I have a vague memory of a couple of different “styles” of customer service over the last 25 years or so… Wait… I’m not wording this well…
Let me try this: my impression is that sometime in the early-ish dot.com era, maybe around 2014 or so(?), corporations gradually (but not that gradually) changed from phone calls to emails for customer service.
I figured back then the corps didn’t want to pay for CSRs (Customer Service Representatives) to man mass phone banks live, in real time. Instead they thought it fantastic to have it done by email so they can wait and get to it when they feel like it.
But then, maybe 2012 - 2015 (total guess) it all started shifting back to phone-only customer service with email CS going by the wayside.
I’m sure I don’t have the years close to correct but my main point is to mention the phenomenon, see if anyone else has noticed it, and see who wants to bitch about companies that make zero email addresses available.
It’s like, at first they thought “how can we give even worse customer service and save big money?” So they abandoned the phones. THEN 10 years later they thought “We aren’t giving shitty enough service. How can we make it worse AND save even more money!” and they realized that if they do it by email that people could and would ask detailed questions that took somebody a long time to answer.
They saw that if they went back to phone service they can put everyone in a endless, shitty, phone tree with 4 different levels of CSR knowledge/experience and the first three levels can’t do anything but read PDF’s to you that you’ve already read. Where you used to need only 20 minutes to write an email, you now needed 3 hours to suffer through endless on-hold music, disconnections, and transfers (each starting over from the beginning.)
A few years ago I was trying to cut expenses, and since I barely watched cable TV anymore and hadn’t used my landline in years, I decided I wanted to drop the TV and landline services from my Comcast subscription and just keep the internet plan.
When I tried to do that on the website, it referred me to a chatbot. The chatbot said it couldn’t help me and I needed to call. When I called, the AI receptionist said it couldn’t help me and I needed to talk to a human. Instead of connecting me to a human, it (at various times of day over the course of several days) inevitably said that all human operators were unavailable and I’d need to go on the website.
I wound up having to go on the Comcast subreddit and post a gripe thread for an actual human employee to contact me so I could change my plan.
I used to work at a cable company (but it was bought by a bigger one and they laid me off, which worked out nicely for me so no hard feelings). For discussing billing issues, you have to verify that you are the account holder. This is done via a combination of personal information and a passphrase or PIN. You do not want to send this information via inherently insecure email.
General rule of thumb:
Customer service is inversely useful depending on the size of the company. That is to say, the larger the corporation is, the more obstacles that will be placed in one’s way in order to reach a person with any knowledge that can be of help and actually do something.
Chat bots have never helped anyone.
Thank monopolies & near monopolies. It won’t get any better. All we can do is find the best amongst the worst to deal with . . .and keep complaining.
Phone service came back (besides the not sending personal info via highly insecure email) because people thought “phone service means better quality service”. I think most people are disabused of that now.
I think the next trend is “secure” messaging provided through a company’s website. So you log into their website, and chat with an AI agent. If the AI agent can’t resolve the issue, the chat gets forwarded to a human agent, who can read everything up to that point. So potentially less repetition by customer.
And I think the next, next trend will be to have same thing, except a voiced AI agent do it over the phone. I’m sure it’s already done, but the voicing part is enough more expensive that many companies aren’t doing it yet.
I’d say it’s inversely useful depending on the number of customers. Which is highly correlated to size of the company, but large companies with few customers are very good at customer service, since each customer is very valuable. And small companies with large numbers of customers will treat them terribly.
Eh, chat bots can do some things. For example, if you have some sort of service (electric/gas utility, cable TV, internet provider, etc) and you need to start or stop your service, or you are moving, the chat bot can usually handle those types of things pretty well and you don’t need to speak to an actual customer service rep.
On the other hand, if you have an issue that you know the chat bot can’t handle, it can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming to actually reach a live person.
The latest one I had to deal with had the chat bot giving me a list of categories and choosing from one of them. I told the chat bot that my issue wasn’t covered by any of those categories and I needed to speak to a representative. The chat bot said it was happy to connect me to a representative and all it needed was for me to choose from its list of categories so it could connect me. Again, I told it that my issue wasn’t in any of its categories, and we got stuck in this endless loop of the chat bot asking me for a category and me telling it over and over that none of its categories applied and I needed to speak to a real person. I finally just picked one and when I finally reached a live person they needed to transfer me to someone else since they were in the wrong department for my issue. Once I got the issue resolved, I told them how frustrating their system was and that their chat bot needed a “none of the above” category.
But hey, with all of the money these companies are saving by not paying anyone’s salaries for customer service, at least they will pass the savings on to us with lower prices for their products and services, right? (sorry, excessive sarcasm alert there)
Perhaps I’m overly optimistic/naive, but the utility of generic search mechanisms has gone up significantly with AI. I expect chatbots will eventually do a similarly better job of accessing whatever information a customer service person would need (have you ever seen the giant rows of binders they often work from?).
I used to manage technical support and customer service operations during the advent of whiz-bang phone switches that allowed us to implement decision tree recordings during wait times and I know how crushingly frustrating that can be when the chances of your specific question being answered is low. But it’s better now, way better, and for questions that actually have answers (as opposed to policy overides and other judgement calls), AI is probably going to be better than a human.
Email can be problematic for technical service since there is typically a long delay between replies. A typical customer support interaction will have a lot of back and forth to narrow down the issue and try various solutions. If your fridge isn’t working, you probably want it fixed pretty quickly rather than having lots of back and forth over several days. Instead, methods like phone and chat allow immediate back and forth communication to get the issue resolved quickly.
An additional factor is that email to companies are frequently ignored. Many people have sent questions or requests to an address like info@company.com and never gotten a response. If I’m having an issue, I don’t want to ask for help to an email address and then spend days wondering if anyone is reading it or if it went into a black hole. Using phone or chat means I know that I have someone working on the problem with me.
I’d guess it’s the viability of AI “assistants”. I called a company the other day and got what was either an AI bot, or an extremely tedious man who spoke in odd cadences.
So the notion is that we all wait several more years, or however long it takes for AI/chat bot development gets up to snuff, while in the meantime we’re stuck dealing with ill trained & inexperienced customer reps (if/when we can reach them) to solve what can often be simple issues that require nothing more than 2 cents worth of common sense and access to someone that actually knows what’s going on and the ability to make required changes.
Chat bots don’t replace humans who are capable of placing issues into proper context and making the correct decision to rectify such. The use of chat bots are in place to further line the pockets of those that created the problems in the first place that customers are attempting to overcome.
I can’t say I noticed a change between phone and email and back, it’s always been rather company-specific. I will say that general support@companyname or customerservice@companyname etc. email addresses have mostly been replaced by web form submissions. Those give the company more control in routing the messages to the right people internally, while also limiting message length and the potential for spam. Often you’ll get a reply email from a specific person in the customer service department, so you don’t have to go through the website again. Do you still consider that Email support? What if they make you sign in to your user account and the form submission creates a ticket that can be tracked on the website? That system may or may not spawn an email that you can reply to directly (usually they have some weird code in the subject line or elsewhere in the email that you’re instructed not to remove). More likely, if you get any email at all it’s one that just tells you that “you have a new message in your support portal, please log in to the website to view it.”
Agreed, but let’s not forget that we’ve had a hand in bringing about this situation. When consumers are offered lower prices they (we) go for them, even when it means the vendor cut their post-sale service to meet the competition (who cut their’s first). Even very determined vendors like Nordstroms eventually get sucked into this death spiral.
The cost of well-trained and competent labor is a thing. Making products that require less support is a great goal, but apparently capitalism has a greedy answer to that as well. Look at Toyota, their products are considered to be among the most reliable on the market, but their service network is famous for being abusive.
If only profit was measured by “acting in the best interests of people.”
I absolutely loathe customer service via chat. It’s always apparent that the person on the other end (assuming there is a person on the other end) is multi-tasking (usually poorly), barely reading or skimming what I wrote, inevitably misunderstanding or ignoring the question, then posting the closest auto-response they have—which never answers the question.
Email isn’t much better, and for that you get to wait a day or two between responses.
My preference is a customer service rep that actually picks up the phone, or failing that, has an automated system that offers to call me back in a timely fashion instead of waiting on hold.
I have an untestable theory that the shift reflects people actually using email–that is, we were used to picking up the phone, so they went to email; then we got used to using email, so they wanted to move away from that. There’s a term “sludge” in the customer service business. It means the amount of friction–difficulty–that’s inserted into the process. And it’s not accidental. They WANT you go to away, since it costs them $ to pay the poor sap in the Philippines to answer the phone. The fact that this may cost them a customer doesn’t seem to factor in, oddly enough.
The perfect example of sludge is how easy it is to sign up for things and how hard it is to cancel them. Newspapers are particularly bad about this–maybe not as bad as sketchy services, but given that they’re allegedly real businesses and (also allegedly) in the truth business, it’s appalling how bad it is.
The Biden administration passed a law saying it had to be as easy to cancel as to sign up; no surprise, the Administration That Shall Not Be Named seems to have killed that.