alt Hacker News> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live.
He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button.
And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password.
And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link".
I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible.
I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.
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The thing is a YOU don't get to decide this. Maybe the PW reset flow is significantly more complex for some people who don't have an actual human walk them though it; maybe Xfinity routers shouldn't need to be power cycled to fix problems. Maybe corporations should make their products better to avoid do many support calls or price that into the purchase price. At least let's be honest that the entire exercise is an attempt to externalize costs on their customers.
> Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.
Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better.
By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.
This mentality is how you get
"Hi, thank you for your message, please take a look at our following FAQ guides:
- I forgot my password
Was this answer useful to you, or would you like more links to our FAQ? Before we give you a link to what used to be a talk to a human line, but which has been replaced by another chatbot in a sort of Matryoshka"
I had a friend who worked for a company that built AI call centres. I naively thought that customers would use it to do "password reset" type workflows and have an escape hatch for customers to talk to a human if the AI couldnt handle what they needed.
Surprisingly few of them wanted that. If the AI couldnt handle their issue they mostly wanted customers to just fuck off.
It takes less brainpower to talk to a person. I often just call companies instead of trying to fight through their stupid FAQs and websites and all that crap. No I'm not going to install your stupid app just to do one thing once ever. I don't want to learn anything or remember anything. We're at a stage in technology where there's no excuse for crap software in simple devices.
Recently the ventilation fan in my house wasn't measuring temperature correctly so I called the company. Their tech came round, got me to enter my wifi password, updated the firmware, and viola - it started working properly. I'm sure they had a FAQ or manual explaining that but I'm not wasting my mental energy on such rubbish.
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Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.
If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.