Recently, I had the misfortune of dealing with a certain, “build your own website” company.
It struck me during my fourth online chat that this is the reality of Tech Support going forward.
Without getting into details in terms of exactly what the issue was, I was in some kind of loop where the tech support team (or rather bots) were insisting that I needed to do something that I was unable to do and they kept insisting that I needed to do it. Unfortunately, the system that they were asking me to do would not allow it, so I was trapped in a limbo of how do I solve this problem.
While I am waiting for my escalation case to resolve, I thought I would write a blog post because now I have an clearer understanding of exactly what tech support has become. What I am talking about, is the fact that any tech support issue that anyone has with any relatively large service, in essence, has to go through the first two to three steps of bot/AI support. Now that is nothing new and I am sure whoever is reading this will understand they have probably dealt with an AI bot with some text support issue. What I am focusing on is rather the fact that beyond level one and two, where you are assaulted with general solutions to common problems there is little to nothing in terms of support.
That is to say, large companies now seem, at leaset to me, spend nothing on actually solving any unique or complex issues that their customers have in order to improve the overall system. Which as a result leaves us with is a system that works well for 8 out of 10 clients and effectively abandons the remaining two in hopes they will just go away quietly.
Ultimately, if those two clients are assuming (and why would the not) that the company that they are spending their money with wants their business. Then I think they might be wrong.
For now it seems that it is more effort for a company to support those clients who are having a rare issue and endeavouring to help improve their overall business, their service, their tutorials, their workflows, and their procedures by addressing said issue than it is to abandon that customer in favour of another “better fit” customer. If that company has a group that is happily paying for its service and does not have any particular system issues then, in essence, the outliers, clients who want to use that company’s services but need additional support and care, represent potentially too much effort for the company to invest in.
I have more of the old school belief that companies in general want to make every customer happy, ultimately to leave a good and positive review, to spread the word about that company going forward. But that mentality is potentially entrenched in an old way of doing business. Now it seems that business is the law of majorities, not the minorities
Ultimately what I am saying, is I feel that the value of us as clients to some of these companies is only truely measured in how we match “their” system. For those of us that don’t, we are not worth the effort to try and make happy by resolving our issues. Ideally by talking to a human who can sympathise and navigate their own business’s various levels of procedures to finally get us a resolution for stop us from continuing to bang our heads against a wall.
The solution is obvious, move to a different service, but wait what if even there I am met with the same wall of tutorials, guides & bots all to dissuade me from using that service…
