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Comment by dyates | Hacker News Reader

Live chat windows that pop-up automatically and hassle you once you've spent X seconds looking at a website are annoying, much like email subscription modals. But when I've been actually looking for support and made the choice to click on the chat button, I've generally had a great experience, so long as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options. It's asynchronous enough that I can keep doing something else while I wait/chat, saves me from having to spell things out or repeat alphanumeric codes over the phone, and is way quicker than email.

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I have used those chats, talked to humans, and had my issues resolved - but I can't say it was a great experience.

I had to keep the relevant tab open and actively watch it because there is no sane method to get the notification if it's in background. Can't get distracted for too long, gotta actively watch that stupid chat for when someone comes in or replies after "I need a few minutes to do something for you, please hold on".

Also, I was nervous that any accidental navigation actions (like clicking on some page link) I take in my browser would lead to loss of that chat session. Basically, I was trying to not breathe in the direction of that chat and hope that it would work. I mean, it shouldn't, but I've seen it happen.

Honestly, I'd rather see a bunch of links to various messaging platforms. Or a phone number I can send a text to. Humans or machines, short or long response times - at least I know the underlying technologies are reliable.

I have had the same feeling – "this is okay, but could be way better"; I think a big part is in the lack of context.

Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? I am logged in to the website, they should be able to see that I am Account # 820914 and currently viewing Order # 788321.

Ensuring that this sort of context communication as the lowest bar for an in-app chat would go a long way towards making me prefer it to a conversation where I have to gather and route relevant information.

I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?"

At a hospital or clinic, it is common to be repeatedly asked your name and birthdate, even by the same nurse. It's not because they don't remember your birthdate. It's a procedural security measure in a busy, complicated environment to minimize how often they mistakenly hand you a bottle of someone else's pills.

I imagine this might be similar.

It's not. Hospital personnel do indeed ask you the same questions repeatedly to make sure they're treating the right person, but online vendors rarely have such high consequences attached to getting this wrong.

I suspect the real answer is that when they finally hand you off to a live human being, that human is sitting in the boiler room of a third-tier contractor on a different continent than the main headquarters of the business, and they have no idea what you're currently looking at on your screen. It's technically possible to do this handoff with a complete picture of how the user got there, but that requires a degree of technical integration most companies don't seem to want to pay for.

To be fair, in my experience they almost always tell explain the reasoning for repeatedly asking this information "for security reasons I must confirm your information again". Maybe I was just lucky with good places and people, but I never had wondered why the heck they need the information they already have on file (or worse, that I have already told them some minutes ago), because from their brief explanations I understand that they have some form and they must type in my data in there for verification.

> I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?"

But presumably you are talking to customer-service agents, not representatives, and what are they supposed to do about it? I share your frustration, but this seems to be just a recipe for spreading that frustration, not for resolving it.

(Unless you meant something else, e.g., you are professionally involved in call-center design, in which case I applaud your being a voice of sense in that domain, and thank you for it!)

I am polite but firm most of the time with agents, but I do get chances to talk with people who have the authority to change things. Raising a stink and ‘let me talk to your supervisor’ really can lead to tickets getting forwarded to people who can fix the process or at least give agents training in how to avoid or manage ‘lights on nobody home’ situations.

Lately I have been facing a breakdown in business processes with my local electric utility that first disconnected my electricity because one of my tenants made a mistake. I think they finally understand that I have three services at two houses at one address, but I went through two periods since then of getting no electric bill for months (which I won’t let slide because the last time they stopped billing me I got disconnected.) Getting that fixed involved waiting three hours on hold which got me talking to regulators again. The crew building the new deck at the other house has also deferred work because they have been unable to get through to anyone there who can turn the service off temporarily so they can work near where the wire comes in.

> Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again?

Because their integration isn't very good.

Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.

> Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.

Be scared of those. They typically use client side JavaScript to read a cookie to know which username is active.

There is usually no verification of that info, so obviously it could be faked by a malicious client.

The docs say that, but it's way too easy to just trust the info rather than setup a properly secure solution.

I could see that being really bad... A 'social engineer' could talk support people into helping them hijack an account.

I would love to watch the inevitable presentation we'll be seeing at some security convention within the next few years.

This is a good point. You can definitely verify a user off of context (signed tokens, etc.), but you're probably right that a lot of folks don't do a great job of that!

> Or a phone number I can send a text to.

Or a phone number that you can actually call and which is picked up by a human within a reasonable time frame and who is actually empowered to solve your problem.

And to my surprise that actually still exists.

Just recently I had a stellar experience with the support of my hosting provider.

30 seconds wait, a person who knew what I'm talking about. Solving the problem instantly by mailing the relevant form, while we still chatted. All resolved in less than 5 minutes.

For what it's worth: that was hostpoint.ch. I'm not invested in any way. Just a very happy customer after 2 really good support experiences (one by email)

> Or a phone number that you can actually call

Of course, but I skipped this because I had tried to stay in scope of a text chatting.

Personally, I'd love to see more businesses accepting texts (SMS/Signal/Matrix 3PIDs/WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever works for them - just clearly indicating that they do). I'm an US resident but not a native English speaker - and while I've chatted online a lot, I have relatively limited experience talking to other people. So I have some difficulty talking to people, especially if my and their accents make conversation... less smooth than we both would prefer. Or at least I feel some non-negligible amounts of uneasiness before having to make an actual call. It's not too bad and I'm trying to improve as much as I can, but for some important conversations I'd rather use more reliable methods if those are available.

And to extend on this example, due to family matters I'm currently overseas in Mexico - and I only know very basic Spanish that is nowhere sufficient for any intelligible conversation beyond ordering food or asking for directions. Thankfully, almost every business seem to have a WhatsApp number so with a help of translation software I was able to do quite a bunch of non-trivial requests.

And while my case is maybe not that important (except for me), there are always folks with genuine speech and/or hearing disabilities who could be unable to use voice communication channels at all.

Oh, and texts allow asynchronous communications. I love that I can text my dentist office and schedule an appointment. I don't expect them to reply immediately (they won't if I text off-hours), but I know that they would receive my message and respond when they have a moment. Which is all I need, and my phone will notify me when they reply back.

Thanks!

I really appreciate your reply. It makes it quite clear that there really are cases where voice is not the best option.

Sometimes we are a bit blind to the need of others since we're too much focused on our own preferences and needs

In that sense your comment helps to see things from another perspective and teaches a bit humility in the process.

I'd say sometimes those services are successful but sometimes they aren't. It's not unusual for those things to claim "I am a human" but the human is nowhere to be found. For me it is a general pet peeve that everybody wants to open up UI elements that cover up whatever it is I want to interactive.

There's a bad idea which keeps coming back which are attempts to replace asynchronous communications (web forums, emails, ...) with more synchronous communications such as chat sessions, discord, etc. I can't wait until somebody tries making you go to a waiting area in "the metaverse" and spend an hour looking like a dork waiting for help. Lately I have been appreciating how you can a question to a site like

https://www.dpreview.com/forums

probably get a bogus answer in an hour but have multiple great answers in two weeks.

I agree. I also had to use a chat that put you on hold until an operator became free, while the site itself had a auto-logout if you didn’t click a box after X minutes waiting.

I've seen a live chat implementation that starts as a chat bot, but switches you to a person after a few clicks and you can't find what you need. I felt that was a perfect compromise.

A very annoying "feature" of some of those is making you wait for the human (okay that's acceptable) BUT timing out the session if you don't reply them within a minute or such.

That's the cousin of telephone hold music that interjects with a recording periodically, such as "We apologise for the delay; your call is important to us". All this does is repeatedly grab the caller's attention AND progressively reduce the strength of the grab, so that finally when a real live & hopefully useful human joins the call they may not be noticed. Just give me some crappy Muzak: instrumental without voice, or a gentle periodic beep to confirm the line hadn't dropped. If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.

fading the music and overlaying the status would be better rather than the abrupt cut.

Best of all is the system where they ring you back when they are ready

> If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.

I have almost never encountered this while on hold (the closest I have come is the despicable "we are experiencing unusually long hold times", all the time), and it would be so good. What I particularly hate about the repeated announcements of the type you describe is that they are often much louder than the background music, so, not only do they train me not to pay attention, they force me to turn the volume way down, or hold the phone far from my ear, making it still harder to hear when a human comes on the line.

Revolut's in-app chat was like that. You may have to wait over 4 hours, so obviously you're not looking at the screen when a person picks it up. Then when you take a look you find they've replied and then left, and you have to wait for another person on a different shift to pick up your reply.

The trouble is, this was also their only support channel. No phone or web or email.

This went on for nearly 1 week when I was trying to talk to them to unblock my blocked-for-no-reason account a few years ago, and their response times got progressively slower.

In the end a quick message on social media got the account unblocked in 20 minutes. How?!

Bad internal structure, is how.

The other annoying thing is when the human asks the same questions I already answered to the bot.

The chat boxes that actually are chat don't bother me. Provided they don't try to pop-up unrequested or otherwise make themselves annoying, I actually like them. They can be really handy for asking a quick pre-sale question or getting support.

The ones that are just a shitty interface to a FAQ suck, though. I don't even like it when they're as you describe, because its eventually turning into an actual chat with a real person is kinda-hidden functionality.

Exactly. When I know I can get a real live helpful person, it is awesome. When it is a bod that will just try to find information in the FAQ that I've already read, it is not very useful. When it is a live person who only knows how to give me the phone number and say, "please call during business hours" it is very annoying.

Yeah that filters out probably the 90% of trivial requests.

It ought to be possible to closely integrate a chat bot with a human so that people don't even notice the transition... It is always fair for a human to say "let me talk to my supervisor" and it is the same for a bot.

When I need live chat support, it's because I've already exhausted the help center and can't find my answer elsewhere. I really do need to speak with a human.

Fortunately, many chatbots in my experience will indeed switch over to human support if I write "I want to speak with a human". I'm glad they take that into account.

I'm glad you had that experience. In my experiences with both website based and call center based chat bots, the primary goal is to make it as difficult as possible to reach a real person, if I have a detailed question. I'll get a few menu options and maybe a link to an FAQ. I find it unbearable.

You, along with most people on this site, are not the average consumer for these type of chat apps though. People aren't exhausting the help center, reading FAQ's, searching other sites, they're probably barely even reading anything on a help center at all.

I approach it from the other direction nowadays. I'll hit up live chat instead of checking the help center. If they're going to annoy me with that on every page, I'm going to use it. And if it wastes their time on something trivial, that's on them.

Does that actually benefit you though? Is it more efficient for you to wade through a chatbot or wait for a human to respond rather than read the documentation?

This is the ideal scenario when building these out. Automate a lot of the low-hanging fruit that most people are going to be looking for, then seamlessly convert to a support chat with a human as needed

> as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options

Another annoying option is getting an auto reply about no-one being available; or being asked for personal data, sometimes before even starting the chat.

>so long as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options

Key point here. Chatbots are a universal "please despise my company" tool.

If you don't have a live human available - don't show me the chat button.

If it is clear I'm talking to a chat bot, then I have the option. But if you make me jump through hoops to get a human and then give me a bot, I'm going to be pretty annoyed at you.

Overall I had very mixed experience with chats for support, because it is impossible to get past the bot. Or if, it takes age for a human to show up, then they disconnect if i don't respond immediately.

But my bank, which is horrible is many ways, has implemented it exactly right and the chat has been my main way of interacting with them for a year or so. It starts out with a chatbot listing common FAQ topic but also says that at any point I can just type "Asesor" (Advisor) to be connected to a human, which usually takes little less than a minute. They can then trigger authentication from within the chat so they can actually do basic things related to the products (but not things like e.g. doing transfers).

I’ve found they are particularly effective when the chat option only pops up on the “contact us” page, and it goes direct to a human (with a max of one question to route the request).

Amazon gets points for having the worst implementation I’ve seen. Although it doesn’t pop up and spam you, if you click through on the website or app, it connects you to an incompetent chat bot.

Third parties provide direct links to Amazon’s competent chat bot that can actually handle basic requests.

Seriously, WTF are they thinking?!?

I agree. A live chat support option, appropriately staffed, is often the most expedient way to get help.

I work configuring contact center software. Chat agents are often more experienced, "tech savvy", and less overloaded than phone agents too. And Chat is harder to ignore than Email, which Agents can just give a token reply to punt it back to the pending queue.

Absolutely agree. Don't give me a sales pop up when I look at your landing page, but if you have an Intercom chat on your support page, I'm all ears. Had to contact Stripe support a few weeks ago and they got to me pretty quick and were really good about it. I think the company I work for spams you on the landing page unfortunately...

It’s way over the place, sometimes it’s great, sometimes you have to wait in a queue for half an hour, sometimes it’s just a cheap bot shield in front of the customer service representatives.

The one time I used the live chat (to attempt to cancel my Economist subscription) they immediately left the chat

It's time for this to be a protocol, and built into the browser.

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