Unpopular opinion and rant: Us, the consumers, brought this on ourselves. Not intentionally but it was a slippery slope.
No one I know did ever ask the sales representative “does your customer support answer within 5 minutes and will I always reach a representative with att least 10 years of experience, that has the authority to make real decisions?”. No, but we were all very interested about the pricing of the service/product.
Then these “Please press 1 for…” happened… and no one of us really cared about the change because the service providers offered a much lower price than the ones with customer support representatives with 20 years of experience. Since all of us went for the cheapest provider, the other ones had to cut cost to be able to offer their service on a competitive price level. So then there were no one offering competent support with representatives that knew their shit. And it slowly continued to go downhill…
So here we are with shitty services, which we pay for, where we all are treated as cattle.
If people at least started to ask for better customer support there would someone, who wants to climb the corporate ladder, creating a PowerPoint presentation with a real VIP Service Level. Of course it will cost more money, because real people cost money, but we would att least get what we want.
But no. Consumers will still go for the lowest price.
If you only speak to people with years of experience, how exactly do people develop that experience?
Nice try. But let’s play with the thought that there’s no way we can let a rookie listen in on customer calls and gradually work their way into the role until they have enough experience… What about hiring technicians/professionals that has been working with the products/services for 10 years?
That would be a way of getting competent customer support people, right?
And just to clarify my comment that you replied on: The problem today is that most often there’s no career path for the customer support rookies and the pay is so lousy that most people just work customer support until they get something better.
That’s definitively the correct way to avoid getting experienced people in the customer support.
Interestingly, at least where I live, in my experience, the more expensive ISPs, TSPs etc. have worse, almost evil, customer service than the smaller, cheaper providers. Maybe the smaller providers can’t afford the most evil money-saving customer service systems, and that’s what makes them better?!
I have the same experience as you do, but there’s a reason that the big ISPs continue to be big: The majority of customers seems to prioritize a lower price than a better level of support.
(Also, I’m not just talking about ISPs. I meant customer support in general and how the view has changed from “keeping a customer is much cheaper than gaining one” to “cattle, cattle, cattle. If we lose one, there’s hundreds to gain”.)
Honestly, I’ll take anything over those outsourced call centers at this point. Half of those representatives barely speak English.
Yup. I was literally born in India, lived there until I was 7, and have an Indian mother who very much still sounds Indian, and even I struggle to understand what outsourced Indian/Pakistani call centre staff say sometimes, especially when there’s background noise.
And there’s almost always either background noise or a bad connection. Sometimes I go sit in my car and listen over my car speakers, which are decent speakers, and it doesn’t even help.
I had to call into Fedex Worldwide’s help center for an issue with a shipment on my company’s account the other day, and there was so much noise in the background, the guy I was speaking with actually stopped mid sentence to tell a bunch of people behind him to be quiet, then continued on like it was a normal.
Not that it should be acceptable to happen with a retail consumer level call, but it just seemed so unprofessional for communication related to a business account.
Y’all do understand that customer service is not there for the “service” part ;)
An exceptionally well trained AI customer service has the potential to be amazing.
I only call or try to chat/email with customer service if something has gone way wrong - like outside the typical customer service capability of assistance.
If an AI can realize that my problem is human worthy and escalate it faster, that would save me time in the chat queue talking with someone who barely knows my native language.
Alas, AIs will be poorly trained, so the bad-english CS reps will still be right behind the AI interface waiting for me.
Ooh, there’s a fun question:
Would you rather:
An AI handle customer service, or
An overseas call center handle customer service
?
Depends. Can I easily make the AI hallucinate and give me free shit/tell me something I can later use to get free shit?
iirc someone attempted that already with plane tickets.
Canada sided with the consumer, so companies are liable on what the AI will allow.
