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Comment by amflare | Hacker News Reader

The reason I prefer humans to AI or whatever is that humans are infinitely better at fuzzy searches. I'm not enough of an expert to know what I need to know to get what I want. So I relay on a human with experience to translate for me, then give an answer. This is also an issue I have with indian call centers. Its very hard to communicate something to them in a manner that doesn't use the "correct" words. So I lose a lot of the service I'm counting on.

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To me there's no value in talking to a human if the human is roboticly following a script.

It's really frustrating to call the helpdesk and get:

HD: Hello! What's your customer number?

Me: xxxxxxx

HD: Thank you, what's the problem?

Me: It is failing to connect to the network. I've tried a soft reset, then a factory reset, and finally reinstalling the firmware. While sniffing the traffic it looks like the device is failing to accept the DHCP responses from my server, as it continually broadcasts DHCP solicitations and is send responses but never configures its network settings.

HD: Have you tried turning it off and back on?

I’d be interested in the stats on call resolution at the off/on step. You have to assume it’s large enough that they ask it first.

Also I’m genuinely curious, what sort of response you expected to get when you called and told them about traffic sniffing.

Speaking as a one-time 'high speed internet tech support customer relations specialist' working at a call-center contracted out to Comcast, I was told that it was close to 90%. That seems exaggerated since I would say it was closer to 70% (ballpark) success for my calls, but it was high enough that the place eventually implement an entire first-line crew that did no more than ask about whether power cycling had been complete or explain power-cycling before handing the 'sub(scriber)' off.

If someone called in with the GP's depth of troubleshooting completed, the standard policy was say something like 'this is outside of my allowable offered support'(but if you really know how, help, but not officially!).

I'm usually hoping that they'll send me on to level 2 support so I don't have to redo all of the stuff I've already tried. I won't even try calling support until I've exhausted their FAQs/Knowledgebase and Stackexchange/Google. Picking up the phone is the last resort. Unfortunately it's fairly rare that the phone support is of any help.

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