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
This sort of thing has been going on for years, probably as long as there have been companies and products. Can't get X to work, maybe your neighbor can, why not ask? In the case of software and other technical products, it really costs the company little to setup a forum, so why not? Also the people doing the supporting are completely volunteer, and are compensated in a feeling of helping others. If they don't want to participate, then they can stop at any time.
Everything you say is true, but at least having such a forum where one can get some support is better than not, and better than having that pseudo-support scattered across a dozen boards over the Internet. Doesn't excuse such lazy behavior, of course. Generally, if a company is providing an expensive product for which I need support, and then provides crappy support, I'll be looking for an excuse to try a competitor's product next time out. You might think that this would lead companies to upgrade their support, but it doesn't seem to. One of the big problems is that most of that company's customers are idiots, so it's a huge money sink to constantly answer their silly questions with expensive, highly trained support people. So, if a producer is using the forum to weed out the Tier 1 "Would it work better if I plug it in?" crowd while jumping in and helping out when someone has a real problem, then I guess I don't have a problem with it. If such a forum is viewed as a replacement for support, then I'll likely be looking at competing products next time.
I had that problem with 3Dstudio max back in its heydays.
...simply based on their PRIDE of their work. I was in love.
I finally decided to bite the bullet and go legit, I purchased a full 3Dstudio max 4 license + character studio (In my country, that cost over 5000 USD back then), and I didn't receive ONE ounce of support, only mocking for not having the right equipment for their software.
3D studio Max 4 got constant crashes with Application Error and corrupted files. And while I was in the middle of an important animation project of mine, this was unacceptable. Freezes and Crashes. Autodesk supporters blamed my computer. I did everything they said, I upgraded to Windows 2000 Professional, I upgraded my ram to the maximum possible limit. I even switched the mainboard 3 times + upgraded to the recommended intel processor. It still had the same freezes and crashes.
After 6 month struggling with the big corporation, I got tired of 3D software and swore I'd never use it again, but once a 3D artist...always a 3D artists...it's almost like being an alcoholic, it is THAT addictive (at least to me), so I tried Blender 3D (back then it was a small runt around 2mb while 3Dstudio max was a 60mb beast), and I had less crashes, albeit it was harder to learn.
Discovered a few bugs in Blender, and reported it to the coders (Ton Roosendaal), and got an INSTANT response, no longer than 2 days had some of his coders in his coding team fixed the bug, free of charge
And what can we learn from that? Today I still use Blender, albeit for professional production. I've produced high end commercial for the big brands such as Carlsberg (beer, not free...) worldwide and never looked back.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
In the end this reduces the cost of software to the customer.
Customer benefits by having ready access to a database of information produced by other users (more expert than any front line help desk).
Vendor benefits by not having cost overhead of front line support infrastructure.
Everyone benefits by having honest information exchange.
Vendor developers/consulting team provide secondary support and expert knowledge as appropriate.
This is a win/win for all involved.
Is this akin to the "To help the environment, please reuse your towels" sign in hotel bathrooms? Sure, we know this is really to increase the profits of the hotel. But in a free market with open competition, these figures ultimately produce a cheaper product for the consumer.
Thoughts?
Adobe is filled with issues, among them when I am compelled to sign in to verify I am an authentic user each time I use the software. This does not bode well when I am in transit and have no access to wifi. I used the forums and asked about this issue but receive a robotic response that you do not need to sign in each time you use the product. My experience proved the contrary. I call Adobe tech support, who asks to log onto my computer, and over several days it feels like half of India is lgging onto my computer to try to repair this issue. I figure a reinstall would do the trick, several reinstalls later, no change. India still needs to get on my machine to try to figure out what the hell is going on and the engineers over at Adobe are laughing because they tell their outsourced labour nothing. You get the forums and get little help or call in and get no help either. Adobe has the largest market share in their industry, so they do not care. Only when an upstart gives them a run for their money will you see Adobe shake a leg.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
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.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Whyd you shift "the" a bit to the left?
You've identified a hole in the market.
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....
I find that company support rarely is any good. Right off the bat if you call all they want is feedback for their MBAs, where did you buy it, when did you buy it, are you considering buying another in the next 6 months, how many people work at your company, etc. All this to ask how to reset the router to factory settings.
Or I can google "How to reset my ABC router to factory settings."
Then you get the brain dead people who just don't care. The other day I was a bell aliant and I asked them if their FiberOp has a real IP..... "what is an IP?" Then "Yes it probably does."
This could actually be good for open source, if company's are providing support through forums, then people will be used to this model when using open source without any "official" support.
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 :)
The company I worked for 20 years ago bought some expensive software and the people who came out to install it couldn't make it install. A call to their own tech support was no help. Boss called me up to look at the problem. When I looked at their install batch file I saw the problem was the install script assumed the hard disk was at C:. When you have more than 2 floppies in the system the first hard disk is at E:. The system had three floppies. I modified the install script while the two company reps watched and the install when fine. A forum having other people with a similar hardware setup might have been a help.
Dyslexics Untie!
Help menu -> report a bug... Do you think it needs to be easier?
There's the issue tracker( http://issuetracker.unity3d.co... ) for submitting other bugs... and this gives a very loose guide to what issues bug people the most...
*Every* bug gets checked and seen!
The problem a lot of the time is working out which bug needs to be fixed first by the limited resources we have...
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.
US companies have been engaged in a race to the bottom for some time now. Laying people off and borrowing money to buy back stock and keep the price up (and fatten that bonus). The constant layoffs and off-shoring have really eaten into the company's abilities to support or even produce quality goods. I used to work with an "enterprise" product for which we paid millions in licensing fees (yes, millions). The support was awful and the product quality seems to be constantly eroding. I don't know what replaces the old model. Perhaps a community based tool set. Whatever the solution, those companies that provided "enterprise" products at huge prices will not be a part of it.
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.
I work for a company that does this for one of our products (not our main product, but a mobile app) simply because the app would otherwise be unprofitable. We typically sell the app or $3, and this app is to control an external device (not ours), so can require some configuration of the customer's environment. It's not something simple like a game, but it actually interacts with other things on the customer's network.
It's not a great situation, but there's just no way to support the users that need help setting up port forwarding on their router, re-configuring AV software, etc, on a $3 app. If we provided regular 1:1 support on a $3 app, it wouldn't make business sense for us to sell the app. If we raised the price to something like $20, I'd bet no one would buy it and we would STILL have many customers that want their hand held through everything.
I learned pretty quickly that the engineers skilled in making customers go away looked better when management did their metrics. Sometimes there were complicated problems (customer building a custom PCB made an error in assigning IRQs or memory mapping error). Customers figured out to ask for me specifically, which did not help my metrics. It is really a shame when companies design their process to make people fail. What an effin mess.
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.
Merely supplying some kind of forum site centered on the product where users can gather has value. It's a bonus when they don't sanitize the content to bury problems and hide discontent; I've found that quite often if the product isn't complete crap, they're sort of self-regulating and total whiners get ignored by normal participants even.
Maybe it is a way to cut corners on support, but what kind of support were you really expecting -- a product development engineer dropping everything to figure out your issue? That doesn't exist except at the highest priced support levels for the largest enterprises and products, and even then you are just as likely to get steered into a hall of mirrors of consultants and local partners who just want to bill more. In almost all cases the alternative to Forum-centric support is bad telephone support and a weak knowledge base, at least from the vendor. If you're lucky there may be a third party site that helps, but often this just fragments knowledge across zillions of similar sites.
And it's not like supplying a reasonable forum is free, either. It takes software, hardware, hosting, administration and those cost money. I'll take the hive mind of other users over what the alternative is for the same money, which is like one one additional FTE -- an overworked, underpaid, clueless phone support drone.
How about a publicly accessible forum where the SUPPORT STAFF answer questions?
What's wrong with peer-to-peer support? Basically the company is free-riding on the backs of its users.
Real support costs money. Most people aren't willing to pay the proper cost for it.
The next best example of something we all own and often need troubleshooting is a car.
Routine car things are costly enough (oil change...). But that's the equivalent of running a virus scan or defrag.
If you ever have a real problem where something isn't working, it is costly. Diagnostic work? Even costlier and no guarantee it will work.
And the PC is ever more complex as you mod it will all kinds of stuff. Custom hardware. Custom software installed on it. Custom configuration.
Now, how much do you think it will cost you to fix a problem with your car that had it's engine replaced with a more powerful model, software modded... and all the other fancy things car modders do? Yeop... it's going to cost you a hell of a lot more.
And with cars, the normal answer is to just replace parts as a whole.
If you have a problem with some application crashing. Would you consider it valid support if they just said, let's try replacing your ram or upgrading your video card. Cost $500. And no guarantee of working.
And yes, car manufacturers do offer warranties. But they're typically void if you do anything to mod the car.
You'd no doubt not find that acceptable. You want them to fix the software.
Computers are just that complex. And for the rest of the industry, it is heavily cost driven.
People have no idea how much tech support costs. I used to run a tech support department in the 90s (on the technical side, not a manager) and it was always funny when customer would claim to have been "Ripped off" because they waited on hold for 10min.
How much did you pay for the device?
Take that, the figure out how much profit the manufacture is getting. 1/3 of the sale price would be very generous.
Figure out how long you were on the phone with support.
Assume the support worker is making minimum wage: $7.25 (they made more but lets just assume)
multiply... subtract...
The manufacture pretty much loses all profit as soon as you call them.
They first tried putting support on-line. But the people who needed support were usually so un-tech savvy they couldn't even open a browser. (this was the 90s)
So then they tried IVR (phone tree support) but people were too impatient and just skipped it.
They tried raising the price of the product but people wouldn't pay.
Then they tried charging for support. People flipped out and every call turned into an hour long bitch session.
Then they moved support out of the country so they could hire bellow minimum wage. But then the customers started screaming because people "Didn't speak English" That kind of bugged me because I trained staff from Jamaica and India, and they were all very intelligent people. Far more skilled than the people calling in and complaining.
Finally they just put up forums and said "screw it" and shut down support all together. I got laid off, got a hell of a lot better job and the general public just ended up forgetting that there was ever such a thing as phone support.
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.
But why should the support staff waste their time repetitively answering a question that is already answered in a customer forum?
That wasn't the point. OP is referring to companies who leave support largely up to the forums, while leaving users in the dark regarding whether the problem is being addressed by the company. The utility of user forums is well-known. But that is only a part of the support equation. When it is left up to the forums and those other parts of the support equation are left out or ignored, you end up with sloppy support at best.
Apple is kind of famous for this one, actually. Not that they don't support issues themselves, but they seldom if ever chime in to some of their user forums, and keep annoyingly silent on whether a fix for the problem will be upcoming.
I can think of one issue in particular that has been a complaint in Apple user forums through several updates now, and to the best of my knowledge Apple has been completely silent about when, or even if, they plan to solve the issue. Users in the forum have managed to solve the issue for some users, but others have been left hanging for many months.
There are some cases where community forums make a lot of sense, of course. On occasion, you genuinely have a "community" of users that would be willing to help others answer questions with both technical and creative problems to solve, so why not take advantage of that? Some products are extremely high-volume and low-margin, and a single support call from even a small percentage of users would kill profits. Most users are smart enough to figure out that the quality of support should, by nature, tend to go up with the cost of the product. For instance, I wouldn't expect anything beyond community forums type support for Mozilla products, since I paid nothing for them in the first place.
Unfortunately, I feel too many companies simply try to use the "customer support forum" as a cheap alternative to real support. And it's frustrating to users when the only answer they can get from other users is "sorry, it's working great for me", and aren't even sure that the company in question is aware they're having problems, and can't even provide any sort of feedback.
Delegating that responsibility to a community forum (at least, without an alternative for "official" support) says to me, as a customer "I really can't be bothered about answering your questions. Here, you guys can collectively figure it out". Frankly, if a bunch of customers are asking the same question over and over, maybe the company who created the product should pay attention to what those questions are and try to design their product to be a bit more intuitive. Yes, good customer service is likely expensive, but the smart response is to design your products to minimize user questions and problems, not to cut out call centers.
There have been some companies I do business with which have surprised me with excellent one-on-one support, and it makes me much more willing to do business with them in the future, since I know I always have the option of working with a live and helpful human being to resolve any issues. Perhaps as importantly, I know they will work with me in an official capacity as a company representative, and they'll stick with the problem until it's actually resolved to my satisfaction. No matter how nice the people on the community forum are, they *are* only volunteering their time, and can't be expected to demonstrate that level of commitment unless you happen to get *extremely* lucky. It's one of those intangible expenses that is likely tempting for bean counter mentalities to cut back on, but which smart companies realize is an important investment in keeping customers satisfied.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
See? This is stellar community support. Complain about support for the product on a random website, get a response from a developer in 30 minutes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I had (still have) problems with Dazzler video-to-usb. After long campaign to get video to work but never can get audio feed. Customer support is useless so that leaves the forums, which most are bankrupt. Most of posts are people with same problems, most solutions are copy/paste from same post from whereever (which does not address problem). But all these forums you gotta register with account name and password.
There used to be usenet where anyone can post and read, and since it was not technically sophisticated, you can't really copy/paste same crap over and over (you had to type your writings like a typewriter). This was also before the marketeers and spammers overran everything. sob!
mfwright@batnet.com
How about a publicly accessible forum where the SUPPORT STAFF answer questions?
What's wrong with peer-to-peer support? Basically the company is free-riding on the backs of its users.
The company isn't free riding. No one is forced to answer questions on the support channels. Some people want to. And the company is facilitating that free support, and often supplementing it with some of their own. That's what they should be doing.
The problem isn't the company leveraging people who want to help. The problem is when people don't get the support they need, either from other customers, or the company. The metric that counts is how long it takes a user to get an accurate, actionable answer, whether that's a solution, or a verification that "you can't do that".
Customer support forums are great, no matter WHO provides the solutions, as long as solutions come in a timely manner.
I think that's where each company needs to look at what it's doing for support, and using whichever method suits it best.
For example, I've been on a few forums for specialized music hardware or software where it was highly structured. You weren't really allowed to post messages helping out the next user. Rather, you had to post specific questions and wait for one of their support people to reply, as though it was an official "trouble ticket".
This gave a much worse result than a forum where the company provide no direct help at all, IMO. The official staff was slow in responding, and it usually required multiple emails back and forth as they asked for all sorts of details the company apparently made a procedure of collecting before assisting a person.
I think what USUALLY works best is an open forum where everyone can assist each other, but official employees are tasked with keeping up with the forum topics and interjecting assistance as well. But I can't tell you how often I've gotten useful advice from the Apple Support Forums, even though nobody from Apple gave any official help at all in there. When you sell a product that's very widely used (like Apple does), almost anything you come across has also been observed by somebody else. The forums help get those people communicating with each other and raise awareness of an issue. Other readers quickly chime in if they have any suggestions or also saw the problem -- and before long, there's usually an answer. When it's clearly a problem that's insurmountable without a bug-fix from Apple, there's always the option to file an official bug report with Apple's online bug-tracker, and that usually gets it corrected for you by the next software or firmware release.
It's also true that sometimes, I've found the users of a product who are interested enough in it to frequent forums in the first place will know MORE about it than the staff at the company who sells it! So just calling in for support is inferior to asking on a public forum in those cases.
I think part of the problem is, people simply have no idea how many other people are calling in with issues on the same product!
At one of my old jobs, I remember constantly getting called on by the boss to help with his HP printer issues -- both in the office and sometimes at home. He'd volunteer to drive me out to his place over lunch (and usually buy me lunch as compensation) to take a look at it for him.
Truthfully, most of his issues were bugs that MANY, MANY people using multiple HP wireless printers were running into, as evidenced by Google searches on it. He used to complain and complain about how long he had to wait on hold to talk to reps at HP, who would then spend HOURS remote-controlling in to his computer(s) to try to iron everything out. Yet he was sure these issues had to be fairly unique to his environment. He wouldn't accept the idea that lots of people experienced these issues, because in his mind, "HP wouldn't be able to afford to keep the products on store shelves if this was happening to too many people."
What I don't think he realized was that yes, that's exactly why he had to wait on hold for an hour or more each time, and struggle through tech support with language barriers. There were that many people calling in with issues! Apparently though, when you're the size of HP, it's still more cost-effective for the company to keep cranking out printers and all-in-one devices that have known software problems, and just take the calls as they come in. (I imagine the money is mostly made on the ink anyway, and HP is fine with people wasting ink and paper trying to get test or network config. pages to print, in an attempt to fix them when they quit talking on the network.)