I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.
IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.
Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.
How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place.
How companies actually do this:
IVR>You can find self service options on our
Customer> 0
IVR> .. site to check your ...
Customer> 0
IVR> ... transfer funds and ...
Customer> 000000...
On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.
Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.
The fundamental problem is coders want to code. At least in my experience. Many are poor to terrible at talking to customers and have little desire to learn. If it isn't related to code they don't care. It's someone else's problem.
A few developers, the good ones I've worked with, know how to talk to customers and how to talk to support team members to help them.
I work in a support role now and I have worked in a development role in the past. I know both sides of it fairly well.
Finding good developers isn't trivial, but finding good developers that can communicate and work as a team, that's really hard.
I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030816-00/?p=42...
Even Bill Gates did this:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15...
This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse.
I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow.
Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)
The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are:
- logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you.
- "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket
...you feel powerless.
Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..."
Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.
I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...
I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus.
For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...
In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."
- limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it.
- have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc
But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.
I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)
As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.
Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".
The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.
FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.
Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).
A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane
Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.
People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.
This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person.
I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone.
I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals.
On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross.
Anyway- support; never again.