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IT Support Pro Tells Why He Hates Live Chat

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-seems-to-be-the-trouble? dept.

colinneagle writes "When someone calls into support, we first verify his or her account information. On the phone, this can take seconds. On a chat feature it can take a minute or two because people type slower than they speak. I also find that when people type in a chat they try to make the process go quicker by abbreviating the conversation. This means they might not give me all the information they would have if we were talking on the phone. The more descriptive a customer is about a problem, the easier and faster it will be to solve their issue. But the nature of a chat feature means people will abbreviate their stories to be more efficient, without realizing this just makes it more difficult to solve the problem. I end up asking more questions, which takes longer for the full story to come out. Explaining how to fix a problem can be difficult on the phone, but on a chat feature where I can't see your screen and likely have less information to work with, it can make it impossible to tackle a complex issue. It would be much more efficient for both me and the customer to talk on the phone so I can walk the customer through the steps I am taking."

4 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Depends heavily on user type by tucuxi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A technically-savvy (eg.: Bob McHacker) user should be a lot easier to communicate with via chat than a non-technical user (eg.: Joe Sixpack).

    To start with, expert users typically type almost as fast as they speak (seriously: if any of you out there work in IT for a living and cannot touch-type, it is an investment well worth it). As others have pointed out above, both user and helper can multitask; and many computer tasks end up involving huge amounts of staring at a progress bar. You can copy&paste error messages and links back and forth. You can actually think your answers through while you type them, and not waste anyone's time with errr, uhh, yeah, and other "are you alive/i am alive" on-the-phone protocol overhead.

    In TFA, there is no coherent explanation of the type of support / users that this "Pro" is addressing. The article is less than a screenful of general ranting against not having the undivided attention of a user. Nothing to see here, move along.

  2. Opposite experience by GPLHost-Thomas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny that I read this, when I have the total opposite experience. I found that it's cool to use the chat, so that people can actually type their domain names, account names, or whatever. I found restful that people aren't on the phone and expect you to fix in the second, or find their account immediately. It's also very nice that I can cut/past URL, like for example the one explaining what a glue record is on wikipedia and so on. It's also quite cool if a customer types slowly, that way, I can continue to do what I was doing at the same time, but anyway, it's very rare that our customers are typing that slow.

    Maybe this has to do with the type of customers you get on the other side of the line (ours might know more).

    1. Re:Opposite experience by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It also seems like some of the problems described are a result of a badly designed support-chat system, or a properly designed one with bad policies in place, attempting to shoehorn the phone-based workflow into a rather different environment.

      Sure, if I call you, you need to confirm some sort of account/service tag/serial number/customer ID/something because I might be calling you from just about any phone number and automated phone mechanisms are a pretty painful way of entering anything nontrivial. But if I'm starting a text chat over the internet, you can just have a form that requests that information before setting up the chat(and hey, why not send me directly to the right subsection of your support apparatus based on the answers I provide, just for fun?) and then not waste everybody's time by having me re-type it unless there is some specific point of confusion/uncertainty/disagreement with the database.

      Similarly, 'I can't see your screen' is one of those problems that can be solved by technology... Your internet chat system doesn't have a way for me to upload screenshots, diagnostic logs, etc. to your support people why exactly? Yeah, you can't do that in phone support, so people make do; but you could do better in chat support.

      Obviously, none of this is the poor support guy's fault, it isn't his system; but a chat-support system that is more painful than a phone support system, despite vastly greater ancillary capabilities, is just plain broken.

    2. Re:Opposite experience by Deep+Esophagus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You'd think that the login system would eliminate the initial exchange of information, but in my experience with tech support that's rarely the case. Put in my name, my product info, a brief summary of the problem, and invariably it's "Hello, my name is Mary. How can I help you today?" Well, "Mary", you could help me by reading the information I just took five minutes to look up and type into the login page before I got here.