Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Tech Customers Forced Into Supporting Each Other?
An anonymous reader writes "Has anyone else noticed the trend towards 'community forums' where customers are basically being recruited to solve the issues of other customers while the companies selling the products causing the issues sit back and take a passive role in the process? Granted, sometimes the companies' employees play an active part in the forums and provide some value-add by contributing crucial, and often undocumented, knowledge that solves the problem in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case, and this leaves customers with no visibility into whether or not their problems are being addressed, and, if they are, when they might expect to receive assistance. This is bad enough when dealing with consumer electronics that cost up to a couple of hundred of dollars, but it's completely unacceptable when dealing with proprietary design tool vendors that are charging several thousand dollars for software licenses for tools that are the only option if a customer doesn't want to drop an order of magnitude more money to go with 3rd party tools (e.g., Synopsys). Who do you think are the worst offenders of this downloading of support onto the backs of the customers themselves, and what can be done about it?"
Customer Support Far superior to slave wage 3rd world call center or minimum wage uneducated moron with 8 hours of training
The big problem is that it doesn't reduce the cost of the software, it increases the profit of the software provider
The problem is they are taking it WAY to far. I expect to be able to get a PERSON on the phone when it comes to technical problems or warranty issues. Too often im forced to fill out forms and am directed to the forums instead of a CS rep. No amount of tech will change the fact that they will ALWAYS need people in Customer Service.
Good-bye
It's more than just some brilliant VP deciding to reduce the cost of support by basically saying, "let's let the users tell each other how to fix our product."
The really nasty part of this, and you'll see this on any "community forum" for any product of any complexity, is the amount of BS and crap information being repeated as gospel, without correction or clarification from the vendor. One guy who has a flukey problem posts a sketchy "solution," other people extrapolate from it, n00bz try to apply it to completely unrelated issues and fail, they complain about not getting "support," whine when the board veterans and few people who DO know something don't immediately reply to their vague posts, the n00bz leave, the veterans fall away, and "community support" rapidly becomes "no support."
Oh, unless you buy a support agreement, but then, since their few remaining support techs don't hear about some or many of these bizarre problems, they don't fix them, meaning paid support is worse than nothing.
I've seen this occur over and over in situations where "community support" isn't accompanied by skilled, consistent moderation AND intercession by the paid support techs and the developers. If you completely leave the users to try to "support" themselves, you end up with no users to support.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Even that would not be so bad IF THEY ORGANIZED THEIR FORUMS AND FIXED THE SEARCH FUNCTION.
If I have version X of product Y then I should be able to search on product Y with a sub-search on version X.
I should NOT be getting results that apply to product A, B or C. UNLESS the company tech support people have specifically gone through and WRITTEN an answer and specifically labelled it as applying to A, B, C and X (version 1, 2, 3 and 4).
It cannot be that difficult to build a flow chart for the most common searches / problems that are appearing in your forums.
I work as a network technician for a K-8 school. My job, and the job of my small team, is to provide infrastructure and other equipment to our staff and students. Thankfully, we have an eager bunch who are anxious to learn. This proves beneficial to us because, frankly, we'd never get anything done if every student (or teacher) who didn't know how to cut/paste came running to us for support. That's not to say we don't assist people, or that we don't have busy days, only that smaller, more well-known problems can be handled by our staff--or, in this case, our community. Granted, we're also not some big company selling our product to consumers and then wiping our hands of any and all responsibility. Like with my humble tech team, a reasonable amount of service should be expected, but I strongly believe end users should be able to educate themselves. That said, I'm still gonna mash "0" until I get a human :)
And generally, the number of a tool's users with a problem at any given day SHOULD be << the number of developers or support staff.
But why should the support staff waste their time repetitively answering a question that is already answered in a customer forum? My experience is that peer-to-peer customer discussion forums are almost always superior to the formal support offered by the vendor. They have better advice, often list more than one option for solving the issue, are quicker to access, and are FREE. The summary makes all of this sound like a bad thing that we need to "do something about". Rather it is something that should be encouraged. When I am selecting new software, whether proprietary or OSS, I am much more interested in an active and accessible forum, than in what formal support contracts are available.
The quality of support you get from forums. mailing lists, and IRC channels is almost always far better than that directly provided by the company. Support teams that are competent enough to not just be warm bodies reading from a script simply don't scale well, because support employees at that level of competency expect (and deserve) to be paid as much as developers.
The vast majority of support queries on the other hand are repeats of the same questions, over and over again from customers who can't be bothered to use Google to search for their problem which means companies have to have a filter in place. That filter can be a forum, a web form that forces you to view every single article in the knowledge base, or a team of barely trained monkeys who are underpaid, and will burn out within 3-6 months from being asked the same questions over again by customers who are, on average, so dense that they don't mention the device in question isn't even turned on until they have already nodded along and gone through 30 minutes of "troubleshooting".
The use of community based support shouldn't itself be a concern, but how that support is implemented, how it's managed, and how the company uses that community based support to triage and escalate issues should be. In the most effective, and customer friendly cases, community support basically is used to to weed out the people who can't bother to help themselves from the people who have real problems, and the latter will get real support from "power users" or even actual developers.
The key to making that work in favor of the customers that actually need help is good moderators. They need to be jaded, vicious bastards who will stamp out any hint of noise amidst the signal, who aren't afraid to humiliate someone who posts the exact same question without reading the post directly below it where someone else asked the same thing.
All of this, should of course be accompanied by the best paid support you can find, at whatever rate allows you to pay your support staff a good (at least $25 USD/HR) wage plus medical, mental health, sick days, vacation and other benefits, and generally keep them happy. This should be a "tierless" support team if at all possible - the people you put there should be able to handle anything that comes their way, or act as a liason between customer and developer when necessary. The rate for this level of support should be high enough that your support team shrugs off people asking "dunb" questions as suckers who wasted their money rather than banging their head in frustration.
Chances are, the same support people can be providing paid phone support and "escalating" cases from the forums for free support when it's needed & deserved. Everybody wins in this case - lazy people can pay to be lazy, people with no time to wait for a solution can pay for one, and people who are willing to work to find a solution can get the help they need free of charge.
Support costs money. The goal of the business is to make money. If businesses can reduce a cost without losing profit, it would be irrational for them not to.
Realize that businesses are doing this in response to demand. People are not flocking to a competitor's product simply because that competitor provides better support. If people did this, you bet the businesses would give you the support you want. But people don't. So, without that reward, the businesses have no incentive to provide the support.
People flock to a product for brand name and features. So, that is what businesses provide.
And, as willing as you might be to vote with your wallet as an individual, unless the same vote is a trend, it will not be effective. As always, your destiny is in the hands of all your peers.
I expect to be able to get a PERSON on the phone when it comes to technical problems or warranty issues.
As someone that actually did tech support, I hate this attitude. I can't count the number of hours I spent reading the manual and phonetically dictating keystrokes to some idiot that was too lazy to read it himself. Email, or even an online chat session, is infinitely superior to a phone call when dealing with software issues.
you might be surprised. when my ~$50 sennheiser in-ear headphones broke, i sent them in under the 2-year warranty and got a free replacement. they probably cost ~$5 to manufacture, so they have plenty of margin for support; they just make more money if fewer people use what they are entitled to.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The key word is CAN. Take a look at one of the recent stories about HP cutting off another sixteen thousand jobs.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Because that's their job and the paying customers require that service as part of what they have paid for.
Of course. Customers that specifically pay for staffed/phone/whatever support are still getting it. The point of this discussion is what normal customers should get as standard support. Or, more bluntly, this is a typical Slashdot whinefest of people complaining that they aren't getting something that they haven't paid for. If you want support from paid staff, then pay for it. But don't insist that the cost be built into the product and susidized by the 95% that don't need hand holding.