Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable | Hacker News Reader

Why Tech Support Is Purposely Unbearable

nytimes.com

85 pointskanamekun105 comments

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.

There is also a large difference between the small fry support and the larger corporate support, especially when you consider the vendor relationship that many large companies have.

In a small company the support personell can be really hit or miss but often times can have major impacts on the product or even directly submit patches to the code you are running.

At a bigger company they may pay a third party to maintain certain standards; often times they will leave a vendor if they are too good because the bonus structures are often based on how satisfied customers are and how much volume they handle. If their vendor is too successful and they have to pay more money for their cost center than usual, signaling the long end of the contract.

Exactly. The company I worked for was a huge customer support company that developed the firmware that went on most of the modems that rural internet companies used. Some of the smaller companies paid on per a call resolution basis. The other's just had large contracts for us to help them no matter how many calls we got. It was a major problem when customers called in for simple questions that were outside of what we were paid to answer. Nothing worse than turning down/playing dumb a super easy question because it is against your policies to help people. It led to some really interesting problems, where you couldn't tell the customer that you can't answer that question, but the customer was confused as why you couldn't answer it, thinking that you were dumb, and asking for the next level of support or something. It also made for some really odd tickets. "Couldn't help customer because question was outside scope of responsibility.(question goes here) Customer got angry, tried to calm customer down. Customer wanted to speak to supervisor. Transferred to supervisor Billy Bob."

I would later check those tickets and supervisors would just refer the customer to the customer support of the actual internet company. FFS how frustrating would that be. Call the tech support number 24/7. Then speak to a supervisor, who send you to a customer support for the local company, who pays you to solve peoples problems. It was one of the most confusing jobs on the planet.

Another side note, they rolled out a call center check list/call flow application that was developed in house. They required us to use it. I was one of the few who refused to do so. My supervisor came around and asked me what the issue was. I showed him all the problems it had and how it drastically slowed down and erased notes if the customer mislead you down the wrong path and you found out later it was a completely different issue, which happened all the time. (They literally developed this software without having a single person who answers calls on the team, not a single person...)

Supervisor said can you write it all down so I can give it to the tech department. I sat there that night(was on night shift this particular night) and wrote up a javascript(notepad) example version on my local machine that was probably 5x better than theirs. I didn't think they would understand what I was saying.

My supervisor flipped out and introduced me to the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls. Man I could go on and on about how bad tech companies and customer service companies are.

About a week later they hacked my javascript into their version of the app and rolled it out. My supervisor eventually left due to frustrations of how they ran things. He had no other skills and left a 65K a year job to do manual labor for half the amount per year. He was probably the best supervisor there. I think this is probably another reason customer service industry sucks. Good people don't like doing bad jobs.

Thanks so much for sharing all this, I find it super interesting! I've spent a long time on hold wondering why it's so hard for large companies to properly scale customer service.

And I'll definitely keep in mind the tip about thanking the supervisor when a representative is particularly helpful.

> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls

So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)

He said he had a prototype in JavaScript, that's still s long way from a multi-user production system. The problem generally is that management doesn't understand this.

There's concurrency issues, as in what happens if two technicians are accessing the same ticket. There's the backend system which will also include user details etc. there's the whole account management portion. And so on.

A prototype is great but there's still a good a lot of work left to productize something ;)

I know, that's why I added the smiley.

I responded to the other poster. I hope this clears it up. There wasn't any backend to develop on this ticketing system. It was simply a html form with checkboxes to print out a note to paste into the real ticketing system.

I am not saying I am a good developer. I don't do any development at all anymore, I used to do web dev that is all, and I wasn't that great at it.

I looked up the javascript/JQUERY in the docs and hacked together a front end that took notes off a checklist that then generated a note that users could put into the ticketing system.

To clarify what was happening. They had 2 apps that were separate. One was the one that allowed us to log into their modems etc. This is where we wrote the notes for the client. It was just a text field that we could write what we did on the ticket. That was all. Most people didn't write good notes, so the company got tired of that and developed a second app. Which was basically a html form with check boxes that you could work through. At the end of the work flow there was a button which generated text based on what you checked off. "Answered customer call about MODEM SUPPORT. Customer claims INTERNET NOT WORKING."

Basically something like that. We then copied the text it generated and pasted it into the other software which was on their account. So when I say it took them 4 months to develop the call flow and note taking app. I literally mean 12 call flows with about 4-6 check boxes that generate text to copy and paste into the other one.

The issue is they had the call flow you want to go through on the top, say MODEM DEAD or something. After you took in the customers information in those fields: name, phone number, company, problem, etc. If the customer was leading you down the wrong path, and it was actually internet being slow not modem dead(which happened all the time). Then you could have to change call flows by selecting the right one from a drop down box. What happened then is it cleared the entire form of all the information you had placed in it. Their name, number, all your previous steps everything.

So all I did was hack together a duplicate version of this that when you changed call flows it kept your notes and said ---> changed call flows to ---> and then let you paste all that information, so if the call was 10 minutes because of this, it was noted. So am I saying I am an awesome hacker, hell no, but it isn't hard to make check boxes on a form print out words to copy and paste, why did it take them that long to do it. When I first started there they told me they had just started working on it in my training.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Thanks for this. It is fantastic.

I'll just throw in Amazon Prime video as well.

Why do all these companies have such horrible UI?

It's not. It's just that most people do extremely simple searches. They experimented with more complex interfaces and while they please a minority of power-users, they reduce overall engagement by confusing the masses.

In other words they reimplemented network tv.

My guess is that the general audience / user base simply doesn't care.

It's similar to the experience I had when I had to look for a replacement for rdio, which was closing down last year. I was shocked to learn how inferior and lacking all other services were - yet rdio was the one that had to close shop. One of the most obvious issues is the fact that you can't filter/browse releases by label on any service but rdio. Being able to see a label's catalog and new releases is an essential feature for music enthusiasts, yet the general public apparently couldn't care less. It seems if you use these features, you're already part of a very niche crowd. I guess it's not too different from searching by actor or director on Netflix.

On Spotify you can search for labels like this:

label:Stax

I know, I discovered this a while ago. However it's clearly not really intended by Spotify's devs and not a great substitute for a proper implementation.

Netflix is a shining bastion of usability compared to the VOD services in my country. When replaying tv, the better one has unskippable ads (for only twice the price of netflix!), the worse one doesn't have a fast-forward and starts the replay ten minutes before the actual show.

I think the problem is due to being tv companies to start with. They're not geared towards an interactive experience with viewers and have no idea how to provide it.

> They're not geared towards an interactive experience with viewers and have no idea how to provide it.

This can't be the full answer. Starting an on-demand stream 10 minutes before the actual show is so mind-boggingly stupid that I cannot imagine incompetence to be the root cause. In other words, Hanlon's Razor does not apply, and malice on their part should be assumed.

My non-malice potential answer is that they are broadcast streaming to save bandwidth. They wait until either they have a certain number of people or 10 minutes elapses and then start showing it. They may not be realising that they never meet the required number and always wait 10 minutes.

These queries and "show me where I can find show X across broadcast, cable, on-demand, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or other" are the reason I bought a Tivo. Their UX is still not what I'd like as far as efficiency, but they get the table stakes 100%.

There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in

Wow. I forgot you used to be able to do this in Netflix. Back in try days when they were slinging DVDs. This also worked on the Apple TV. But I. Don't have an ATV so I'm not able to verify its still that way.

I'm using Netflix on a PS3. It's pretty but functionally useless.

Doing general inbound customer support (not tech) for a telco for a couple of months, I had the opposite time-related experience. I had a low number of daily calls, and was occasionally upbraided for it. But when I got a customer, either their issue got fixed, or it got escalated to the next level[1]. They didn't have to call back unless there actually was work to do on their side. The usual experience was a couple of callbacks, as note-taking was seen by the couple-of-hundred staff as somewhat optional. A colleague of mine came through the same training process and was terrible for the customers - didn't know what he was doing, transferring calls to the wrong department just to get rid of them, never left any notes at all... but his daily call count was high, so the higher-ups loved him. Nice bloke, we'd go drinking together, but he wasn't who you'd want to get on a call.

[1] Arthur was the escalation point. I loved Arthur. I would go to him with a messed-up customer problem and he'd say "hand it to me, you don't have to worry about this anymore". I'd hand him the paperwork and I'd never, ever see the problem again (he actually did something with it, he didn't just bin it :) ). It reminded me a bit of the jedi mind trick: "You can go about your business..."

It's crazy isn't it. Did your higher-ups think he was doing a better job because he was working more on calls all day, where you were off them quick? In my job as soon as you got off a call you got right back on another one with a new customer. So I would have like 2-3x the calls per day of another person. I think that is one of the reasons the other people took so long, they figured whats the point, this person is nice and old I will just stay with them over getting a rude person. Who knows the logic behind it all. I tell you what though, I have some incredible stories that I will never forget. Some insanely funny customers and some hilarious co-workers.

When I first got to my job I had quick call times right away. Several supervisors told me they were going to listen to all my calls because they thought I was just hanging up on people. After they listened to them all, they told me to slow down and take more time. I was like, but I am rewarded for doing a better job and having faster call times. Literally that is how bonuses are given. WTF... None of my customers ever said "slow down please to me." I think they didn't want to pay me more for doing a good job. I just needed to do average so I met their agreement numbers with the internet company.

I think that part of it is that number of calls is the only quantitative KPI that can be relied upon. And not only do talented people not like to stay in the callcenter on the phones, talented managers also don't want to manage callcenters (very high staff turnover, cost-center department, not much sense of achievement when you solve problems, no political power to change the company's product when it's causing problems, etc). So the talented people cycle in and back out for the most part, and the less-talented people remain.

>the talented people cycle in and back out for the most part, and the less-talented people remain.

This is known as the dead sea effect http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

> 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.

Oh my God. I'm not even sure if search in 1996 was this bad. I'm almost thinking that this is by design for some sadistic reason, like there's no way that this is this way out of natural happen-stance.

I found that the quicker I answered questions the more questions I received.

A kind of Jevons Paradox for tech support? :)

= )

You are the Alexey Stakhanov [1] of your era. Unfortunately, there's no love for people like you :(

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov

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.

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

FWIW, the one time I had to use this service, they were extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and effective (and in India).

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.

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.

Some companies (I know Amazon does for one, and I'm pretty sure GEICO does too) now have "call me when an operator is available" functionality. I suspect this is relatively trivial to implement in a modern phone system, and probably saves money since you aren't tieing up circuits with people sitting on hold.

Eh, 'circuits' are essentially free in these days of VoIP PBXs and you probably save money (at least in the short term) by people who get tired of waiting on the phone and just hang up.

"Essentially free" isn't free at large enough scale.

When compared to the cost of actual people you need on the other end to pick up the phone that scales at pretty much the same speed, yes, it's still essentially free.

But it does't, that's the entire point. If you have, say, 100 operators, and a flux of calls that sees 500 incoming calls in a 5 minute window, now you're paying for 500 simultaneous calls, even though you're only servicing 100.

A voice stream is 64Kb (yes, bits) per second for full bandwidth over SS7. So my home connection can carry around 16,384 simultaneous calls for $50 a month. That's one third of one cent per incoming call capacity. So yes, essentially free.

That's not the expensive bit. At some point it has to hit the legacy phone network.

This has been standard at MS for decades now. Of course, to create a "hotfix" required more justification.

You used to get a couple of incidents with an MSDN subscription, the one time I used it the service was appalling, it took them weeks to respond.

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.

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.

>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.

"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.

"“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."

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.

>>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.

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 :-(

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

>doing awesome support has tremendous ROI.

But diminishing returns. If support had a great ROI, everybody would do a good job of it. It really only has a good ROI if you're a new entrant in a competitive market.

From the scriptures: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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.

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

Yay, another set of regulations for business owners to navigate (it's pretty hard to keep up with the existing ones) and another government agency to manage and enforce them.

I'm more than happy to let the free market work this one out.

What specific regulations do you have trouble navigating?

Yeah. My internet tech support has been incredible. I have many amazing stories. All possible because the big telecoms were forced to wholesale, allowing competitors to exist in at least a limited capacity.

I will never go back to rogers or Bell again simply because of how amazing the support is at teksavvy.

Or the "free market" solution would be to allow those calling tech support to pay an extra $50 per hour fee for priority service with a knowledgable human

This is my employer's support model, and it works pretty well - all customers get unlimited ticket/email support, and you can upgrade to phone and live chat support for a percentage of your monthly bill.

It's like the saying that 20% of your customers use 80% of your support. This way you can incentivize those customers to pay a premium for even more of the support package they obviously want. Everyone else can have the minimal support interaction they prefer.

Although if I encountered that as a customer I would be suspicious that the free support is being made deliberately bad to artificially drive revenue of the premium support team.

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.

Google offers customer support by phone.

Really? What's the number for help with gmail? I can't find it anywhere on their site. YouTube either, if it's different.

Also, I need a number to reach support at Facebook, if you have it.

Customer

Gmail: 1-877-355-5787 YouTube: 1-855-500-2756

Never done business with Facebook, can't help you there sorry!

Facebook outsources support to certified regional specialists.

You can find contact information for your region/niche on their partner directory site: https://facebookmarketingpartners.com/

If you pay for Google Apps they do. I've had to call them a few times, and they were actually fairly helpful, even calling me back the next day to make sure the problem was resolved.

Judging by the number they called me from their call center is in Ireland.

>>Also, I need a number to reach support at Facebook, if you have it.

You don't pay to use Facebook, so you don't get support.

Google does provide phone support to Google Business accounts, though, since those cost money.

They offer support over the phone for products they charge customers for.

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.

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

Google does offer phone support (and email etc), with SLAs - however this is for their paid offerings (I.e. Google Apps, which is like Gmail/Calendar/Docs/Drive etc). Google Apps start at $5 a month, so the entry price isn't astronomical.

For free products, there's support on official forums.

I've dropped similar SLAs on 3rd party contractors. They can hire exponentially more support people, or fix their shit. The latter is usually cheaper.

I recently had to call to pay a highway toll because their system for accepting payments online was broken.

The IVR was an endless tree of options, and at each option, it would point out how much time I would save if I paid online. It took several minutes to navigate the phone tree before being placed on hold. Pressing 0 didn't help.

I made a point of spending time with the agent talking about the problems with the phone tree. I did so very politely but also very slowly and verbosely - it took several minutes.

I think if we were able to create a social convention where people waste n or 2n minutes of the agent's time when the company has wasted n minutes of their times, it could change the incentives.

Right now companies save money by having long times. If we could create a movement to do this, leaving customers on hold too long would lead to congestive collapse. Long hold times would end up costing more money than simply having adequate staffing.

Ever interacted with the equivalent of tech support for government processes or services? I have, and it doesn't inspire me to put government on the list of potential ways to solve tech support.

Seems like extending 30-day return policies further out might achieve this. Random commoditized tech I get off Amazon/eBay frequently has a note asking to contact them first to resolve any issues before returning and/or submitting negative feedback. I'd imagine the sellers would not be as accommodating, were it not for Amazon's no-questions-asked-customer-is-always-right return policy.

Hah. I would give my left nut to have competent helpdesk people on the other end, and I'm a vendor who's dealing with the higher-level management and IT people in these organizations. I can't imagine how poorly trained and skilled the front-line techs are.

The government can start with improving customer support at DMV Currently, it's 4 months wait to schedule a driving test and 2 months wait to schedule an office appointment. Of course, if you have an urgent issue you can just visit DMV without an appointment but you should be ready to spend 3+ hours waiting in line.

If you're not satisfied with the amount of personnel at DMV, then you should vote the guys out who cut their personnel budget time and time again.

Perhaps said regulator could start by regulating the IRS and the DMV.

They do need a regulation that we can cancel a service using the same methods as ordering the service. If I can order a service online, I should be able to cancel it online.

Which companies would be subject to such regulation? For instance, a startup without an established customer support center would be fined and forced to shut down because of those fines or because of the money spent on customer center ?

What would be the kpi for customer service? Time spent on the wait line? Customer ratings?! Business days before an email reply? What if someone malicious starts DDoS me with fake customer service requests just to make me unable to deliver an "acceptable standard of customer support service"?

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

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.

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

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.

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

Google also has consumer-facing customer service reps all around the globe. I am part of the team that builds their tools.

Even Google Fiber, which is a direct competitor with the terribly rated cable companies, has excellent customer service (if you actually need to call them). I needed to migrate an account from my wife's gmail to mine and they had it changed within a few minutes. Since then the service has had 99.9% uptime (the one time it did go down was during the World Series, and they comped the entire city 2 days).

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.

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

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.

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.

Not such a clever headline; the only people who say 'purposely' are toddlers and Americans.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com