
Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable - kanamekun
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/technology/why-tech-support-is-purposely-unbearable.html
======
97s
Coming from a tech support background. I used to be a top performer at a
support company and set most of the records for call times etc. I was hated by
most of my peers, and many of my supervisors because I set numbers to low for
most of the other teams and they were under preforming. I am not saying this
to brag but to state how awful most support workers are. Most of my co-workers
had no idea what they were doing besides reading off a script, any question
outside of the box and boom, off to tier 2.

One problem is: I found that the quicker I answered questions the more
questions I received. If the customer knew that I knew what I was doing and I
was able to help them efficiently they had more questions. This led me to
ponder how to solve the problem. I ended up getting my supervisor to create a
FAQ page based on a ton of the questions that I was constantly asked. I was
then able to refer customers to this page and actually say honestly that it
would answer their questions.

A lot of the problem with these tech giants like ATT, Comcast, etc, they have
horrible interfaces. For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a
show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again
before you can watch the next episode. It's horrible. I called multiple times
trying to figure out how to get around this. They said there is no fix and it
is how the system works. I googled it and millions of people have the same
issue. It's absurd, yet they haven't fixed it. I don't think they even care,
or it cost them money for customers to watch on demand so they want to make it
as aggravating as possible.

Another interesting aspect of being able to help people quickly is you never
get good reviews or people asking to speak to your supervisor. People are so
pleased that they were able to get their answer solved in a manner they could
understand in a really fast time they just breath a big sigh of relief and say
"thank you so much", and then get off the phone.

I had co-workers who would spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with someone
sitting there trying to explain something to them, and since they were so
patient, the customer always asked to speak to supervisor to thank them for
their patience. For some reason the customer always thinks they are the
problem in this situation. It really boggles my mind.

Just a view.

~~~
wtbob
> For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to
> literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch
> the next episode.

Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an
actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a
studio's corpus. This sort of thing _should_ be table stakes, but for some
reason it's not.

~~~
thearn4
My conspiracy theory lately has been that Netflix's search and basic UI is
terrible on purpose, to make us not notice the shifts and declines in the
streaming catalog quality. For the life of me I can't imagine why else they
would ignore calls to improve it.

~~~
97s
I subscribe to netflix once a year and binge watch all my favorite shows
during the holidays. I tried staying subscribed to them, but their UI is so
bad I never know what is new and what isn't. Why can't they have a list of
newly added shows that isn't a huge picture. I don't enjoy horizontal
scrolling.

~~~
pcmaffey
Instantwatcher.com is your answer, with direct links to watch on netflix.

~~~
meowface
The sliders for dates and ratings are awesome.

Now that's how you do a UI.

And they're running this for free, while Amazon and Netflix are supposed to be
spending billions on this.

------
Animats
I like "Fast Customer", which waits on hold for you. I was thinking of
something like that years ago, and was going to call it "Holdmaster". It makes
sense as an app; pre-smartphone, it would have required a box attached the
phone line.

Microsoft once had customer support lines where you could call in for about
$195, but if it was their bug, you got a refund. Fun gamble.

~~~
techsupporter
Microsoft still does though it hasn't been $195 in quite some time. The
offering you're thinking of is called Professional Pay-Per-Incident (instead
of Premier). Current price is $499 though you're guaranteed to spend virtually
the entirety of your incident on the phone with an outsourcer in India.

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/gp/offerprophone](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/offerprophone)

~~~
Spooky23
Most of the Premier engineers are in India as well.

If they're outsourced, they are a very good outsourcer. I have had many good
experiences with them.

~~~
yardie
The turnover in call centers in India I quite high. If you are getting a
knowledgable engineer in India they are probably getting near US wages.

------
ranveeraggarwal
It's worse when you have the exact problem laid out and the customer support
guy knows less about the product than you do. Two years ago, I talked to the
Dell Customer Support about my failing hard drive and showed him the tests I
ran to verify it.

He: What do you mean by failing hard drive? Is it not booting?

I showed him bad sectors in my hard drive.

He: Is the problem solved?

I: No! You have done literally nothing to solve my problem.

He: But your laptop is booting now, right?

I: Yes, it is, for now. But it won't in a few days.

He: I think your laptop has no problem. Have a good day.

I did take a backup and my hard drive did fail completely a week later. So
much for tech support.

~~~
tallanvor
One of the reasons I stopped buying Apple products was this type of
interaction. I had a Macbook Air, and it would freeze up randomly for several
seconds at a time. There were no error messages or anything, and finally found
out when I tried to upgrade the OS that it wouldn't install on the drive
because it was failing. Eventually I figured out how to find the SMART status,
and took it in since it was under warranty.

The rep kept trying to get me to reinstall the OS since "if that's the
problem, they'd have to charge me for it". Never mind that the installer
wouldn't run... After about 15 minutes of this back and forth with him trying
to prove that nothing was wrong and me showing the SMART status, he finally
went in back and asked someone who told him to take it in.

------
wccrawford
>To get better service by phone, dial the prompt designated for “sales” or “to
place an order,” which almost always gets you an onshore agent, while tech
support is usually offshore with the associated language difficulties.

I ended up doing something similar the other day. I wanted to cancel my TV
service, and was considering upgrading my internet speed. I called in and
chose the option to cancel a service. I was on hold for 30 minutes.

I had to hang up and then called back a little later, but this time I asked
for "upgrades". I got someone _immediately_. He was a little non-plussed when
I immediately asked to cancel a service, but didn't scold me. I did then
upgrade my speed.

------
keithpeter
_" The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service
providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are
bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled
their service. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are
consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support."_

UK: significant problem with adsl broadband, kept going round in circles over
a period of weeks, was advised _by the tech support_ to phone the sales number
and ask to cancel contract. Issue escalated in minutes and solved in an hour.

Apparently customer _retention_ has higher priority to customer _support_.

------
arbuge
"“It’s utterly maddening because the thing about conversations is that when I
say something to you, I believe I’m having influence on the conversation,”

....

"AT&T, Comcast and Verizon Communications did not respond to requests for
comment."

------
madebysquares
I worked tech support for 6 years for a large telco in the northeast it was
the most miserable, mundane part of my life. They were so poorly managed and
so focused on bottom line that customers wants and needs were not important.
Helping customers was the least important thing as long as you didn't talk to
them for more than 8 minutes and you didn't appear to be rude.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>They were so poorly managed and so focused on bottom line that customers
wants and needs were not important.

That's because tech support is regarded as a "cost center", where the primary
goal is always to keep costs to a minimum. This is why most support centers
prioritize making the customer go away rather than actually solving their
problems, documenting the issues and working with other teams to find
permanent fixes.

~~~
mikekchar
And this is why shrink wrapped software sucks. Having worked in that industry,
customer service gets a call: "The application crashed and corrupted my save
file!", "How many seats have you purchased?", "Seat? I just bought one copy
for myself.", "Thank you for reporting the bug. Please buy the next version to
see if the bug is fixed". Of course, developers never even get the bug because
the customer only bought 1 copy. I never saw a bug from a customer that bought
less than 200 copies :-(

------
michaelbuckbee
The article focuses mostly on big incumbents. If you're in more of a startup
mindset doing awesome support has tremendous ROI.

~~~
rdiddly
From the scriptures:
[http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

~~~
aangjie
Ermm.. I always thought while it read fine, it also assumes that you'll
eventually find a way to make those things scale.(be it automation, guided
voice faq ? etc..). Doing things that don't scale is a good way a to corner
portions of a market with big and established players, but not enough. aka
necessary but not sufficient.

~~~
rdiddly
The point is, as a startup, try to blow your customers' minds, including with
excellent support (agrees w/parent). It acknowledges that there may be some
difficulty in scaling it (agrees w/sibling), but statistically you're unlikely
to get big enough to have to worry about that (especially if you don't provide
excellent support), so don't worry about it, just do it. And if you ever get
to that point, you might find it scales better than you thought it would
(agrees with you).

------
passenger
A smaller response time actually leads to more requests from customers IMHO.
Customers are more likely to contact you for "mundane" tasks when they are
assured of a quick response.

~~~
bpchaps
This might be true. When I worked at a helpdesk, I was given praise for having
the fastest call times on the floor. In the same review though, I was
critiqued just as strongly for not being personal enough. It was and telling.

------
brownbat
Reminded me of Julie Snyder's ten month battle with MCI over immense charges
she never incurred. Agents seemed to make up new offices and procedures to
assure her that her issue had been elevated and this time it would be
different.

It was only fully resolved after she put the story on This American Life.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/253/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/253/the-middle-of-nowhere?act=2)

------
beyondcompute
A solution? The good ol' government regulation. If companies 'cannot' achieve
acceptable standards of customer support service, those standards should be
imposed on them. This game where ordinary customers are so often the victims
must be put to an end.

~~~
sverige
That's hilarious! Having run a few call centers, the costs involved in upping
service levels from, say, 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds to, say, 98% in
10 seconds, grow geometrically.

If regulations were passed that mandated service levels, many companies would
take Google's approach and simply not offer phone support at all. And we all
know how great their support is.

The solution is to not use any services from monopolies, as the article points
out. But of course, that's impossible for most people.

~~~
Nullabillity
Uh, if there were mandated service levels then Google would have to live up to
those too...? Presumably this would be an acceptable-or-you-get-fined deal,
not an acceptable-or-nothing-at-all deal.

~~~
majewsky
It will be hard to argue (esp. in front of judges) for SLAs on free services.

------
sllabres
Reading the article and comming accross the obviously true line of “Don’t
think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the
minimal level of service” this came to my mind:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkPcTNnGNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfkPcTNnGNk)

------
Zigurd
Both Hover and Squarespace have amazing, wonderful, useful tech support. They
are selling somewhat technical products to what are, at best, a "power user"
level of customer. They make it work.

~~~
nathancahill
Rackspace is amazing as well. Which they advertise, but it's 100% true.

------
GnarfGnarf
For examples of excellent Tech. Support, I recommend GoDaddy, Infusionsoft,
Managed.com (PowerDNN). These people know their stuff. And they speak English.

For execrable support, see Google.

~~~
chipperyman573
I don't know why I keep seeing this comment on HN, but Google has good support
for all paid products.

~~~
csydas
Probably because there are different experiences with different Google
products. Apps for Education Customers, for example, get a working product but
very little in the way of support. You can submit whatever you want, but
whether Google chooses to answer is another story, not always with a happy
ending.

------
AtlasLion
A differentiation should be made between b2b and b2c. B2b support is way
better with much higher SLA's.

~~~
jmme
Yes. I currently work in b2b tech support (well, its my last week). The job is
better and service much different that described in this article -- SLA
response times are enforced, but there is expectation that some tickets will
take hours over the phone, sometimes over days.

The main issues are retention and hiring people with the right knowledge
and/or ability to learn. New hires are often useless for months on the phone,
and the most talented people jump ship even after aggressive promotions. Both
issues fundamentally come down to pay.

------
michaelbuddy
Clever headline. Almost makes you think the NYTimes is telling the truth. But
the places I've worked, the desire was always to resolve the phone calls one
and done. Get the answer, get them resolved so they don't have to call back.
The conspiracy theory the NYT is cooking up is clickbait.

~~~
yardie
That hasn't been my experience. Worked a few tech support jobs and the big
ones wanted the call finished in 8 minutes no matter the outcome. Now, they
would tell you to resolve the issue, wink wink, but your performance was based
only on call time.

