A Plea For Companies To Provide Support Via Text

Text of any form is not good for support because it amplifies the back-and-forth duration required to actually determine the issue and walk them through the resolution. The key here is bi-directional conversation - that is, you can talk to them and they can talk to you at the same time.

Think of someone helping Grandpa with using his email. On the phone, most of the time is spent in back-and-forth, explaining a concept multiple ways until he understands the request. The information he gives back may be vague and incomplete, so you can discuss it with him to get instant further clarification and context. You can then walk him through the solution in a bi-directional conversation, whereby you say a step and then he asks for clarification about certain aspects, before you proceed to the next step.

Now consider email/text/etc. Focus even on the solution stage. You send 5 steps to perform to complete the task. He gets stuck on step 2, and so responds. He doesn't know if he'll get stuck on steps 3, 4 and 5 either because he can't get past step 2. That's potentially 8 emails back and forth to get the problem resolved.

By not having instantaneous bi-directional communication, it is a hell of a lot harder to debug and walk someone through the solution particularly if they're not technically adept. For us on HN it may be fine - we can stumble our way through blanks relatively easily - but for Grandpa, he has no hope of doing that and so phone support is by far the most time-efficient method.

This article only thinks about what the caller's experience is, and doesn't consider at all what it would take to implement this on the call center side.

How would you guarantee responsiveness? With a voice call, the representative is on the line with you until your problem is resolved. With a text message, the rep would have to start helping somebody else if you took too long to reply, and may not be able to get back to you for a long time. Since they have no way of knowing how soon you'll reply, or if you'll reply at all, they can't just sit there idly waiting for your reply for a couple of minutes. And if a rep gets a large number of slow repliers queued up at once, he'd have to mentally juggle several different conversations and couldn't give any of them his full attention. Which caller gets priority? The one who you're currently texting with or the one who just came back after five minutes? What if a caller hasn't replied for a while and it's the end of the rep's shift?

Also, is there any way to route text messages through a call center so that a caller could text a single customer support number instead of having to know the number of the next available service representative?

One more thing: SMS messages get lost at a rate of 1 to 5%[1], so you're going to have a lot of irate customers wondering why they never received a reply. If a voice call drops, both sides know about it immediately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability

Needy customers. That's the problem. Some of your customers literally just want to chat. They want to feel close to your brand and give feedback directly to the CEO. It's problematic. Easier to keep them at arm's length with email.

SMS is terrible for this. It is completely insecure. You can fake transmissions easily, and nothing is encrypted, so you can't discuss any private info. There are very good, and obvious, reasons why organization do not use SMS for support.

While it's great to have a simple text-based medium to do this, SMS is awful.

I agree with the sentiment, but it's hard to take this guy serious when he suggests something so obviously bad.

From a customer point of view, I'll go for the phone call if phone is available on the website. Why ? Because it's much faster. A simple example is to change a flight, I could do it by email but then if I call I have the immediate confirmation that my flight has been changed, that I have a correct seat and a confirmation by email (yeah I know those kind of stuff should be doable directly from the airlines website but Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines do not offer that for some of my flights). Of course those call center are in Asia, so staffing is not an issue.. Western company take so much time to deal with. Air France took 2-3 days to change a detail on a flight. Valve took 5 days to tell me that cross country checkout is disabled. It would have taken only 5 minutes on the phone.

And let's not talk about banks...

Off topic: I thought the post would be a plea for tty support replacements since no one TTYs but everyone TXTs or IMs or emails.

My experiences: I don't know if others will chime in with their experiences, but Rogers in Canada has textual/live chat support channels in place and you can even contact a manager by chat. For background, Rogers is Comcast plus Verizon for Canada. Yeah. But I'm actually quite pleased by the chat service. As a customer I could copy and paste what I would otherwise repeat laboriously from agent to agent. The only weakness was that not everyone I needed to speak with had signed up for the chat service. Many departments then required me to call in, reference the chat, then get transferred. It would be nice to integrate the touch points between chat and call. Better still? Assume that I'm in the middle of an existing issue at the start by asking for a previous ticket number or having the right people call me back in a timely manner. Apple has done a few of these things but could use improvements, specifically in the disconnect between store and phone services or online. Microsoft... is still working on their Store processes, they've quite a few kinks as it took weeks of hour-long calls to finally place and receive an order -- and they asked me to call to place it from an email they sent me. Yeah, not calling or having others call me? Way better than calling and wasting both my and your time, service providers. If we both know time is limited, working asynchronously with the ability for escalations and status notifications is just what we need.

Thanks, good thoughts here. I work for a crazy-fast growing tech company that supports its users by email and text only. Yet we still receive multiple requests on a daily basis from our strongest users to speak on the phone.

I believe there is a perceived notion in the general public that speaking is the fastest way to resolve an issue. This probably comes from the fact that we can speak our thoughts faster than almost any other method of communication. Verbally talking with someone is also the most primal way of resolving issues. Finally, 7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through vocal elements (how those words are spoken), and 55% through nonverbal elements (facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc) (from a blog I wrote - http://blog.blainelight.com/2012/09/NonVerbalCommunication.h... most people want to have their frustrations 'heard' when reach out to support, and text only convey's 7% of their whole message.

In a tech-centric world, it's easy for us to want to embrace the future. We have to realize that even the early majority is still dependent on voice communications to express their primal need for help (i.e. asking for support from a company).

Would love to hear your further thoughts. -Blaine

The key difference between phone and email support is the expectations of the customer, not the underlying technology. When I send an email to support, I don't expect an answer for at least a few hours. When I call, I expect to get my issue resolved before hanging up. I may wait on hold for 30m, but I am going to resolve the problem before I get off the phone.

I don't believe this is due to technological limitations of email. I have had conversations via email that are essentially realtime chats. I think the real issue is that passive support simply gets a lot more support requests than non-passive support. Offering SMS sadly wouldn't resolve this, it would just be another support medium that gets flooded like email.

NOTE - By passive support I mean anything where you send a message and just wait for a response. Non-passive support would be something like a phone call where you wait on hold for someone to be available.

The problem that needs to be solved is support availability through telephone and email channels. There's no reason for companies to force their customers to sit on hold and there's no reason to drive them through complicated voice menu trees. Similarly, with email based interactions, multiple responses means that the agent is probably not handling the interaction well and could be asking better, more probing questions to get to the heart of the matter more quickly.

(I write this as the head of a large customer service operation for a US-based mobile phone provider - if a phone company can answer the phone without putting their customers through voice menu hell, anyone can do it.)

Wholeheartedly agree here, but it requires your support staff to have strong reading comprehension and writing skills - something I've not seen in various "live chat" support options that I've used.

As a company, maybe I want to inconvenience the customer a little bit. Making them pick up the phone seems like a barrier to support requests and may therefore cut down on the number I have to deal with, reducing costs.

Just a thought.

I do not care about support via Text. Web-based chat on the other hand is awesome and I use it everywhere it is available. I often need support during working hours and using web chat means I do not have to yak over the phone about my problems and disturb co-workers around me. Oftentimes I need to type something into the computer and it is much more convenient to Alt-Tab between things and copy paste something instead of typing by one hand (yes, I know head set would solve the problem).

I've found most companies worth using do provide email/ticket support, with the main ones that don't being ones in very old/stagnant industries.

The article talks about apps though, and honestly, I'd rather sit through a hour on hold on the phone than install some bloatware app. Forget 'apps', email is perfect for support.

Companies do this even if they don't publicize it. You say you're deaf, and then they don't have any choice.

After failing to get through on their various numbers, I cancelled my eFax account via e-mail this way (as they don't/didn't allow online cancellations) and it went smoothly.

Transmitting personally identifiable information, including credit card data and supporting documentation as suggested in the article, through email, text or an app sounds like an extremely dangerous minefield.

There's an Indian one in the same vein http://haptik.co

You should really try talkto http://talkto.com