Y Combinator Challenge #24 - A Buffer Against Bad Customer Service | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator Challenge #24 - A Buffer Against Bad Customer Service

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9 pointsdrm23710 comments

"I’m horrible at dealing with customer service people, but my wife is ridiculously great at it. I don’t know how she does it, but she’ll get on the phone and within minutes we’ll have crazy discounts on our cable or phone bills, instant returns with no extra fees, etc, etc.. "

I'm pretty good at this too. The trick is to be nice to them. Ask them how their day is going while they're waiting for the computer to update, etc. Basocally read How To Win Friends and Influence People and apply.

All day long they have people yelling at them over stuff that isn't their fault. A few minutes of kindness to them is like a life raft to a drowning kid. They'll often do whatever they can to keep you happy and on the phone, because they know that as soon as you're gone, you'll be replaced by some old lady screaming at them about their broken computer.

Reserve all of your negative emotion for telemarketers.

Ha, nice. My wife's trick is to make it as non-personal as possible. "I know it's not your fault, but <insert problem>. I'm not mad at you, but you might understand my frustration at <restate problem>.". Also - stay on the line as long as it takes...most of them are measured on how fast their turnaround is and they're not allowed to directly hang up on you (as long as you're not being hostile or overly rude), so eventually they'll do whatever it takes to get you off the phone.

Right, the non-personal thing is key. They just answer the phones all day and try to make up for other people's mistakes. Most of them are sensitive to your problem, they just don't want to be unfairly treated as if they were the root of it.

I'm reminded of this Australian ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnN7c5wZKBM

I understand that in India they have, essentially, professional waiters-in-line for dealing with the various bureaucracies.

welcome back! So pretty interesting and novel idea. Do you think the amount of reps could really scale up over time? Oh, how much easier it might be to have someone bitch to fedex when my package is lost.

Thanks man, good to back. I didn't go into too many details on this one, but I think the "secret sauce" to scaling this idea would happen by actually making deals with the major customer service call centers on the back end. That way, instead of the customer service agents having to call the same 800 numbers and wait on hold like the rest of us, they could get a direct line to a dedicated service rep at the call center who could quickly resolve issues for the agents. So what would be a 20 minute call for a customer could only be a 2-3 minute call for the agent.

Or how about organizing a peer-to-peer aspect? I'll do your problem if you'll do mine? (For example if I know how to deal with company A and you know how to deal with government B.)

Um, virtual assistants? PG was talking about lots of HTML parsing, I think.

Yeah, as I go through the list it's interesting to see the items where PG is outlining a broad problem (i.e. #7) versus something where he is throwing out hints around a solution that he's thought of. For this one, I kept coming back towards something like applying the Kayak/Sidestep model to airline miles. But I'm not quite sure how that would work, so I decided to go a completely different course. I agree with you, though, there's probably a much better html-parsing-based idea that could come out of this one.

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