is there any way to route text messages through a call center so that a
caller could text a single customer support number instead of having to know
the number of the next available service representative?

One more thing: SMS messages get lost at a rate of 1 to 5%[1], so you're going
to have a lot of irate customers wondering why they never received a reply. If
a voice call drops, both sides know about it immediately.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability)

~~~
Dysiode
There are some interesting hurdles, and you've done a great job of thinking of
a few of them! I can see three likely async solutions: SMS style message based
(explicitly not real time), real-time message based, or real-time chat.

SMS Style Messaging: In my customer-facing experience with the concept I don't
think SMS is suited to the challenge. Instead a full fledged chat application
would need to be used. As far as queuing goes, related to this and my
experience with Simple most of my interactions a) aren't real-time and that
expectation is set when I create a message, and b) if they go on for a period
of time they're handled by different CSRs. I've never had a poor experience
because of that.

> With a voice call, the representative is on the line with you until your
> problem is resolved.

Additionally, related to this, there are a lot of times where that's not the
case, or there's research to be done and if I were allowed I could do that
research and come back with a response. That's discouraged/forbidden in call
centers because there's the assumption you won't perform without pressure but
that's almost certainly a staffing issue (or if there are too many
basic/uninteresting research requests then it may be a systemic problem).

Real-Time Messaging: If we're looking for a more real-time message based
solution (i.e. not chat), a single CSR could handle a few requests, but if
they get a particularly detailed one there could be an expiration that hands
it off to another rep, but that could get messy fast, even with a "So-and-So
is busy at the moment, my name is..." (though with more elegant verbage).

Real-Time Chat: As I do everything in my power to avoid calling people, I will
use chat if available as an alternative. Now, I can't say I've asked every
person I've spoken to, but I know a couple of cases where I can confirm I was
their sole interaction. It took a bit longer, but I was doing other stuff
while I waited and I had the expectation when I started the interaction.

tl;dr Set expectations of delayed responses to messaging based support, don't
bother with real-time messaging as it doesn't make logistic sense, and treat
all real-time support the same (one active interaction).

------
sachingulaya
Needy customers. That's the problem. Some of your customers literally just
want to chat. They want to feel close to your brand and give feedback directly
to the CEO. It's problematic. Easier to keep them at arm's length with email.

------
jmomo
SMS is terrible for this. It is completely insecure. You can fake
transmissions easily, and nothing is encrypted, so you can't discuss any
private info. There are very good, and obvious, reasons why organization do
not use SMS for support.

While it's great to have a simple text-based medium to do this, SMS is awful.

I agree with the sentiment, but it's hard to take this guy serious when he
suggests something so obviously bad.

~~~
rahimnathwani
So, how about using WhatsApp or WeChat or Line? These apps are as convenient
and cheap as SMS for many people, but don't suffer from the same ease of
spoofing.

------
xordAb
From a customer point of view, I'll go for the phone call if phone is
available on the website. Why ? Because it's much faster. A simple example is
to change a flight, I could do it by email but then if I call I have the
immediate confirmation that my flight has been changed, that I have a correct
seat and a confirmation by email (yeah I know those kind of stuff should be
doable directly from the airlines website but Singapore Airlines and Malaysia
Airlines do not offer that for some of my flights). Of course those call
center are in Asia, so staffing is not an issue.. Western company take so much
time to deal with. Air France took 2-3 days to change a detail on a flight.
Valve took 5 days to tell me that cross country checkout is disabled. It would
have taken only 5 minutes on the phone.

And let's not talk about banks...

------
lstamour
Off topic: I thought the post would be a plea for tty support replacements
since no one TTYs but everyone TXTs or IMs or emails.

My experiences: I don't know if others will chime in with their experiences,
but Rogers in Canada has textual/live chat support channels in place and you
can even contact a manager by chat. For background, Rogers is Comcast plus
Verizon for Canada. Yeah. But I'm actually quite pleased by the chat service.
As a customer I could copy and paste what I would otherwise repeat laboriously
from agent to agent. The only weakness was that not everyone I needed to speak
with had signed up for the chat service. Many departments then required me to
call in, reference the chat, then get transferred. It would be nice to
integrate the touch points between chat and call. Better still? Assume that
I'm in the middle of an existing issue at the start by asking for a previous
ticket number or having the right people call me back in a timely manner.
Apple has done a few of these things but could use improvements, specifically
in the disconnect between store and phone services or online. Microsoft... is
still working on their Store processes, they've quite a few kinks as it took
weeks of hour-long calls to finally place and receive an order -- and they
asked me to call to place it from an email they sent me. Yeah, not calling or
having others call me? Way better than calling and wasting both my and your
time, service providers. If we both know time is limited, working
asynchronously with the ability for escalations and status notifications is
just what we need.

------
lightblaine
Thanks, good thoughts here. I work for a crazy-fast growing tech company that
supports its users by email and text only. Yet we still receive multiple
requests on a daily basis from our strongest users to speak on the phone.

I believe there is a perceived notion in the general public that speaking is
the fastest way to resolve an issue. This probably comes from the fact that we
can speak our thoughts faster than almost any other method of communication.
Verbally talking with someone is also the most primal way of resolving issues.
Finally, 7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through vocal
elements (how those words are spoken), and 55% through nonverbal elements
(facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc) (from a blog I wrote -
[http://blog.blainelight.com/2012/09/NonVerbalCommunication.h...](http://blog.blainelight.com/2012/09/NonVerbalCommunication.html\);)
most people want to have their frustrations 'heard' when reach out to support,
and text only convey's 7% of their whole message.

In a tech-centric world, it's easy for us to want to embrace the future. We
have to realize that even the early majority is still dependent on voice
communications to express their primal need for help (i.e. asking for support
from a company).

Would love to hear your further thoughts. -Blaine

------
joncalhoun
The key difference between phone and email support is the expectations of the
customer, not the underlying technology. When I send an email to support, I
don't expect an answer for at least a few hours. When I call, I expect to get
my issue resolved _before_ hanging up. I may wait on hold for 30m, but I am
going to resolve the problem before I get off the phone.

I don't believe this is due to technological limitations of email. I have had
conversations via email that are essentially realtime chats. I think the real
issue is that passive support simply gets a lot more support requests than
non-passive support. Offering SMS sadly wouldn't resolve this, it would just
be another support medium that gets flooded like email.

 _NOTE_ \- By passive support I mean anything where you send a message and
just wait for a response. Non-passive support would be something like a phone
call where you wait on hold for someone to be available.

------
freejack
The problem that needs to be solved is support availability through telephone
and email channels. There's no reason for companies to force their customers
to sit on hold and there's no reason to drive them through complicated voice
menu trees. Similarly, with email based interactions, multiple responses means
that the agent is probably not handling the interaction well and could be
asking better, more probing questions to get to the heart of the matter more
quickly.

(I write this as the head of a large customer service operation for a US-based
mobile phone provider - if a phone company can answer the phone without
putting their customers through voice menu hell, anyone can do it.)

------
voltagex_
Wholeheartedly agree here, but it requires your support staff to have strong
reading comprehension and writing skills - something I've not seen in various
"live chat" support options that I've used.

~~~
bdcravens
That's a staffing issue. If reading and writing is an issue, then I seriously
doubt the phone support experience will be of any quality, so there's really
nothing lost.

------
Nursie
As a company, maybe I want to inconvenience the customer a little bit. Making
them pick up the phone seems like a barrier to support requests and may
therefore cut down on the number I have to deal with, reducing costs.

Just a thought.

------
mynegation
I do not care about support via Text. Web-based chat on the other hand is
awesome and I use it everywhere it is available. I often need support during
working hours and using web chat means I do not have to yak over the phone
about my problems and disturb co-workers around me. Oftentimes I need to type
something into the computer and it is much more convenient to Alt-Tab between
things and copy paste something instead of typing by one hand (yes, I know
head set would solve the problem).

------
blueskin_
I've found most companies worth using do provide email/ticket support, with
the main ones that don't being ones in very old/stagnant industries.

The article talks about apps though, and honestly, I'd rather sit through a
hour on hold on the phone than install some bloatware app. Forget 'apps',
email is perfect for support.

------
petercooper
Companies do this even if they don't publicize it. You say you're _deaf_ , and
then they don't have any choice.

After failing to get through on their various numbers, I cancelled my eFax
account via e-mail this way (as they don't/didn't allow online cancellations)
and it went smoothly.

~~~
mistercow
If a company has limited resources for providing text based support to the
disabled, I'm not sure it's really cool to tie that up by claiming your
disabled when you aren't.

~~~
petercooper
It's also not "cool" for a company the size of eFax to not put a simple cancel
mechanism on their site and then not answer any of their phone numbers when
you want to cancel.

So simple e-mail vs do a credit card chargeback. As a merchant, I know which
_I 'd_ prefer. If they have capacity issues with support, that's their issue
to resolve as a business. If you can't adequately support your customers
equally and you can't work out how to fix that, you deserve to go out of
business.

Of course, hogging a teletype operator specifically for the disabled to tackle
some minor support issue probably isn't the most positive thing to do, but
sending an e-mail.. anyone can do that and if it takes a white lie to get past
an internal policy, so be it.

~~~
mistercow
>It's also not "cool" for a company the size of eFax to not put a simple
cancel mechanism on their site and then not answer any of their phone numbers
when you want to cancel.

Right, but it's not eFax you're hurting by tying up their accessibility
resources.

------
zhte415
Transmitting personally identifiable information, including credit card data
and supporting documentation as suggested in the article, through email, text
or an app sounds like an extremely dangerous minefield.

~~~
Dysiode
I'm not sure how this is necessarily much different than phone communication
with the notable caveat that text is quicker to parse. It's already
inadvisable to give that information over the phone as a landline can be
tapped and there's plenty of proof of concepts of tapping wireless networks.

At least with an app you have the option of adding in security layers. SSL for
one, Simple uses a PIN on their app, Art.com will process a transaction in
chat but direct you to their website to submit payment information, and on top
of all this you have the added benefit of easily documented interaction. -You-
can reference your own interaction without the near impossibility of having a
call recording audited (as a call center CSR and supervisor I've seen this
happen no more than six times).

In fact, in one interaction with Art.com I sent an email to an agent with
photos of some damage to the piece they shipped me in my initial email which
resulted in a resolution in the response.

Another case with GIGABYTE I was able to send photographic description of my
issue due to a consistent (likely language barrier related) misunderstanding
about what was meant by "a missing pin." which immediately clarified the
conversation and we were able to move forward.

tl;dr the variety of "offline" security measures available and the convenience
gained with "offline" support makes that minefield significantly less
dangerous in my experience, especially considering the dangers already present
in phone based support.

------
adityar
There's an Indian one in the same vein [http://haptik.co](http://haptik.co)

------
rileytalkto
You should really try talkto [http://talkto.com](http://talkto.com)

