I hate email support. If I’m trying to call, it means I have a problem that needs addressing right now. Email is basically a black hole. You never know when someone will respond, if ever.

I'm pretty sure when he said "having a human-attended support email address" would rule out black holing.

human attended email address still might mean 24 hour response time.

Do you mean that the EU mandates a generic email address (like ‘[email protected]’) as distinct from whatever more personalised support address(es) they may push more publicly?

Do you have a link to the regulation? I've not been able to find anything.

Hm, on second thought this might be a German regulation. German imprints definitely do need to contain a monitored email address (which somewhat hilariously is often [email protected] or [email protected]).

This used to be the only way of reaching my phone operator for a while (they had chat support, as well as a phone number, but ironically that one would only text-to-speech read out "helpful" FAQ articles and then hang up, only forwarding callers to a support agent if they know the secret incantation producing zero FAQ hits).

I've had mostly very positive experience with chat support. It's always what I look for first.

Same, though on spotty net, chat may not work or may not work well. Email is great when traveling.

For me, it's been mostly nightmares. I will say though that chat via a third-party messenger (e.g. WhatsApp, iMessage etc.) is significantly less frustrating than in-app or web chat, which frequently times out ("please respond within 30 seconds or we will consider your issue resolved" after having me wait for 15 minutes for an agent etc).

> It leaves a paper trail (persisted within my control), it has minimal overhead (the forced superficial friendliness or attempts of small talk in support chats are deeply disturbing to me), it works on a bad internet connection, it works asynchronously.

This one is frustrating to me as well. After telling the chatbot about your problem and waiting 20 minutes to be connected with a real person, only to have them open with "Hi! How are you today?" and then pause the script for a response is incredibly grating.

They also don't seem to be using any sort of functioning ticketing system or even hot-transfer, because being forced to re-explain the issue 3+ times to different reps on the same chat seems just as common as it was in the phone days.

On top of messages being non-persistent, it seems that chat representatives take a minimum of five minutes per reply. It’s unclear if they’re (1) helping other people simultaneously (2) performing a slow corporate policy (3) multitasking.

It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.

It's very clear that they're assisting multiple people. It would be an incredible waste otherwise, but unfortunately these agencies likely stretch their support agents far too thin.

Oh,they very much are helping multiple people at once.

I worked at a call center with a T-Mobile LOB, at which I had several friends working in their online chat dept.

Support reps and sales reps alike were both required to be on at least 7 open chat windows or face termination.

They could be shadowed at any time by an ops agent, who would ding them for not pasting proper replies (they frowned heavily upon real interactions- going 'off-script'), or having less than the 7 required chat windows.

If these companies could they would nix phone agents entirely, and this is why- one agent becomes 7.

Customer satisfaction? What even is that?

I’ve had a very different experience with email support. It is often clear from the reply that the person didn’t even read my email. I’ll often say, “I’ve already tried x as described in your online help and it gave me the following error: <copy/pasted text of the exact error message>.” Then I’ll get a reply, “You need to try x.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve responded to email customer support with “Did you even read what I wrote? As I said, I already tried that and it did not work.” It’s incredibly frustrating because it just feels like a delaying tactic, and you wait, sometimes another 24 hours (or more), before you get to the actual answer (if it comes at all).

I think what this says is that most customer support is just awful all around.

> Not chat, not a web-only form or ticketing system, just plain old email (on the frontend):

Really! I tried several companies to fill taxes for LLC (foreign owned)(https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/11kkkn2/best...) and good luck finding a way to use email.

Chat is so bad for support of first issues!

It's frustrating how many companies in the UK don't do e-mail support.

I've literally resorted to sending paper mail multiple times.

>It leaves a paper trail

I suspect many companies consider that a bug, not a feature.