Hacker News Reader

> Front line phone customer support was useless in a Kafka-esque manner.

Isn't that just how online retail works these days? Once you find your way through the menu tree, you get to talk to a person who sort of speaks your language, over a bad connection that will probably cut out in a minute or two, and who is paid to deflect. If it matters, you'll try to cause a Twitter storm. Otherwise you'll give up.

View on HN

I called chewy.com because I forgot to apply a coupon code on an order that I placed 30 seconds before. They answered the phone, spoke English well, and had no problem applying the coupon code to an existing order for me. Quite nice.

Yes. And Amazon isn't that much better. Last night it took me a full 10 minutes to get someone at Amazon on the horn. And you can't call Amazon. You can only request that they call you.

“You can only request that they call you.”

Sounds like exactly why Amazon is much better. They don’t put you on hold, and there’s no IVR menu to suffer through.

The best telephone systems I've been on did two things:

1. Tell you the estimated waiting time so you can decide for yourself if it is worth it,

2. and offer to leave a message to call you back at a time you want instead of waiting.

The live chat is the nirvana you seek. And that goes for pretty much any customer support anywhere in my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com