
Customers Don't Want to Call for Support - wslh
http://blogs.forrester.com/kate_leggett/16-03-03-your_customers_dont_want_to_call_you_for_support
======
my5thaccount
Customers rarely call me, but when they do, it's fine -- I love them. It's
usually because they can't figure out how to log in. It's especially painful
when they call at 8:30am on the east coast and I'm on the west coast and my
cell phone wakes me up and they say, "I can't log in." and they are mad at me
and I don't even know who they are or which account and it turns out they've
been typoing their username for days.

But I love every single one of them! "Hi, yes, sorry you're having trouble, I
am happy to help. Which customer are you with? What is your username? Ah, let
me send you a password reset to your email address. Did you get it?"

"Yes."

"Ok, great. Let me know if you need anything else."

And you can hear their tone of voice change immediately to, "OMG, this person
was so nice and I was so mean to them and I was clearly doing something wrong,
but I don't know what it was, but wow, I actually called a company on the
internet today and someone answered the phone and actually solved my
problem!!!!"

Nothing better than making customers happy.

~~~
dublinben
As someone who has been on both sides of that conversation many times, that is
a failure of your product. A user should not have to pick up the phone and
call you (during normal business hours) to get a password reset.

~~~
my5thaccount
There are plenty of things she could have done before calling me, but she
_could_ call me and she had a great experience doing so and now loves the
product even more and has more confidence using it, because she knows if she
faces something really hard, there actually _is_ a person who will help her
just a phone call away. If anyone asks her about it, she can say, "Omg, I just
called them and they answered and I was in. I've never had that before!"

There's a real value in that and all it cost me was a phone call. No money
well spent, imo. I was going to wake up that day anyway.

------
dredmorbius
Typical Forrester bullshit (I've been wading hip-deep through their crap for
20 years).

Yes, offer defense in depth, more below.

 _But when your customers DO call you, it 's because other avenues are clearly
failing, and their reasonable expectation is for excellent, clear, fast,
appropriate, and effective service._ That expectation is usually observed in
the breech.

I loathe phone support calls because of:

1\. busy signals

2\. long, and worse, _unpredictable_ wait times.

3\. utterly counterproductive wait queue practices -- if there's music, which
_always_ renders like crap on digitally compressed lines, then I'm waiting for
a voice, and repeated patently insincere protestations that my call is
important *frustrate my waiting for that voice to come on.

4\. Clueless CSRs clearly working from scripts which haven't themselves been
tested.

5\. Further insincere protestations from those same CSRs.

6\. Far too often: failure to satisfactorily resolve the problem.

7\. A product design and/or quality which necessitated the call in the first
place. Much such damage is self-inflicted.

TL;DR: If your customers are calling you, you've done messed up good, and
better fix it. Fast and right.

~~~
edraferi
I generally agree. I like companies that enable me to do most things
independently online, then quickly connect me with a competent human when I
call about complex issues I don't understand.

~~~
dredmorbius
As do I.

But, first, this is already a 3rd-order failure: the product was poorly-
designed enough not to be clear, and failed to offer in-product guidance or
help to guide the user to the right solution. By the time you're searching
online, the vendor has failed _twice_.

Supporting a community of intelligent, literate, and adult users who all the
same simply don't get technology, that's just not good enough though.

Yes, _make your online support information publicly available online._ It's
part of what I look for when assessing new technologies, and lack of this is a
huge demerit. _And make sure it 's the same information your own people are
using._ Some of your customers _can_ self-support, or be supported through
dedicated staff, friends-and-family plan, or online community support.

But get that damned phone support quality up there _too_.

~~~
DrScump
<But, first, this is already a 3rd-order failure: the product was poorly-
designed enough not to be clear, and failed to offer in-product guidance or
help to guide the user to the right solution.>

Traditionally, _lots_ of support calls amount to "pilot error" and led to the
common acronym RTFM. Even the simplest, most basic things could warrant a call
to support (especially if free) from somebody seeking a de facto handholding
or tutorial.

The other end of the spectrum is when you (as support) get a call from a user
who is a _known quantity_ infamous for _really knowing the product_... better
than most users. Seeing such a name on a support ticket induces a shudder,
because you _know_ he's revealed some hairball of a problem that will eat your
day... or _week_ , with the only mitigating factor being his/her detailed
strategy of workarounds already attempted. (You out there anywhere, Bob
Kaplan?)

~~~
dredmorbius
I learned humility for how "normal users" use computers back in the late 1990s
when javascript reporting of display settings were first coming out. A
trivially easy thing to change and improve your experience ... and yet the
vast majority of users didn't.

Choose _really_ sane defaults. Autoconfigure if possible.

And on the other side, I've got a few fixes, patches, and documentation to my
credit in some larger projects and products. Nothing truly wizardly, but solid
basic stuff.

------
devonkim
I have to disagree with some of the implications of the article. Older people
(baby boomers or older) like my parents or mother and father in-law
immediately look for a phone number when they encounter an issue because they
"don't trust computers to be as up-to-date as a real, live person"
(summarization). This tendency seems to decrease as a person becomes faster at
looking up information online, but even my father that's in IT will still
reach for a phone if he can't figure out what he's looking for within a
minute. For myself, the resistance to calling is because of the dreaded wait
time in a call queue.

It should also be noted that while the statistics unequivocally show a trend
upwards in use of non-phone support channels, this _still_ leaves roughly 40%+
of interactions by phone at the moment. The other important implication is
that when customers do happen to call you, it will increasingly be because all
other sources failed first which means your call center should be moving
towards higher-skilled problem solvers than mostly tier 1 / level 1 support
agents that might as well be replaced with an AI but aren't because voice
systems are expensive for the results in conversation.

My fundamental point is that you while you should understand general trends,
you should validate against _your_ organization. AARP probably should not
think about dropping half their phone agents exactly, but maybe they should
revisit the idea in another 4 years as the general population becomes more
educated and the technology-handicapped pass on.

~~~
bsder
The under-25 generation seems to be actually terrified to have to ... gasp ...
_TALK_ to somebody.

Many of them will sit and wait for 2 days after ordering something online when
something is available 5 minutes away at a brick and mortar store.

I don't get it. I guess I'm just old.

~~~
joshstrange
> The under-25 generation seems to be actually terrified to have to ... gasp
> ... TALK to somebody.

No I don't like talking to customer service, their english is normally subpar
but that's not even the worst part, they ask you to verify identity with every
transfer (and after you verified it through their phone system). Phone lines
often drop for no good reason throwing you back to square one. I'm not
terrified to talk to someone, I'm terrified I'll spend an hour on the phone
and NEVER talk to anyone (Hello IRS).

> Many of them will sit and wait for 2 days after ordering something online
> when something is available 5 minutes away at a brick and mortar store.

5 minutes? Hahaha. I have to go down 16 floors (elevator but still), find my
car in the parking garage, then drive through traffic where the closest
grocery store is 10 min away and tech/superstore is 20 min away then I have to
go in the store, find what I want, stand in line, and buy it. OR I can order
it on the couch in my pajamas and have it cheaper and delivered to my door.

> I don't get it. I guess I'm just old.

You might be old but that's not the issue. You must live next door to every
store you ever need to buy things from and call companies that answer with a
real understandable human on the first ring.

~~~
iofj
Having started out, during studies, as a tech support agent for an ISP, as I
imagine a lot of people have here, companies don't like support calls either.

The vast majority are either dumb (trivial problem like misspelling username),
unreasonable (demanding a truck roll because "their latency went up by 2ms",
download speed going down, ...), shouting or combinations of the above.

Treating callers that call about a product like adults is an expensive mistake
for companies.

------
nikanj
I. WANT. TO. CALL. SUPPORT!

Nothing is more infuriating than having a problem, and being endlessly
redirected from a FAQ to user forums to email. Email gets me a canned answer
from Bob, who didn't read my mail for more than 7 seconds. Replying to said
mail gets me Chuck, who's very sorry Bob couldn't help me..and then pastes the
same canned answer.

With a phone, you're not running totally stateless, and can actually make
progress towards solving the problem.

~~~
CPLX
I want to call a support person that's actually more knowledgable than me.

Many phone support agents are just looking at and reading from some sort of
scripted FAQ, which means they are between me and the content I want. I'd much
rather they just put all that text online rather than having it read to me.

~~~
mannykannot
> I want to call a support person that's actually more knowledgable than me.

Amen to that. Unfortunately, it is not a common option any more.

Leggett's article is at best ambiguous over this, and she gives the impression
of not understanding the issue. Firstly, 'voice' is not a unified category: on
the one hand, there is informed-human voice support, and on the other, there
is the combination of voice automation and uninformed flunky. Leggett shows no
sign of understanding that people are not abandoning the former out of choice,
but because it is not available.

------
maxerickson
Someone else used my email address for their Ubisoft account. The problem with
this is that Ubisoft doesn't verify addresses, so I end up getting a bunch of
junk from them (maybe things they should not be sending me too...). I looked
for an email contact form to ask them to remove my address from the account.
No dice. Their Twitter person said to call Ubisoft Support. Not gonna do that,
so now their user isn't getting messages and I'm training Gmail that Ubisoft
is a spammer.

ESPN Fantasy Sports was similarly broken as of a year ago, if someone entered
your email address for a league, the _only_ way to stop getting messages was
to create an account, join the league, and then delete the account.

Of course just clicking spam is far easier than trying to fix the problem, but
I figure creating friction against these sorts of broken processes is some
sort of minor public service.

~~~
rbritton
I have a <first initial><last name> gmail address. It's unbelievable the
number of people who sign up for stuff and think that's _their_ email address.
I get pay stubs from some New Zealand company, OB-GYN reports for some woman
in Baltimore, and so on. Very few services verify email addresses.

~~~
maxerickson
My email is maxerickson@, so about the same as yours. My favorite example was
a nice woman who started sending pictures of her newly born baby to the
address (thinking the kid could then log in to the account in the future).

It turned out okay, I sent a polite note and she figured it out. One of the
main reasons I do anything about it is that I simply don't want to ever see so
many of the messages.

My theory is that the Ubisoft guy is also the guy giving the address to
employers. Hurray for that.

------
diogenescynic
I cancelled my Comcast subscription because their phone support is so horrible
and they removed the ability to chat to a live agent on their website. If you
call Comcast customer service you have to verify your account/identity to
access the phone tree and then once you are actually connected to an agent you
have to verify your account/identity again. Then when that person transfers
you to the department or agent who can resolve the issue, you have to verify
your account/identity again. It's absurd. I actually think it's designed to
frustrate you into hanging up. Also, the call transfers tend to drop your
call. Imagine verifying your account/identify three times, then your call is
dropped so you have to go through the process all over again. You've now had
to verify your account/identity 7x for usually what is a simple task. It is
the single worst customer service experience I had ever experienced.

~~~
mwfunk
What frustrates me most about Comcast is that so many common tasks that one
would think would be solved by checking a box on their site requires making a
call to customer service. They are not incentivized to provide decent self-
help options because they WANT you to have to call, because phone support is
another sales channel. I don't think I've ever called Comcast about anything
where they didn't make me listen to (recorded or otherwise) pitches about
other services you could sign up for.

My few experiences with live chat weren't much better. It was always a 45
minute ordeal, where 90% of the time was spent with me staring at the chat
window waiting to move on to the next step of the process, with periodic
assurances from the rep (or a bot, who knows!) that they were still there and
were just waiting for some request to "make it through the system" or
whatever. Meanwhile there was a constant stream of Comcast marketing messages
and, uh, "special offers" being presented to me in the chat window.

If they had more useful self-help options, it would reduce phone support
calls, which would reduce their ability to leverage support as a sales and
marketing tool. If their phone support system was more efficient with fewer
transfers, shorter hold times, etc., it would also reduce their captive
audience for sales and marketing.

I'm not so cynical as to think it's all a conspiracy, but they do have an
incentive to not improve customer service, and when it's been so comically
terrible for so long it's hard to not think that some faction within the
company has the power and motivation to hobble their support offerings in the
interest of generating some teensy amount of additional revenue in exchange
for customer frustration.

~~~
banana_giraffe
I can't speak for Comcast, but when I worked at a medium sized ISP back in the
day when ISP meant dealing with dial-up modems, all of this was caused by
politics, and not by design.

The customer support department was only really concerned with call times. If
the number one call type was customers asking to delete a 'stuck' email, then
all that mattered was that the reps could handle that call quickly. The devs
were only concerned with shiny new features.

There was a feedback channel so the reps could say "a lot of email seems to be
'stuck', can you make it easier for the customer to delete it?". But that'd be
a bug like any other, and not prioritized above others just because the reps
said it was their number one type of call. And reps wouldn't fight too much
for it, since reducing calls wasn't really a concern, just keeping call times
short.

I'd think a big org like Comcast could fix some of these stupid issues with
cross-department politics, but then again, from what I've seen, fixing that
sort of thing in big orgs is even harder.

------
gregpilling
Anecdote: we recently made a few videos, explaining the most common tech
support questions. Studio, lighting, mic, etc. and edited professionally.

Calls dropped in half at least, with those specific problems almost wiped out
completely. I am shipping 1000 products per month, and handling 2-3 phone
calls per day to support them.

Now planning on making more videos to cover the next most frequent generic
questions, and then on to a dedicated video per product (143 products).

~~~
sandebert
Not to be rude or anything, but you might also had some effect if you updated
the texts on your customer service page to not just be repetitions of Lorem
Ipsum. :-)

[http://sascase.com/customer-service](http://sascase.com/customer-service)

~~~
zajd
Well that's because you need to go to the customer support area:
[http://sascase.com/customer-support/](http://sascase.com/customer-support/)

~~~
kecks
... which is empty as well.

------
Kenji
Yeah, it's super obvious. I don't want to wait 30 min in line and then talk to
someone who treats me like an imbecile but they are clueless themselves. And
to get someone on the line who actually can fix the problem, I need to explain
my issue 3 times more and waste another hour. Phone calls are the last resort,
when everything is breaking apart and failing.

~~~
iofj
Heh, given the current quality of phone support, one wonders why they aren't
replaced by scripts + voice recognition + voice synthesis.

I'm pretty sure I can write a basic AI program that can beat comcast tech
support agents at their job, assuming an eventual fallthrough is available.

~~~
donperignon
With the recent improvements in voice recognition and deep learning
algorithms, machine-driven support is just about to happen soon. Plus there
are many companies actually working on that field, ie. [http://www.artificial-
solutions.com](http://www.artificial-solutions.com) or
[http://www.anbotogroup.com/en/index.php](http://www.anbotogroup.com/en/index.php)

~~~
iofj
Thanks for the links, but if that's the quality of their voice synthesis ...
it's not going to work.

------
pheoki
This is ridiculous. I absolutely want to talk to a person when something has
gone wrong. Too many systems are poorly designed, and you can get your account
into an invalid state. I'm paying for a service, and part of that service
should be to allow me to contact someone when their system breaks. Spending a
day researching on forums is wasting my time. It isn't that I don't want to
call for support, it's the company that doesn't want to pay qualified
individuals to provide that support.

------
nsfyn55
She leaves out the primary benefit of agent-assisted digital channels... they
are asynchronous like some sort of people epoll(1). They maximize throughput.
The friction comes from the synchronicity of voice communication. With that
said some things require voice communication so I doubt eliminating them
entirely will ever be an option.

------
kdkooo
I think this article leaves out a major question of whether or not people feel
like being social. Some people like talking to people when they have a problem
or question, some people have a strong resistance to explaining their problem
on the spot to a stranger.

------
zippergz
I want to have the _option_ of calling, but I don't like being forced to call.
I absolutely hate it when I email in with a simple question and the reply is
"please call us." If I wanted to call, I would have called in the first place.

------
ape4
Users want

1\. A well designed product.

2\. Easy online help.

3\. If that's not enough, easy to contact knowledgeable people to call who
know more than the FAQ.

------
korginator
Another increasingly common trend is not having a proper escalation path, like
an email address. Good luck trying to find an email address at Netflix to
escalate a problem.

------
howareroark
I'm thinking it doesn't have to be so complicated as web chat and SMS.
Forester is kinda in the business of convincing companies to spend money on
new fancy stuff.

Just respond to an email right away with a welcoming and well considered
response. As soon as I know someone has reliable email support, I'm down.

Calling is fine too, but with email you give someone a chance to do a bit of
research for you and not be on the spot.

------
trasc
This article refers to documentation that is behind a $499 paywall. Ick.

