[Edited 2020-08-26 to correct lots of spelling mistakes]
You know how it works.
You purchased a product or service…you paid good money for it. Now, it either doesn’t work as advertised or it works and then is corrupted during a manditory update. So, you go to the web-site for the product and you try to find out how to get support.
First, when you find the support page, you are presented with a ridiculous attempt to have you find your solution from a poorly categorized list of random problems others have reported. And the solutions aren’t even provided by the company, but have been outsourced to their customer community. And this drivel is stored in what they comedically call a Knowledgebase.
You groan and start ploughing through the most likely results from the search only to find that each article is for a different model, a different version, or is for a problem that is completely unrelated to the one you are experiencing. In short, nothing of value is produced after an hour long dredging of the dross that their search engine comes up with.
So then, you look for options for contacting a live “someone” in support. You click on the contact us link and, surprise surprise, you end up back at the same useless knowledge base you just slogged through for the past hour. You click the contact link again and end up in the sales contact area where someone is just waiting to hear from you…but unfortunately, they don’t deal with support issues, so go directly back to “website Jail” and do not pass “Go”. Back to the support page and eventually, searching really carefully, you find, in a very light grey 8 point font on a white background, a link that says “start a web chat” or call this 800 number.
Wishing to avoid the eons long wait on the telephone, you click on the “web-chat button”. It does absolutely nothing….no message to say that a chat session will be starting shortly…no message to say that chat is available only between daylight hours (on the dark side of Pluto)…no message to say that your browser isn’t supported by their chat sessions…nothing! So, with an irritated sigh, you try another browser, just to be sure that the problem isn’t your browser. True to form, none of the browsers you try will bring up the elusive chat support function.
So, you have now invested about two hours trying to get support for a product that you are paying dearly for on a subscription basis and are no further ahead than you were in the first place … except now … you are so irritated that the systolic part of your blood pressure is approaching four digits. This is when you call the dreaded help line sick with the certainty that you will be 25th in line with an estimated wait time of 3.5 millennia.
Yet you dial, because what other option do you have? You can’t use the piece of garbage you have paid so dearly for. You get through immediately to a telephone response tree. It spends 10 minutes telling you that everything you could ever want to know about their wonderful product is available on their website. You get to hear, in detail, about all of the benefits of their wonderful website.
Then it presents the options. Press 1 to hear about how our company is wonderful. Press 2 to hear a long treatise on how we selected the music for our telephone tree background. Press…well, you get the idea. The options are presented in reverse order of relevance to any customer.
Finally, you get to the option that is supposed to provide you with support for your product only to find out you have to type in the 80 character serial number for your product, in upper and lower case, including special characters. No instructions about where to find the serial number. but you google it and find that the serial number is conveniently located inside the cover on the bottom of the product (which cannot be turned over without damaging it and its surroundings). So now, you start typing in the product number and after the first 50 characters or so, you make a mistake. The phone system has a minor haemorrhage and tells you it cannot proceed because you are a bad person. And the system now hangs up on you. Back to dialling…your face is glowing red now and you have a nose bleed.
Eventually, you get through to a customer service agent and are told that, for quality purposes, the call will be recorded. Apparently, everything up to this point has been pure quality and didn’t need recording. So you get to speak to an agent who can’t understand why you are frustrated, but who is very sorry for the inconvenience you may have experienced. The line is poor, the agent has a strong accent and they speak at a volume that would require an amplifier to hear, but you are speaking to a live person…so…great!
You can now begin to detail your problem. But WAIT! Before you can do that, they NEED to know who you are. They can’t be giving this “Quality” support to just anyone (or they might be subject to charges under the Geneva convention against cruelty to humanity). No, they need YOUR information. They want to know which product you have (apparently the serial number you keyed in was for nothing because it doesn’t identify your product to the support agent). They want to know your name, your phone number, your credit card number, the number of times you have had a bowel movement in the past three days…that sort of thing. You are now 15 minutes into the discussion and have not spoken a word about the problem you are experiencing with the product you paid big money for.
You tell them that you had a problem with your product, but that now, the biggest problem is that their support processes have caused you to burst a blood vessel in your brain. They tell you that each ticket can only deal with one problem. They then tell you that they don’t handle health problems and that they will be closing your ticket. They thank you for your patronage and they hang up.
You experience an anneurysm and die. Your soul hangs over your dead body and in the background you hear the refrain:
Somehow, somewhere, someone had the idea that selling a product for a profit was not good enough any more. Profits now have to be obscene and that means cutting corners on development and reducing support costs by pushing customers as far away as possible when problems arise. There is no longer any tip-of-the-hat to the old adage that the “Customer is always right” or “Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money refunded”. Many corporations, now-a-days, seem to feel that they haven’t done their jobs unless they have screwed over all of their customers. I am tired of this foolishness. I intend to vote with my money.
And you agree. Lets all stop putting up with this crap.
Gourken's Brain Dump (more of a trickle actually) 