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Comment by andr | Hacker News Reader

I had a few unsuccessful back and forths with different Fi agents about an issue, and after a couple of weird remarks, I developed the theory that first level agents get their performance scores penalized every time they escalate an issue. I would have them go through the same script over and over for over an hour, and even sometimes admit that I had an issue, but refuse to press that button. I have no hard evidence, but that was my read from the conversations, and would explain the bad support experience overall.

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Close, but not quite. Call centers are designed to make the general support (tier 1) agents effectively flesh and blood robots. These are jobs that might start at $10 an hour if you’re lucky, have little training, and typically very high turnover rates. Even if you get a competent/experienced agent who has literally seen your problem a thousand times and knows that step 3 of the script will always fix it, they will be penalized if they skip the first two steps. Likewise, they will be penalized if they transfer you to tier 2 until they get to the step in the script that says, “transfer to tier 2.” It doesn’t matter if you’ve had this exact problem 5 times before and every instance required tier 2. Doesn’t matter if you were just talking to another agent who ran the whole script and screwed up your transfer. The only way you might get lucky is if you’re lucky enough to have some kind of open case or note on the account that instructs them to transfer you directly.

That is interesting, I have never actually called them but have used the chat and email interface a few times with pretty good success. I wonder if there is any difference in how the different communication methods are scored?

I actually had the polar opposite experience. I had a complex support issue with my pixel 3 delivery and I got irritated because support was constantly escalating and shunting to different teams. While it was a bitch to fix the problem and took awhile, to Google's credit they did eventually do so and went the extra mile for me to extend a promotion and honor a referral code which they certainly didn't need to do.

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