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Honestly it’s not that much worse than being forwarded off to India where someone’s getting paid $0.10 an hour to read off a flow chart to me. If your 24-hour service line doesn’t have an actual engineer available after the flow chart It’s not meaningfully different than the AI.
Yep. I hate having to phone support lines to be told to run basic troubleshooting like turning something off and on again when that’s the first thing that I’ll try.
If only shibboleet actually worked…
The alt text on that XKCD is even better:
“I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.”
tbf, customers have a near-infinite number of different issues and problems. those ‘flow charts’ and scripts are designed to start at a baseline and work up from there and they start with the most common ones. you’d be paying more for whatever it is you’re calling in about if they hired only fully-qualified persons that can ‘think on their feet’ without the flow charts and scripts wrt whatever issue it is you have, troubleshooting it, and coming up with the specific solution for you… a hell of a lot more. and yes, the first thing you should usually try with tech items is a power cycle. ::insert itcrowd-turnitoffandonagain.jpg::
No one is asking for a gaggle of full-time engineers.
The flowchart is designed to fix the vast majority of problems top down. If 90% of the problems are solved by rebooting you’re going to reboot. It doesn’t matter if the ONT shows your fiber line is not connected. Wow that sucks I understand and don’t have a problem with that. But most support these days can’t even connect you with an actual engineer once you break the flow chart.
You spend 30 minutes on the phone having them check off check boxes when they get down to the point where there’s actually a level two problem, there’s no one there to talk to you. Here let us take down your information and we’ll get back to you within the next 24 hours.
A couple of decades ago this really wasn’t a problem. Level 1 technicians would run their flowcharts if you broke out to a level two technician you wait on the line for 10 to 15 minutes and you’d end up with a level two technician, It almost always solve the problem if it was solvable. Honestly the products I call for support on haven’t really gone down in price with the lack of support provided these days. They used to be able to provide me multi-tier support live on the phone with just their existing margins. It’s the same thing screwing over pharmacies and retail. They found they can get by with giving less support and having less people work the lines so that’s what they’re doing.
Something very sweet with living in a country with a different language than English is that the people on the phone can’t be outsourced.
The AI problem remains though :(
I’d probably feel very different about the whole situation if the call center is that were being subverted were in my own country.
(Goes through a phone maze to get the option you need, then the robot voice comes on)
“OUR STAFF CAN HANDLE THAT REQUEST TUESDAY THROUGH THURSDAYS BETWEEN 10AM AND 4PM. GOODBYE.”
And it’s never even a half decent bot.
“You double charged me this month”
“Hi! For problems relating to your wifi, please visit our FAQ.”
support bot has ended the chat
Followed by an automated email that reads “Would you like to participate in our customer survey? We are dedicated to improving the quality of our customer support! :D”
I see you answered 0 out of 5 stars. Janice in Support (whom you’ve never spoken to) will now get put on a PIP.
Technically they aren’t 24h if they didn’t shut down for one of the 1:00am hours last night. If they stayed open for both 1:00am hours, they’re a 25 hour service line today.
“We’ve been running for most of a year now. It’s what BeefPiano would call a 7000h service line”
In a similar vein, I’d like to remind my apartment complex that your emergency maintenance line doesn’t count as an emergency maintenance line if nobody answers it outside of business hours.
Especially if you only call me back after leaving a message Saturday, on Monday morning. The AC was broken and luckily it wasn’t dead of summer, but it still hit 90 something inside Sunday, and god forbid it was flooding or something like that.
I remember how last year there was a long time when ambient temperature was about over 30 degrees too. I don’t have AC at home and if I remember correctly I just opened one window and attached foil to another so sun wouldl not heat my room as much. Wasn’t that bad.
Right up there with customer service lines that just have menus of canned responses that don’t address your need. No, I don’t need to hear your hours, I don’t need to know where you are, I can find all of that online. I need to talk to a human being.
A few years back you could say “operator” or press zero to get transferred to an actual person. In my experience it only works about 1/3 of the time these days.
Sometimes the system would even escalate your call if you were swearing while you were on hold.
Swear. Loudly. Scream ‘Fuck This Shit’.
It works and gets you a more immediate operator. May or may not be one with empathy, but 🤞
Sure! I’m transferring your call now!
Sure! I’m transferring your call now!
Hangs up
But is it a 24 house service if it’s only staffed by a chat bot?
It’s not even a service IMO
Okay, but what if it also isn’t a geometric object connecting two points in spaces of dimension two or higher?
Do you expect them to jeopardize their bonuses by spending money on human beings to support customers? Then you’ll probably want them to keep them employed for more than a few months so they can actually become good at their jobs and familiar with the products.
Fuck you Seagate, this doesn’t excuse your behaviour. I would like my drive RMAd please
Three months to actually initiate the rma. Got billed 3x for replacements i have yet to receive. Please dont come at me when they didn’t show up.
