This is more of a work rant. Iām so TIRED of service tickets that I kind of just want to die. OMG. Does ANYONE else HATE them as much as I do?
Why on earth does a business or organization fucking set up a customer service representative (CSR) to answer phone calls from sometimes-annoyed customers, equipping said CSR with the ability to CREATE A SUPPORT TICKET ONLY. No ability to do anything else to assist with the issue. Not even the ability to transfer calls or provide another phone number or look up the customerās account or anything.
I am relatively new to customer service and every phone call is EXCRUCIATING and Iām not even the CSR.
Iām assuming this is an attempt to keep ātier 2ā from being flooded with complaints? But OMG this makes some customers madder than a hornet. How is that effective customer service?
OMG kill me now. Just fucking kill me. I hate this!!! Fuck!!!
Iām an IT support professional, Iāve been doing this kind of thing for more than 20 years now. Iām what youād call Tier 2 support. CSRs who are able to create tickets, and do it properly, are invaluable.
By doing it properly I mean being able to ask relevant questions, get proper information (especially contact info which is a huge pet peeve of mine), and appropriately route the ticket. But thatās the tricky partā¦ Because in order to ask the right questions you have to know some things. It takes a bit of expertise to both know what questions to ask to clarify the problem, and to understand what the customer is telling you. And if you have multiple groups who provide support, in order to know which group to route the ticket to you need a bit of understanding of what those groups do and what kind of issues they can fix.
Since all of the above requires a bit of knowledge, once a CSR has that knowledge in theory they can potentially offer solutions themselves. If Tier 1 isnāt supposed to fix issues, even very simple ones, or otherwise offer advice that can be awkward.
Thatās a dilemma that my own organization had (not a problem anymore). We had a CIO who was adamant that Tier 1 was supposed to answer phone calls and emails, put a ticket together, and thatās it. No actual support themselves. Which was frustrating that group immensely. Yes, if you make the calls shorter then it means you can handle a larger volume of calls with a smaller group of staff but handcuffing your people is awful for morale and inefficient. If someone needs their password reset and Tier 1 can do it in less than a minute, why should they pass it on to Tier 2 who might not be able to respond in hours (depending on circumstances)? The CSR manager even quit to go to a different organization over that stuff. Eventually the CIO retired and the replacement guy was more understanding. Things work much better now and Tier 1 gets good training and is empowered to handle simple issues themselves. And us Tier 2 folks really appreciate that.
Check out this oldie but goodie, a collection of really awful customer support tickets from āGeorgeā (all real), who was just AWFUL. These were from a Tier 2 guy who decided to share his frustrations with the rest of the world and it is entertaining as heck. This is so old that I used to entertain myself by browsing through this site back when I was still new in my career.
THIS. This is the kind of issue I am talking about! And I donāt get why some organizations set it up this way. The account that is driving me crazy right now has NO ability for Tier 1 to do anything AT ALL but create a ticket. No access to even look at the customerās account or anything. WHY??? If they could help with some small issues, customers would be so much happier overall.
Thanks for the reply. At least someone āgets itā and itās not just me being crazy! I will definitely look at these āGeorgeā tickets!
There are multiple reasons. I still think they are bad, and I think itās wrong, but there are reasons. It keeps calls short, so you can have fewer people doing that work. You donāt have to train the staff very much and you can hire people who are less qualified and pay them less. Basically you hire human answering machines. It is a cost-saving measure.
On the other hand, if you are going to go that route you might as well just have guided support. Have someone fill out a form online with drop-downs and everything must be filled out to submit the ticket. Or have them go through a guided phone tree to gather relevant info. Rather than have a person who is supposed to act like a mindless machine to gather data for a ticket, have an actual machine do it. Putting an employee in that position is demoralizing.
Totally agree. Why not just use an answering machine?! I guess the organization is hoping having a live person answer and provide empathy for the issue while taking the message will help. But demoralizing is right.
I work as a CSR for unemployment. 95% of the time, all I can do is put in a ticket. I then am supposed to shuffle claimants off the phone before they realize their ticket will not be addressed for at leat 4 weeks. I cannot take a claim over the phone (that requires a Specialist). I often feel, as has been posted, that a simple computer program could do my job. I feel every day that rather than helping people, I am a tiny cog in the huge machinery of disincentives designed to get people to stop seeking the benefits they are entitled to.
I understand that most people do not wake up in the morning and shout āYay! I get to go to work today!ā. I feel by doing this job (which Iām very good at) I am on the side of evil.
I work for state government. I donāt work for the unemployment agency for my state, but last year there was a crisis with so many people becoming unemployed due to the pandemic that our state unemployment agency was desperately understaffed and asked people in other agencies to help out. A number of my coworkers took on temporary job assignments to help out.
I heard from many of them the exact same thing youāre saying. They had to take call after call from desperate people that they couldnāt help. It was horrifying. Pretty much every one burned out of that role quickly and stopped helping after a short time. I donāt envy you at all and Iām sorry you have to go through that.
My greatest frustration from the client side of the support table is dealing with Tier 1 staff who donāt have the training to deal with what Iām calling about, but whose inflexible routine requires them to make me jump through useless hoops first before they can escalate. (and/or they wonāt take my word for it that it needs to be escalated if they canāt do the thing I know I need to have done).
e.g. these incidents with NYTEL aka BellAtlantic aka Verizon service in the DSL era:
My complaint about customer service tickets it that sometimes they feel like a black hole where no information can escape.
My personal favourite is getting a ticket created, seven months pass by with no action, then out of the blue I get an email notification that the ticket has been closed because the problem has been fixed (except it hasnāt been). And then I get an email asking me to fill out a survey on customer serviceā¦
I work in software, and from my end, the tickets are an absolute necessity. I know a ton about my specific area, but if I were to answer the phones, Iād be clueless about how to resolve 90% of questions. The front line support can answer lots of those questions about a broad variety of things, and when they get to something they canāt answer, they generally know who should answer it, which means that my time is mostly spent on things that Iām actually an expert on. And everything gets tracked so that we have all the data in the right place and things donāt get dropped. Theyāre different skillsets.
Now, if the problem is that thereās such a huge volume of incoming support requests and the first tier support literally canāt do anything except enter a ticket, the problem is not with tickets; the problem is that the system is totally dysfunctional.
Itās unfortunate that so many organizations treat support as an afterthought or worse, and try to reduce costs by making it inconvenient, but in a well-functioning support organization, tickets are a way to efficiently divide labor and accomplish tasks.
Even more valuable is a Tier I CSR who knows how to not open a ticket because what the customer is demanding is impossible, illegal, or not the organizationās responsibility.
The customer is not always right, and it does everyone a disservice when the CSR punts.
Thanks for sharing this. I was in IT until I joined the Darkside (they had cookies). The tickets I got werenāt that bad but for most of my responses, I used to have to go to the user and get them to explain the problem.
Thatās rough. At my job, earlier this year we worked on unemployment-adjacent calls and it was awful. There was a huge volume of calls at that time and we were temporarily helping. We could only take tickets, and it was going to take days, at least, before the jobless person might get a response. That was when I started hating tickets!!
Another account I work on, our Tier 1 agents can look up accounts and help with some minor issues, then transfer to a specialist as appropriate. I prefer that model.
Iām certain it depends on exactly what type of software you work on, but I disagree here. Customer tickets, especially ones gathered from ordinary end users, are virtually worthless. Even with guidance, end users simply arenāt capable of gathering the info needed to reproduce the problem.
You know what is incredibly valuable? That little button that says āupload crash information?ā when your app or game crashes. You may think itās like a crosswalk button, there only to make you think something is happening, but it really does work at least some of the time. A small snapshot of the crash information is taken and a long time later (weeks or months) it makes it to me. And that one piece of information, a snapshot of an actual failure in the field, is more valuable than even a perfectly written bug report, let alone a bad one.
So click that button. My sanity depends on it. Even if I complain about missing symbols or having to step through assembly, itās still better than the alternative.
I write software development tools, so my users are themselves software developers. Obviously, the quality of bug reports varies dramatically, but all our users are at least theoretically capable of writing a decent bug report. We also have the button, which is sometimes used.
But the tickets on my end arenāt generated by end users directly. They go through support first.
Ahh, yes. Thatās a whole other ball of wax. Sometimes the communication skills of software devs are a bit lacking, but they at least (usually) understand the fundamentals about how to write a proper bug report.
