Average Time To Resolve Problems is Three Times Higher Than Customers Want (zdnet.com)

Businesses seem to be setting the bar for "good" customer service too low, according to a recent study, which could have significant business impact as the customer experience becomes even more vital as customers decide to buy. From a report: Boston, Mass.- based identity and access company LogMeIn recently released a study to analyze the business impact and consumer attitudes of today's customers and their journey to a sale. It surveyed over 5,000 respondents consisting of business leaders and consumers around the globe. Its 2018 AI Customer Experience study shows that over one-third of consumers were not impressed with their customer journey. Over four out of five (83 percent) of consumers citied an average or poor experience, saying that they had at least one issue while interacting with a brand. Conversely, 80 percent of businesses believe their customers would give them a favorable review -- even whilst admitting that less than half of customer queries are resolved during the first interaction. Two-thirds (68 percent) of business respondents agree that their agents struggle with the volume of customer enquiries, and 61 percent of consumers feel that it takes too long for an enquiry to be resolved.

Comments

Wait...

[hey!]

3 x 0 = 0.

Re:Wait...

[dingleberrie]

I think it's 3 x yesterday = 3 days ago.

Re:Wait...

[ShanghaiBill]

I think it's 3 x yesterday = 3 days ago.

Indeed. Not only do people want their problems fixed immediately, they don't want to have the problems in the first place.

Also if 4 of 5 people have problems with "at least one brand", and companies think 80% of their customers are satisfied, these two facts are not mathematically inconsistent. They can both be true.

Here''s a great way to fix customer problems: Require the engineers who designed the product to spend one day a week doing 2nd tier support. It is amazing how much this motivates them to improve the product.

Re:Wait...

[JDeane]

Honestly most of the time I get the feeling it's not the engineer's at fault for most issues (although some clever "solutions..." uggh but I digress.) most of the time there is a list of requirements and in that list is "Do A-Z with cost under what A-Z could reliably be done with, also do it all in a time scale that is either impossible or just unrealistic"

I worked for Dell doing L2 tech support and yeah it was good times... (Vista was launching during that period of time and Vista ready was a hilarious joke.) a running gag at the call center was pointing at the worst PC's we could find and saying "Of course it's Vista ready!"

From the rumor mill at the time the engineer's had running battles with management about what qualified as "Vista ready" with them wanting the machines to meet a minimum "performance rating" and management just going "but it runs? that means it's ready right?"

Re:Wait...

[mysidia]

there is a list of requirements and in that list is "Do A-Z with cost under what A-Z could reliably be done with, also do it all in a time scale that is either impossible or just unrealistic"

So he was almost right.... Require each of the project managers and supervisors who oversee the engineering, development, and maintenance, especially the budget, timelines, and requirements spec related to each product to spend one day a week manning the phones and doing 2nd tier support for the latest supported version of that product.

Re:Wait...

[qwerty shrdlu]

Years ago Michael Dell would spend the occasional day answering the phones down in Tech Support. But frankly it's easier to tell all your employees that they need straight 11s on the customer satisfaction surveys and make lower management responsible for delivering the numbers. Not the satisfaction, just the numbers.

Re:Wait...

[JDeane]

Yeah I imagine this is pretty much the case, once you get out of the trenches so to speak it's just a numbers game and at that point reality just sort of flies out the window. I remember in training (was very thorough and great training) all the great things we could do to help customers and "Be the reason" all that flies out the window once your on the floor in production. After you hit the floor it's literally about keeping the customer on the phone as long as possible (sub contractor phone tech support so time is money...) and hitting all the steps in the flow even if you know they just need to plug the damn VGA cable in... I literally got a write up for helping a customer reinstall the graphics driver VS reformatting the machine and starting from scratch. My solution saved the customers data, but that didn't matter because I deviated from the script... So happy I am no longer in that field.

Re:Wait...

[rtb61]

The solution is not to contract out service and support calls but put sales and production staff on rotation in sales and support to create depth of understanding between staff and customers but disposable staff == disposable companies == disposable customers, management by psychopathy.

Re:Wait...

[ole_timer]

reminds me of a story I always tell my students - Xerox deigned copiers that were easy to fix - you know those screens that walk you through a paper jam - the Japanese built copiers that did not fail. guess who won?

Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that rampant, unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing less people to do the same amount or more work and customers are noticing?

Hey, but don't worry, this is definitely the most efficient system and nobody could possibly to better, probably. And all that money will eventually trickle down to the rest of us, right? I mean, it's not like these businesses are paying people stagnant or lower wages and the rich are walking away with ever bigger slices of the pie, right?

Right?!

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[HornWumpus]

Because 'smash capitalism' is the answer to all questions.

Says more about you than anything else, nothing good. You are delusional, historically _ignorant_ and no doubt part of a commie circle jerk at your middle school.

You deserve Baria style 'customer service'...we're sorry you are unhappy with the accomodations at the gulag...please accept a 7.62 bullet.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[hey!]

A capitalist can only be as good as its consumers are.

The whole rationale which "proves" that free markets are optimal is based on the assumption that consumers make perfectly rational decisions with perfect information. In that world a consumer would never take an auto loan without comparison shopping, just to drive the car off the lot *today*. If he bought a shoddily built television he'd be making a conscious choice to prioritize short term cash flow over long term expense. And if he signed over his privacy to an online service it would be after careful weighing of the pros and cons.

This is by the way isthe same idealized world in which citizens in a democracy examine each politician's proposals in detail and with a keen critical eye.

As with the old joke about the bear and the running shoes, capitalism and democracy don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the alternative. But it's not necessarily given that they are. How much better they are, if at all, depends on us not being gullible and carried away by enthusiasm or fear.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct! In socialist states no one has to wait for anything! Standing in line is SO capitalist!

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Says a lot about you that you completely ignored the qualifiers of " rampant, unchecked free market ..."

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Brett Buck]

Capitalism gave you everything you have in life, including the medium required to bitch about it.

Re: Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

No one pays for support. Masses want services cheaper and faster.
On the other hand, people working as support want decent wages and comfort.

Simple rule is you get what you paid for.

When someone sees an offer where product is dirt cheap and support is real hourly cost of trained professional they suddenly become blind and see only cheap.
Few days later they realize that they need someone to help the finding the big red button in the middle of the screen and try getting personal service of premium consultant for free.

There's no such thing as free lunch.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[lgw]

Could it be that rampant, unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing less people to do the same amount or more work and customers are noticing?

Capitalism seeks profits. which requires repeat business. Don't confuse that with short-sighted greed. Without bailouts, short-sighted greed is a self-solving problem. You see this all the time with small businesses in the modern world of online reputation, where word gets around quickly if you cut too many corners. It's very much a world of "be as cheap as you can without the customer noticing" these days, for small businesses, as you can no longer get away with "as long as the customer doesn't notice until after I get their money".

Anyhow, it's just freaking stupid to under-staff a call center: increasing queue times pisses off customers and doesn't make it cheaper as all the calls still need to be handled. The only way you save money is if customers abandon the queue, which are usually lost customers.

You want the "depth" of the queue to be one call per rep. That gives you all the cost savings (no idle reps), and an expected wait time equal to the average time it takes to handle a call, which most people are OK with.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

They also try to ensure that the customer service gets the worst, untested tools available and get told to not complain about them or get fired. The workforce remaining after the yearly reductions get to serve increasing customer numbers with the new tools. Yelling and screaming customers. Oh, and don't ever mistakenly ask advice from your neighboring, more experienced people with the complex corporate service offerings. That is explicitly forbidden.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[roc97007]

In the same free market, I can choose not to do business with companies that piss me off. And have.

I have fewer choices with government run enterprise. The example conservatives keep dragging into the discussion is the DMV, which is an easy target, but it applies to any enterprise where you don't have a choice.

Lilly Tomlin said it best, years ago. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Replace that with Social Security, most utilities, Comcast, any business where choice is artificially limited.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright how's socialism or communism or whatever going to resolve customer problems faster?

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

or Google.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism gave you everything you have in life, including the medium required to bitch about it.

By the same flawed logic, everything you don't have and won't ever have, hey, that's Capitalism too! That is, unless you are gullible enough to think that your house and car aren't nicer because you didn't work hard enough?

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[roc97007]

or Google.

or Google, yes. You can use a different search engine (and I do) but there ain't a lot of choices in phones. I have a very old Galaxy that I've been thinking of replacing, but Apple support royally pissed me off yesterday, so it's not likely to be replaced with anything running IOS. Maybe I'll look at Blackberry again.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[alvinrod]

Spare me the rants against capitalism. I'm sure the customer response in the Soviet Union was just great.

The reality of free market capitalism isn't that it makes everything rainbows and puppy dogs, it's that it gives consumers what they are willing to pay to pay for. Every day customers vote with their wallets and if they continue to give their business to companies with what they regard as poor customer service, whose fault is that really? They might value customer service, but what they value more is lower cost, and that's what companies must strive to deliver if they want to stay in business.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

are you calling from inside the house?

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[CohibaVancouver]

and customers are noticing?

"Customers noticing" is only relevant if it means that significant percentages of them are changing their buying habits.

If customers say "Wal-Mart sucks" and then continue to shop at Wal-Mart then the fact that the customers "noticed" is irrelevant.

It's no different than customers complaining about airline service, but then exclusively purchasing air travel based on the lowest fare - Unless customers are willing to vote with their wallets, nothing will change.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Attila Dimedici]

No, the whole rationale which proves that free markets are optimal is based on a study of actual history. Please give a real world example of an economic system which is superior to free markets?

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[hey!]

Never read the classical economists, I take it.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't need to care about repeat business if your customers have no choice but to deal with you.

If you look at the companies with the worst customer service, they tend to be monopolies, have captured regulators that allow them to abuse their customers and make it difficult to change providers. Both are inevitable outcomes of capitalism, so the original poster's laying the blame there for poor customer service is correct.

Free market economics works fine when there is an functioning market, but that is now quite rare.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Immerman]

"Optimal" means the best possible - *not* the best we've tried. The optimal form of capitalism has never been tried, is generally opposed by capitalists, and may not be possible.

Meanwhile, historically we've really only tried four basic forms of economies - capitalism, state-owned capitalism (often mis-labeled communism, which it bears only the most superficial resemblance to), commune-scale communism, and gift economies. The last two of which were probably the basis of human exchange for most of our existence, but seemingly have problems scaling much beyond the village size.

Capitalism has shown itself to be a remarkably efficient way to allocate resources. It's also shown itself, time and again, to be very prone to becoming an extremely unfair method of allocating wealth. Mainly because it tends to give capitalists, whose primary contribution is generally inherited wealth, outsized economic and political power - which they immediately abuse to tilt the playing field further in their favor, creating a multi-generational concentration of wealth into the hands of the already wealthy.

Bottom line - it doesn't make a whole lot of difference whether you reach a fascist state by having the political machine take over the economy, or having the economic powers grow to such a point that they take over the government - either way you have a small body of elites controlling both the government and the economy, and abusing the power of both as they see fit.

Capitalism appears to have much of value to offer, but we still need to develop a counter-point social technology to keep it's problems in check.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[lgw]

If you look at the companies with the worst customer service, they tend to be monopolies, have captured regulators that allow them to abuse their customers and make it difficult to change providers. Both are inevitable outcomes of capitalism, so the original poster's laying the blame there for poor customer service is correct.

Yes, that's the telecom industry and it sucks. There are some other examples like airlines (lots of bailouts there). But don't pretend that's the norm. Especially anywhere you're dealing with small businesses, there's obviously no monopoly or regulatory capture. Even with large corporations, you can come up with some sectors like telecom where corporation and government have become too tightly coupled, but they are exceptions and most business still have to compete for customers.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[sjames]

No, but regulate capitalism does cure a lot of ills. So much so that it was strongly recommended by Smith.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I barely heard your question because of the yelling boss and cusstomers. Sshit, my s-malfunction is coming back!

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Attila Dimedici]

The thing is that economists ALL postulate how an economic system would work in the ideal world. However, free markets are the only one in which real world experience with it bears an actual resemblance to what the theories of its proponents say it should look like.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[HornWumpus]

Capitalism is regulated by definition. The only people that say otherwise are reds posting straw men.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[hey!]

I agree, but I was talking about the arguments that free markets yield optimal results, which is the theoretical basis for favoring markets. History does not support the idea that markets always converge on optimal solutions to things like pricing and supply, only that they work better on a practical basis than central planning based schemes that have been tried thus far.

However if consumers are sufficiently lazy, and if consumer protection laws are sufficiently weak, there's no real lower limit to how poorly a market system might work.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Dragonslicer]

Capitalism gave you everything you have in life, including the medium required to bitch about it.

Capitalism didn't create vocal cords and air.

I will acknowledge that capitalism gave us mass-produced pens, paper, and printing presses.

Capitalism didn't give us the Internet, that was the US military.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[sjames]

So you're saying that the Tea Party are a bunch of pinkos?

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[complete loony]

Like the textbook model of supply and demand? Which assumes that;

• the last item off the production line cost more than the one before it
• with competition no firm can change the price, no matter how much they produce
• consumers compare the value of every permutation of goods they can buy to maximize utility
• consumers income remains stable when prices change

All of which is demonstrably stupid and doesn't match the real economy.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[HornWumpus]

Reducing unneeded regulation is not the same as _no_ regulation.

You should know that, just repeating derp and playing stupid.

Re:Shock horror, capitalism sucks

[Attila Dimedici]

So, please give a real world example of an economic system which works better than real world free markets?

That's because

[mandark1967]

Customer Service Representatives are 3x higher than the customers

How to succeed at business-get people to work free

[XXongo]

Could it be that rampant, unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing less people to do the same amount or more work and customers are noticing?

I'd say that the unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing zero people to do the same amount of work: when I try to get support from a major company, it is pretty much impossible to get to an actual human being. Often the best I can do is to get shuffled off to a customer "support forum", where people post their problems, and other customers, working for free, post their workarounds to solve the issues.

What a great business strategy! Get your customers-- the people who pay you!-- to do your customer support work for free!

Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[jellomizer]

If you have to fix a problem, you need to make sure it will not negatively affect any other customer as well.
Also a lot of companies outsource to other companies, because they think they will have better service then in-house, However their inhouse is probably better staffed and skilled then the company is.

Re:Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[originalGMC]

This, and the originating service or product likely has "scripts" for the outsourced individual to read. This type of thing is fucking awful for call centers. Scripts don't solve problem, they create more problems due to pissing both the caller and the call-center-staffer off. "customer service" is just that - performing a service. Whether or not the call center staff member says please and thank you, pretty sure nobody gives a fuck. They're not calling for someone to be nice to them they're calling for a real reason - to conduct business perhaps, or to solve a problem they're having. Sure being nice is an added extra bonus, but you know what? It is totally not necessary. Perhaps the nicest thing would be to: 1.) be very brief, yet as transparent as possible under constraint of brevity; 2.) never ask open-ended questions like "is there anything else I can help you with?" - the customer called for the reasons they already mentioned. stick to that. 3.) Launch your required business processes instantly. I don't give a fuck about the problem statement if you're not going to listen and then ask for my XX number or my YY username or some shit. Ask up front, guide the caller through the process, don't let them control the conversation; and 4.) don't apologize that's so fucking annoying and we know you don't care/mean it. Empathy Otter understands us and knows exactly how we feel, you the call center staffer should realize that we're not actually communicating with you and you don't have to care about us. You just have to do the job you were put there for, quickly, quietly, efficiently. Explain your actions before you take them, then take them, then explain the results. No cheery "smile while you talk" no needless empathy statements - wasting my time and your breath. Perhaps the best call center I talk to is the *gasp* state run health benefits exchange. No IVR menus, no robots to talk to, just you call and they answer.

Re:Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[swb]

Some of this is consumer driven -- people have little patience, and even less of it for expensive items they find confusing but necessary to own.

But I wonder how much of their unrealistic expectation is driven by unrealistic burdens placed on them? Eg, my widget is broken and I need my widget (which of course I am required to provide to do my job) to work. When my widget is broken, I can't work and my boss and my customers get pissed I am not helping them.

I think people generally are super-stressed anymore by the 24x7x365 world and the margin for error/downtime is so close to zero that any problem resolution that isn't instant is seen as insufficient.

That's an unrealistic expectation, but it's not driven by their own personal needs, it's the nature of the environment that pushes it. And it turns into a huge feedback loop that just results in everyone thinking everything needs to work 100% of the time and that any fixes will be immediate.

Re:Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[sjames]

So you think it's an unreasonable expectation that a support person actually has the ability to look in to a problem and tell me truthfully what has gone wrong? And that it's unreasonable to expect that they at least have some way to talk to someone with the knowledge and authority to make a decision?

My finding with the local ISP is that the CS reps don't even have the ability to see if there are outstanding trouble tickets for the network side in my area. They also don't have the training or common sense needed to understand that if the network is down, they can't ping my modem.

They also don't seem to get that if they reach the end of the flow chart and the problem isn't fixed, it's time to send the problem to the next tier.

Re: Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It's unrealistic to expect more. After all, customer service is meant to just be a punching bag for you to take out your aggression on. You and management that is.

Re:Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[originalGMC]

You're not talking to your ISP you're taking to an outsourced staffer who is paid to answer the phone. Your ISP would prefer you didn't call. They don't have access to the customer database or the IP/Modem tracking system. They have a GUI with like 5 options, 1 of which is "escalate" the other 4 lead them to call ending scripts.

Re:Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[originalGMC]

call ending scripts are disposition statements, like "we'll schedule a technician" or "we'll send someone to inspect the lines" or "trouble ticket to actual ISP for IP reassignment/modem reset" or "transfer to xx/yy department"

Re:Unrealistic Customer expectation.

[sjames]

I am well aware of that. I also know the guy's name isn't actually "Bob". That just means that the ISP has failed to meet a reasonable expectation.

that's right!

[Anonymous Coward]

The average time to a decent slashdot story is 3x higher than its readership wants.

Re:that's right!

[Anonymous Coward]

The average quality of a Slashdot story is 3x worse than its readership wants.

And Slashdot editors are 3x more incompetent than your average monkey.

Re: that's right!

[Anonymous Coward]

And this story will be posted 3x

Re: that's right!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 3x more anonymous cowards here than there used to be too.

Sometimes the problem is the customer

[JoshuaHutchinson]

My work is more business to business support, but the number of times I've seen initial support requests that are along the lines of: "My phone is broken. Please fix." That's not unusual. So the next couple of emails tend to be pulling information out of the customer, such as WHAT errors are happening, what they are TRYING to do with the phone, etc. Even in online forms, we tried putting leading questions on the form to try to get more information and the number of times the answer is the letter X is astounding. Why do you think we are ASKING that question, O customer? For the fun of watching you type?

Company Selling Chatbots Says Customers Want Bots

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't news. This is marketing. This is nothing but a biased survey being biasedly analyzed so LogMeIn can sell you a chatbot for your site/business.

But there sure was lots of percentages in the article, so it's probably by some really smart peoples.

We are experiencing higher than normal call volume

[bob4u2c]

Can't tell you how many times I've heard that and thought, hmm why not hire more people to handle a 30+ minute wait time. Or, how about you just tell me when you lowest call volume is and I'll call back then. But, somehow I think your higher than normal is actually your normal call volume.

Last time I was experiencing a problem I called 7 days in a row, with each new person assuring me they would be the one to fix the issue. Finally on the 7th day the last person told me to not call back as it wouldn't help resolve the issue. So I haven't called back. Instead I took it upon myself to resolve the issue and found an alternative solution that didn't involve their services anymore. Now that I have an alternative, they are calling me to ask if I'm still experiencing problem. The last call they made to me was awesome, "are you still experiencing problems", nope I canceled your service about a week ago, "[click]".

Customer service trumps results

[rsilvergun]

Sometime back in the early 2000s companies figured out that you can have weak product support and get away with it if a) you answer the phone quickly (being on hold a long time makes people feel unimportant) and b) your reps smile, chat, say nice things and are generally friendly.

As someone for whom that doesn't work (I'm more than a bit autistic) it drives me nuts that it works. But it absolutely does.

Re:Customer service trumps results

[lgw]

Hey, it's better than e.g. cell carriers, where you get a 1-hour hold time and they still can't fix the problem. Fixing the hold time is something that customer service departments cant own, and IMO is has gotten better since 2000.

Actually fixing the issue goes deeper - CS can only resolve those problems they've been given the power/training to fix. But I'd far prefer a short hold time to talk to a human who can't help me over a long hold time for the same!

Re:Customer service trumps results

[lgw]

*departments can own

Re:Customer service trumps results

[Anonymous Coward]

(A) $8 disposables never meant to be useful, and hold time
(B) $8 disposables never meant to be useful, and longer hold time

I don't know why there's a distinction, for your purposes. Why call, pursuing solutions, to a desk where they'll never bother putting solutions?

I'll pick up the phone when they actually have something on the other end.

In other words, there IS no support. There's nothing to call. They only pretend to have implemented one.

Re:Customer service trumps results

[lgw]

(A) $8 disposables never meant to be useful, and hold time
(B) $8 disposables never meant to be useful, and longer hold time

I don't know why there's a distinction, for your purposes. Why call, pursuing solutions, to a desk where they'll never bother putting solutions?

Sorry, but why did you buy an "$8 disposable never meant to be useful" in the first place, and why would you expect support for such a thing?

automated voice systems

[FictionPimp]

My issue is automated voice systems. I spend 30 minutes just getting to a human. If they only support voice they are even worse. Currently I just press 0 over and over while saying 'fuck shit fuck' until something sends me to a agent.

Re:automated voice systems

[Anonymous Coward]

My issue is automated voice systems.

I had a recent issue to sort out. The first number I found put me on hord for a representative, until a few minutes later I found out that the group I was waiting for was out for the weekend.

The second number I called, the phone maze disconnected me 4 times while trying to track it to the right department. So I bothered someone in sales (there's always someone to take your money), and got a third phone number.

The third phone number ejected me from the maze twice before I contacted someone in the wrong department who transfered me to someone who could actually respond to my issue.

And MBAs wonder why customer satisfaction is down.

Re:automated voice systems

[bob4u2c]

I had a similar experience. I was calling the support number on my DSL statement to see if I could get a higher download speed on my line.

Called, put in my phone number, confirmed details, sent to voice prompt roulette. Then clearly said "Upgrade DSL"; transferring to account inquiry. After being asked if I wanted to know what my last bill was, I said "no" and back into voice roulette. This time I said "DSL"; prompt couldn't understand; repeated "DSL"; transferring call. The person answering the call said thanks for calling DirectTv, please give me your account or phone number. Confused I said "no, I wanted to see if I could update my DSL service". The person said that the department was closed and the call was transfered to them. I asked them when does the office close, she said 8:00pm. Now I'm really confused, I looked at the clock just to double check before telling her that it wasn't even 7:30 yet. Slight pause on her end and she said, ohh, let me see if anyone is there. Few minutes later she came back, sorry nobody in that department can I get your number (I had already given it to her at the start by the way) and have them call you tomorrow. Not feeling in the mood for more voice roulette I asked the rep what number she was transferring me to, I wrote that down and hung up.

Now the next day was one of the best support calls I have ever made. The phone number she gave me rang like twice, an older guy answered saying he was Gary from San Diego and what he could do to help. I told him I wanted to see if I could upgrade my DSL, he asked for my phone number and zip code. He then tapped a some keys and then said it looked like I already had the fastest speed in my area. He then said to hold on a sec and he'd run a few speed tests. 30 seconds of typing later he comes back and says sorry I just uncapped your line and ran a few different speed test but didn't get anything better. So in less than 4 minutes I had my answer from a tech guy who probably broke the rules by uncapping my line to confirm it wouldn't help. I thanked him for checking and said I probably would be going with cable modem, he said sorry and wished me luck. No voice roulette, only need my info once, gave me a straight answer, and it only took a few minutes.

Surveys arenâ(TM)t actionable

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatâ(TM)s interesting is what people actually do in response to service.

Asking people if customer service is good is an excuse to vent. And people who need service are already frustrated.

Thereâ(TM)s the narrative that customers who get great resolution to a problem have even better loyalty than people who have never had a problem. But whatâ(TM)s the quantifiable benefit? And whatâ(TM)s the real cost of bad service? Do companies who are on the lower end of the satisfaction scale really leaving en masse? Are their lost sales? Are companies bad at math when deciding how much to invest in great service?

Or is this (as I suspect) a case where people are vocal in complaining about something they wonâ(TM)t actually pay extra for. Example - people love to complain about airline legroom. A few years back, American Airlines introduced âoemore legroom throughout coach.â They took out a few rows of seats and spread the space out. With fewer seats, they raised prices slightly to cover the costs. Result? They got killed - people may complain about legroom, but they wonâ(TM)t pay $20 more on a $400 fare to get it.

I suspect customer service is the same way. People may be unhappy with customer service. They might complain about it. But it doesnâ(TM)t actually make the take business down the road. But if you solve the problem and charge a bit for it, that MIGHT have them take business elsewhere.

I don't necessarily mind a wait time...

[QuietLagoon]

... presuming the problem gets solved on the first try. Take my cable company (Please!), I've had to call multiple times in order to finally find someone who actually (1) understood the problem I was having, and (2) was able to resolve it. And then there are those automated phone systems whose menu structure seems designed to discourage customers from wanting to talk with a real, live person.

Re:I don't necessarily mind a wait time...

[shipofgold]

The only thing I want is for them to stop lying and telling me "we are experiencing unusually high call volumes", and instead tell me "we have analyzed our call volumes and refuse to hire any more operators as we have targeted your normal wait time to be 12 minutes".

If they are having unusually high call volumes it means they screwed something up. But nobody *always* has unusually high call volumes.

Re:I don't necessarily mind a wait time...

[sjames]

It's amazing how many lies they tell before you even get to say the first word. By the time a human comes on the line, you have been told how excellent their product or service is (so why did I need to call support?), how important my call is (so why don'y you answer it?), the someone will answer shortly (by what definition?), that the call volume is unusually high (has it ever NOT been "unusually" high?). Then the person who finally does answer lies about their name! No, I do not believe that the person with the strong Indian accent on a line where I can hear the distinct echo of an international call is named "Bob".

Then there's the implicit lie. I called X corp but I am talking to someone who works for an outsource company who has no ability to make any decisions whatsoever within X corp or, for that matter, to do anything but work through a useless flip book. If the problem isn't in the flip book, they often don't even know where to transfer the call to get the problem actually resolved.

sâ(TM)lashâ(TM)code sâ(TM)uckâ

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? We have character encoding issues from an iPhone mobile browser? Still?

Guess basic and simple maintainence of our codebade is one of those âoeextraâ(TM)sâ the new ownership wonâ(TM)t invest in.

Fuck beta.

Same for software

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how my task estimates are also three times longer than my boss wants.

It's not the destination...

[Sir_Eptishous]

Boston, Mass.- based identity and access company LogMeIn recently released a study to analyze the business impact and consumer attitudes of today's customers and their journey to a sale.

Journey to a sale?
Really?

Whats next, a caravan to a refund?
How about a junket to a recall?

Re:It's not the destination...

[sysrammer]

Journey to a sale?

Really?

Must be epic.

So? When have customers ever been rational?

[argStyopa]

Seriously, what a dumb study, comparing what people want to what they get, devoid of logic.

Women are 900% less interested in me than they should be. I'm angry!

Customer journey ? My ass

[vikingpower]

"Customer journey" is one of those horrible words thought out by marketing drones in expensive suits. When I'm a customer, I don't go on a fucking journey (if I want to journey, I'll take my luggage and go travel); companies have customer treatment, which can be good or poor, and that's it, fucking period.

Re:Customer journey ? My ass

[Anonymous Coward]

My customer journey though most websites would be much better if the websites didn't have so much slow ajax tracking crap.

It is much easier to make a purchase if I don't have to wait 10 seconds for the page to render.

So these websites have lots of info that their websites suck, but yet don't do much to fix it...

Re:Customer journey ? My ass

[sjames]

When I hear the phrase "customer journy", I also hear "The ballad of Lemiwinks".

Re:Customer journey ? My ass

[sysrammer]

Thank you for sharing your feedback. May we include your Story in our Epic?

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[lgw]

I'd say that the unchecked free market capitalism means that companies are employing zero people to do the same amount of work: when I try to get support from a major company, it is pretty much impossible to get to an actual human being

This is indeed the shitty new model, but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.

Even my cell carrier and my car dealership have real human customer support, frustrating as it might be to reach them. Heck, banks used to be the bottom of the barrel, but they've really upped their game these days (excepting Wells Fargo, which united their customer service and fraud creation departments), and if you physically go to a bank customer service tends to be quick and well trained.

And ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Average Profit from Customers is Three Times Lower Than Businesses Want ... hmm ... seems to be a correlation

ai - i found this article confusing.

[trb]

sorry this is a meta-comment, but I found it strange.
The title talks about the time to resolve customer service problems.
The article talks about an "AI customer experience study."
I'm inferring that the story is about how people feel about talking to chatbots. But when the article talks about chatbots, it doesn't talk about time.

Maybe the problem with the chatbots is that they do not provide valuable information, and just give customers the runaround. Is that really a time problem?

funny this should appear today

[roc97007]

This article is serendipitous. Just so happens that yesterday I talked to "Amadou" at Apple Support to try to get our ABM account activated. We'd gone through the enrollment process, which took 3 days, got the "enrollment complete" message, and then discovered we couldn't log into the portal with our Apple ID credentials. (Literally, "Your Apple ID is not allowed to sign in to this application."). "Amadou" said we'd have to create a new Apple ID and go through the process again. I said we went through the process documented on the Apple website, what went wrong? How do we know it'll work this time?

He got hostile at that point (mind you, this is customer service, for Apple!) and wouldn't give any more detail except repeating louder and louder that we would have to create a new Apple ID and go through the enrollment process again. Rather than degenerate into a shouting match, it seemed better just to say "thank you" politely and hang up. I outlined the experience to our local sales rep but he can't really help -- apparently his influence at Apple stops at selling us stuff.

The snarky side of me would say that Apple consumers have been trained to take whatever Apple decides to toss their way, ("mindshare") but honestly, it's not just Apple, customer service suckage appears to have increased across the board. I think part (but not all) of this has to do with outsourcing your technical support to cheap, untrained labor who's involvement is limited to whatever has been scripted, which usually means they have access to the same knowledge base that you do, but without the context or technical background to understand what they're reading.

But this has been the case for a long while -- it's the reason we as IT professionals tend to go to forums first for technical issues. Lately things seem to have gotten a lot worse.

The solution, in my opinion, is to drop vendors with bad technical support. Consider: If you're paying a huge yearly fee for support for a commercial product, and it just ain't happening, mighten't it be time to look into open source alternatives? Yeah, I know, no support. But you have essentially no support ANYWAY.

Re:funny this should appear today

[FictionPimp]

I changed cell phone carriers recently because of bad customer service. I bought (paid cash) for a new phones for my family. They activated it at the apple store (unlocked phone). I get my cell phone bill from Verizon and I see activation fees. That is a fee for me buying a new working phones and Verizon doing nothing. I call support and I'm told this is a industry standard practice. I protest that in with past carriers I was only charged a fee for signing up. I was never charged for switching phones. Again the rep says I should have read the entire terms of service before I signed up. I asked him if he always reads every terms of service for every provider he uses. He informs me he always does (so he's a liar).

They offer to give me a one time credit of one activation fee because I was unaware, but insist this is a fair practice. They then ask if I'm happy. I tell them I'm not happy. He then offers to give me credits for my old phones to offset the cost. I don't have any old phones, I recycled them when I bought the new one! He then tells me about their rewards program and how I can use their rewards by installing an application on my phone to offset these costs. When I tell him I don't install apps on my phone without doing my homework he continues to press it. I again refuse and he gives me to a manager. She again tells me it's my fault and I should just use the rewards because I'll receive gift cards to offset these "one time costs". She again tells me all carriers charge these fees. I inform her these kind of fees are predatory and silly. I refuse to pay them. She again tells me there is nothing they can do and I should just use the rewards. She words it as "I have offered you a solution to your problem and you refuse to accept it. Is that correct?" I tell her I have my own solution. I will find a carrier who doesn't charge these fees. She tells me I am a valuable customer and they would hate to lose me. She wants to know how to make me happy. I say "drop this silly fee!"

This goes on for another 30 minutes. I hang up. Drive to T-Mobile. Within 45 minutes I've got our phones activated on t-mobile. The new account activation fee was $10 less than verizon's activation fee. The paperwork and the rep both confirmed they do not charge activation fees on phones, only for 'Sim card starter kits' and even then if you are a customer they never charge you in that store. On top of that, my bill dropped significantly without losing my 'unlimited' data plan. Coverage in this area is the same and I get free netflix. Later that night I got notice from Verizon of a credit to my account, and with the fast cancellation verizon now owes me a refund.

I would have respected the customer service if they didn't send their time trying to sell me on their silly rewards program. I might have even sucked up the extra fee. Their "its your fault" attitude and instance on their stupid rewards program was enough to make sure I will never go back.

Re:funny this should appear today

[Anonymous Coward]

So you didn't familiarize yourself with the ToS and instead based your decision on old information from other carriers. Yet somehow you insist that this is all Verizon's fault and you have *zero* culpability?

Re:funny this should appear today

[FictionPimp]

Exactly. I am the only person on the planet who doesn't read a tiny document in full while a sales rep stands over with other customers waiting. I also don't have a law background, so I really should bring a lawyer with me to sign up for new services. This explains why everyone is in pairs at the Verizon store I guess.

Instead of a list of buried fees that are predatory and have no value to me the customer (as if activating a phone is a big expense for Verizon), what if I was presented with a nice list of fees and what they are for? I bet that fits on 1 sheet of paper. Better yet, what about not charging for services that take no effort on your part. Did the apple store rep scanning a bar-code and handing me a iPad to fill out information cost Verizon $30? Did it cost them $5? Why do other carriers not charge this fee?

The real reason for leaving is not the fee (the fee is the start of the reason and is a stupid fee). The real reason is how I was treated. I was lied to and told all carriers charge this fee. My quick phone call to a t-mobile store discovered this is false. I was told it was my fault (that always makes the customer happy). I was not offered any help, but instead they attempted to up sell their shitty rewards program (probably so the customer..err sales rep could get a good job mark). I was they told I'm a valuable customer and they would do anything to keep me from leaving. Turns out like meatloaf, they would do anything for their customers, but they won't do that.

Top it of with Verizon being the reason the FCC sucks so bad. I'm glad to leave. I should have done it sooner.

In conclusion, Verizon has the highest hidden fees, the most expensive phone plans, shitty customer service, and really really really wants you to install an app on your phone.

Re:funny this should appear today

[Anonymous Coward]

>>I have offered you a solution to your problem
It's a soundbite that they were told would work (and indemnify)

Until you say "My problem is the policy, not the dollars."

Re:funny this should appear today

[roc97007]

I had a similar experience with Verizon, and like you transferred us to T-mobile. We had originally gone to Verizon from AT&T because Verizon didn't suck quite as badly. Now we're at t-mobile for the same reason.

That said, if you *buy* a phone at t-mobile (you went to them, as did I, with pre-existing phones) they will probably offer you "free" stuff along with your phone, like a tablet or a waterproof bluetooth speaker. If your experience is similar to mine, the salesperson will say to your face that the additional gadget is free. They will use the word "free".

But what they mean by "free", as explained on literally page five of the six page, single spaced, small font contract, is that the retail cost will be amortized over 18 months in your monthly bill. This is what has come to mean "free" as in when you buy a "free phone", and is, I guess, why the salesperson can say that it is "free".

Then, you will discover that the price they're charging contains a heavy premium over the commercial price for the same object. For instance, aforementioned waterproof bluetooth speaker, available across the street at Best Buy for $79 costs $300 (I'm not making this up) at t-mobile if included as a "free" add-on when purchasing a phone. Be warned!

And yes, I got bit by this. My own fault for not reading through six pages of very dense, intentionally unreadable contract while standing at the cash register in a busy store.

When I got my first bill, I went back to the store to have a discussion with the salesperson, and then his manager, about what the word "free" means. After a lengthy conversation, which I confess got rather loud at a couple of points, they took the entire $300 off my bill. Which is fortunate, because I was running out of carriers to move to.

The point is, they may have different techniques, but *all* carriers are trying to screw you. You *have* to read the fine print, especially towards the end of the document where the warhead lurks.

My daughter, an adult, recently bought a phone at Best Buy. She had saved up some money and wanted to pay cash for a phone and get it activated. The salesperson sold her on a better phone than she was originally looking at, naming a price for it that was in her budget. She said "are you SURE that this is the ENTIRE price?" He insisted, multiple times, that it was. And then, she got charged an additional $350 for the phone in her bill amortized over 18 months. These people are the scum of the earth and should be treated precisely like Kaa in The Jungle Book. For the same reasons.

Re:funny this should appear today

[FictionPimp]

That is exactly why I moved to buying my phones directly from Apple, Samsung, and Google. I got bit by a similar thing at AT&T when we got our first 'smart' phones years ago. I now only buy phones directly from manufactures and only buy unlocked devices. But if they want to charge me for moving a sim card from one phone to another, well I'd rather not have a phone at all.

Re:funny this should appear today

[sjames]

Nobody has the time to read a 20 page wall of text or the money to hire a lawyer to tell them what it actually says. Those walls of text are another example of poor customer interaction and when they contain anything even vaguely surprising buried in paragraph 4 on page 10 in fine print, border on fraud.

So many root causes here!

[King_TJ]

1. Companies need to take some more care to release products that work as advertised! If you want to reduce the number of support calls, make sure the product you're selling doesn't NEED that much support for malfunctions or failure to perform as stated on the box or in marketing materials.

2. Provide better documentation. (There was a Slashdot discussion about this topic just a day or two ago, with someone asking why nothing seems to come with a decent printer manual anymore.) If customers can't figure a product out that they just bought, they're going to call in to ask about it.

3. Stop hiring the cheapest warm bodies you can get to answer your phones or do online chat support! I just had a terrible experience using Amazon's online chat support last week. Had a simple request .... Just wanted to find out if I could exchange a broken camera that came as part of a videoconferencing solution, rather than having to tear the whole installation back out and box it ALL up for a return. The first lady I chatted with SLOWLY asked me bunch of really basic questions, such as confirming the product I was asking about was a specific one.... After all that, she tells me she "has to forward me to a specialist who can handle my concern" and I start chatting with a second individual, who asks the SAME annoying questions over again. I think it took a good 45 minutes to finally get the answer that they couldn't help me at all unless I shipped the whole thing back. (I could have just done that process online in 30 seconds.) When I asked if we could just do an even exchange -- that required another 10 minutes for them to tell me they couldn't because of some kind of system problem on their end.

4. If you call in and it says your wait time will be excessive? Offer to let the person hang up and receive a call back when someone is available. T-Mobile does this on their support line, and I believe Tesla Motors does it too. It should become the industry standard. Let people get back to whatever else they're doing rather than tying up their phone listening to hold music and waiting.

Re:So many root causes here!

[Anonymous Coward]

> I start chatting with a second individual, who asks the SAME annoying questions over again.

I'm the engineer who occasionally gets support calls escalated because support can't handle them at all. I find that if I don't check the same stupid things again the problem rarely gets fixed. Usually, it got escalated to me because support skipped one of the same stupid things to check. So, am I going to continue asking the same stupid questions first level was supposed to? You betcha.

Re:So many root causes here!

[Anonymous Coward]

3. Stop hiring the cheapest warm bodies you can get to answer your phones or do online chat support!....

AND support your own Support Team, by providing them with the resources and information to do the job.
Too many places try to do support as cheap as possible, which ends up cutting corners.

New release or new product?
Dump a badly written pdf to support, and don't given them time or access to the actual product, just the pdf.
This happens in some companies, and is a recipe for frustration and disaster.

Customers want their problems solved immediately.

[Chris Mattern]

So three times nothing is...nothing?

Cusdumbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Most customers want it now, and they want it all
they want you to drop everything you're doing for them
they're entitled little biatches, and they're a part of what's wrong with our society in general.
another part is the people who profit from these people. shoot'm both.

caption : aghast

New Rule?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a new rule? No matter how fast your turn around time is, people's expectations will be 3 times faster than the average for the industry.

Tech support or pre-sale customer service?

[SB5407]

Is a pre-sale question a "problem"? I thought the report was about tech support, but it instead is about sales support/customer service: "each customer's journey to a sale", "as customers decide to buy".

This just in, people also think the average...

[egriebel]

• * time to become a millionaire is three times higher than they want

• * meal is three times higer than they want

• * cost of a Porsche is three times higher than they want

• * Cable TV bill is three times higher than they want

  etc.

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[ShanghaiBill]

but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.

My company runs ad campaigns on Google, and their customer support is excellent. If you, as an end user, think it is bad, then you are confused, because you are not their customer, you are just a user.

There is no plausible way that Google can offer personal support for everyone that uses their search engine, maps, office suite, or other free services, and it is not reasonable to expect them to do so.

Re:sâ(TM)lashâ(TM)code sâ(TM)uck

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Seriously? We have character encoding issues from emojis? Still?
So stop using emojis.

No, shuffling the particular verbiage for exotic characters won't change The Point, so don't bother.

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[lgw]

It's always reasonable to expect that a business that offers a service should offer support for that service. Google's attitude is one more reason not use their services (not to be their product). If only there were a credible alternative to YouTube.

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[ShanghaiBill]

It's always reasonable to expect that a business that offers a service should offer support for that service.

It is never reasonable to expect personalized handholding while paying nothing.

Google provides FREE services. They support these services with tutorials, blogs, and FAQs. To expect more than that is ridiculous.

If only there were a credible alternative to YouTube.

Why don't you start one? The difference will be no ads and a fully staffed 24/7 1-800 number to call if you don't like the video. Should be easy, right?

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[lgw]

You should try raising your expectations. You might get more out of life.

YouTube, though, goes beyond "no customer service for viewers" and delivers "no customer service for content creators". Way to raise the bar there, Google.

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[Anonymous Coward]

It is never reasonable to expect personalized handholding while paying nothing.

Google provides FREE services. They support these services with tutorials, blogs, and FAQs. To expect more than that is ridiculous.

Google charges us by using our data and selling it, we're their product, so they should make sure that their product can provide them with more data to make more money!

Re:We are experiencing higher than normal call vol

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest 'trick' is great. Give us your number and an agent will get back to you. They call back... AND YOU'RE STILL ON HOLD waiting for the agent to get to you!

Re: sâ(TM)lashâ(TM)code sâ(TM)uck&a

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using apostrope and single quote. âoe and â. They are big standard ASCII characters. I donâ(TM)t think experts ting them to work is unreasonable.

Re:So? When have customers ever been rational?

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] Women are 900% less interested in me than they should be. I'm angry!

You shouldn't be angry. You should consider yourself to be damn lucky, especially if you live in the USofA.

Re:How to succeed at business-get people to work f

[thomst]

lgw complained:

but I've only seen it from the likes of Google: big mass-market companies that have never even acknowledged that customer service is something they should be doing.

Prompting ShanghaiBill to respond:

My company runs ad campaigns on Google, and their customer support is excellent. If you, as an end user, think it is bad, then you are confused, because you are not their customer, you are just a user.

There is no plausible way that Google can offer personal support for everyone that uses their search engine, maps, office suite, or other free services, and it is not reasonable to expect them to do so.

It's hard to argue with that logic - except I'm a Project Fi customer, who pays Google for my service. And I can't say I'm satisfied with their customer support at all.

I recently bricked my Nexus 6. While I wrestled with trying to raise it from the dead, I simply wanted to forward calls made to my number to my wife's phone.

Because Project Fi is the carrier for both phones, Google's support people - who are all Indian, and thus contractors to whom Google has outsourced their support calls - claimed it was "not possible" to forward my incoming calls to her phone. Every one of them (and I made it two rungs up the management chain, before the last guy essentially hung up on me, mid-sentence) gave me the same, obviously-canned response.

Now that's pure, industrial grade, 100% bullshit. It should be trivial to do - check a box on a web form, type in a forwarding number, and let me get on with life. But those contractor drones clearly don't have the authority to do anything other than read from boilerplate scripts, and they were adamantly unwilling to push the issue up the chain of command to actual, direct Google employees.

I think that's a data point in favor of an "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" attitude on Google's part. According to you, customers of their advertising services get high-quality support. I can assure you from personal experience that the same is not true for Project Fi customers.

(This is not a slam at India or Indians. Every company seems to outsource to them for customer service these days, and that strategy can only be based on cost considerations. You get what you pay for - and it doesn't make good business sense to pay Western wages for humans to simply read from scripts. I don't blame the frontline support people for that - I blame Google for not allowing them to escalate support queries to actual technicians ... )

Re: sâ(TM)lashâ(TM)code sâ(TM)uck&a

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anymore you're not

Appleinsider: "Turn off iOS 11 Smart Punctuation to avoid data entry problems"
https://appleinsider.com/artic...

Apple Developer Forums: "apostrophe encoding breaks login"
https://forums.developer.apple...

Ring is the worst...

[ole_timer]

Ring has the worst customer servicer of a major tech manufacturer - they're clueless and incompetent. And the engineers never fix anything.