Posted by felineflock 8 hours ago
Most companies monitor their infrastructure religiously but treat their support experience as a black box. The fix is the same in both cases: measure the thing that matters (time to resolution, not tickets closed), alert when it degrades, and make the alert impossible to ignore.
But my second thought was... how did they make their PBX do that? Is this actually a feature that PBX vendors ship?
Pretty sure I would consider those both failing grades.
Based on the anecdata I have, this is very false.
My brother used to work tech support for X-Box Live. He said 80% of his calls were for password resets, something anybody could self-service in less time than it takes to find the customer support phone number.
Sure, there were cases where they no longer had access to the original e-mail address on the account, or cases where he was sure someone was trying to social engineer their way into someone else's account by claiming a forgotten password, but generally, he'd just trigger the password reset e-mail and the customer was able to reset their password.
At one point, he tried going off-script to tell people to select the "Forgot Password" option and walk them through the self-service, but he got in trouble for it.
Microsoft just straight up doesn't have phone service anymore - at least for non-enterprise customers. It's gone. You get an online chatbot, that's it. Have a problem with your license or account? Get fucked. Go away.
Good support makes me want to stick with a company. Do you know why I buy all my audio gear from one company? Because they're one state over with a 5 year warranty, and immediately respond if I'm having a problem. I considered 'better' options from China, but the last time I did that I got equipment that would me ~$200 to send back for repairs when it broke, so I just shelved it.
But once you get past a certain size, and once you have enterprise customers, supporting everyone else is a waste of time. Why spend X dollars on customer retention with good support when you can spend X/2 dollars advertising to new customers or shoving in ads for other companies that will generate more money instead?
what they don't tell you is that they will call you back after 4pm.
you don't keep your place in the queue. the first time around i expected to be called back within an hour, and ended up expecting a call "any minute now" the whole day.
>Even if HP’s telephone support center wasn’t busy, callers would reportedly hear: We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience.
i am absolutely positive, without proof of course, that this is an extremely common practice. my isp does the exact same thing with basically the same wording. over the years i have called at all times of the day, all days of the week, across all seasons, and it is always "we are experiencing high call volumes right now. but hey, did you know you can do lots of stuff on the website? go to the website. please use the website".
i almost (not really) respect HP for at least admitting to it, rather than all the companies that i suspect are still doing this in the shadows and will never admit to it.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
My doctor's office phone manages "You are number two in the queue". Somewhere, maybe it was a previous doctor, added "and should expect to wait about 5 minutes".
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#Recurring_monolog... , for the probably many people who don't know the reference.)
It is funny to hear "our wait times are higher than average, your wait is estimated to be zero minutes".
Health insurance does this for sure. From what I have seen I am convinced they have sophisticated systems to frustrate patients and providers until they give up.
Look up Erlang numbers for call centers. We absolutely know how to calculate required reps for a desired queue dwell. It is 100% a voluntary decision to degrade the Call Center to push people to web based automation. Consider this your proof. We have the equations. Executives make the active decision to not use them/use them to shift cost burden.
t. Helped implement a Call Center before, and we aimed for sub 5 minute queue dwell at all hours of the day.
I wonder how these systems work now...
Erlang's model assumes that the world is static or at least predictable; it doesn't take into account things like the superBowl, a hurricane cancelling 90+% of flights from a major airport, or a much-larger-than-usual number of customers trying to cancel because of a previously-confidential price increase now being publicly announced.
That’s corporate-speak. They say improve, but it’s perfectly well understood internally to mean drive costs down.
There’s no problem with doing that at the expense of the customer as long as you can get away with it. (Seems like here they were going for a boiling-the-frog approach but moved too quickly.)