Customers Don't Want to Call for Support
blogs.forrester.com
blogs.forrester.com
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.
I work with all US and Alaska tribes, a lot of them older women doing enrollment that I assist with technical support.
They're always happy to talk with me and I tell them do not hesitate to call if there is an issue. Glad to help.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
> Voice increasingly evolve to be an escalation— not a primary service — channel.
I hope this trend continues. And companies drop the know-nothing scripted CSRs (who are like a FAQ that you access through a clumsy voice interface) and instead staff their call centers with pleasant, smart people with actual domain knowledge.
A large data analysis/reporting package, when I used it (quite some years back now) had excellent phone support. Front-tier was basic, but calls would get escallated if necessary, and I once spent a good 45-60 minutes talking through a data extraction language nuance for mainframe formats. That company budgeted $50 per support call. In the 1990s.
My experience recently with Apple is that you schedule a support call and they call you. Often before I can take my finger off the mouse from filing the request. This really is excellent (though resolution of problems themselves is mixed). Part of Apple's cost is that end-user support, and it's good.
There's the case of Dell selling a former gig a storage solution that, despite promises of the salesman, Dell wouldn't support (and it turned out, couldn't). Front-tier was as helpful as he could be, but when I escallated to a supervisor I was informed that support wouldn't be provided and that the supervisor's interest was in not providing support but in actively denying it.
That's been some 7-8 years ago now. Oddly enough, I still remember the incident.
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.
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.
I LOVE talking to my friends. Family. Interesting folks at the pub. People of all sorts on the bus.
I don't particularly love talking to somebody about why their system isn't working or how some bizarre thing I need to do is a corner case they never addressed. I doubt most people do.
Re: local stores Keep in mind that "5 minutes away" to you might be 30 minutes away for someone else, since we don't all have the same means of getting around. I prefer a bicycle - but if you live in suburban sprawl that means you can't really do much of anything in 5 minutes.
Also, most people underestimate how long it takes to make a run to the store. If you do drive, it can easily be a minute or two getting to the car, buckled in, etc. . It's 5 (more likely 10-15 minutes) minutes getting there, and then you're in the store and have to find the thing, if it's even in stock. Wait in line to buy it. Drive home. It adds up. The next time you think you're making a 5 or 10 minute trip to the store, time how long the whole process takes and see how long it actually is.
If I don't need something immediately and I can't walk or cycle to a familiar store for it I probably am buying it online.
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.
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.
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.
Calling should be reserved for issues that are either unknown or require something to be done on the company's end (resetting a flag on an account or some other option that I can't do on my end).
It's just a matter of convenience and access. Common and obvious issues have up front solutions listed. Less common or more technical issues have easily searchable details and solutions or potential fixes listed. Then only the "deepest" level of issues/fixes that require action from the company require a call.
It keeps their phone support costs lower, it keeps wait times shorter, and customer "friction" only goes up as much as it needs to relevant to the fix.
Maybe the underlying problem here is that people increasingly assume calling won't help them actually make progress towards solving the problem. Years of dealing with tedious phone menus, call centre staff who literally can't understand or speak basic English properly, and often call centre staff who don't have the authority or capabilities to do anything useful to fix the problem anyway, have taught many customers that calling will be a waste of probably significant amounts of their time.
I'm not sure how fair that really is, but phone support seems to be increasingly polarised these days. Some organisations still take it seriously, and you can speak reasonably quickly with someone helpful and knowledgeable. In these cases I often find the phone support is the fastest way to find reliable information or solve a problem. Other organisations are more like the stereotype I described above, and I confess to having very little patience with them these days. If I'm calling because an automated system already wasn't working well enough, and I don't get a confident feeling about the phone support almost immediately, I don't mess around any more: if it was an enquiry about a sale, they probably just lost that deal, and if it was a significant problem or complaint, they're probably getting a letter with verified delivery instead.
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.
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.
I doubt that companies with bad email support would serve up anything better over the phone.
Support articles are written from the perspective that the company's products and services are perfect and I might not understand how to use them correctly.
Only on the phone can I get someone who will acknowledge the existence of an actual problem and start drilling into it with me.
In the telecom world, say whatever you want verbally, nobody records things, but anything written in email will come up at contract renewal time or in court if the contract needs breaking.
Email is asynchronous. I can send the message and then get on with something else while waiting for a reply.
I loathe phoning support.
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.
From your perspective, you have solved the problem. Gmail will no longer display emails from them.
The greater problem is also one step closer to being solved. The spammers, in this case Ubisoft, have been correctly identified as spam by you.
Even if you were an Ubisoft customer, if you couldn't get them to stop emailing you, that would be spam.
Spam data is shared, it would be better to create a specific filter instead.
By the way, what's preventing you from resetting the password and deleting the account in this case? Username? Secondary authentication?
As far as the shared training, I see that as a plus. They choose to spam as a trade off in their user registration work flow, if they don't want people like me to mark their messages as spam, they can choose a different trade off.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.