IT Support Pro Tells Why He Hates Live Chat 228
colinneagle writes "When someone calls into support, we first verify his or her account information. On the phone, this can take seconds. On a chat feature it can take a minute or two because people type slower than they speak. I also find that when people type in a chat they try to make the process go quicker by abbreviating the conversation. This means they might not give me all the information they would have if we were talking on the phone. The more descriptive a customer is about a problem, the easier and faster it will be to solve their issue. But the nature of a chat feature means people will abbreviate their stories to be more efficient, without realizing this just makes it more difficult to solve the problem. I end up asking more questions, which takes longer for the full story to come out. Explaining how to fix a problem can be difficult on the phone, but on a chat feature where I can't see your screen and likely have less information to work with, it can make it impossible to tackle a complex issue. It would be much more efficient for both me and the customer to talk on the phone so I can walk the customer through the steps I am taking."
Welcome to communication (Score:1, Insightful)
Packet size happens.
Is this a journal entry? (Score:4, Insightful)
No seriously, this reads like a random rant than an actual article. What are we here to discuss again?
Chat has its place, but shouldnt be primary (Score:5, Insightful)
I need to preface this by saying that I am a 20 year IT veteran who does phone support for one job, and onsite support for another.
Phone support: Takes a guy 5 minutes to finally get to the point: Internet Explorer is crashing and he thinks its because his cable internet is going down, and he is calling to complain. I have to really listen to this guy and let him get through 5 minutes of bullshit before he gets to the point "Internet Explorer has stopped responding" etc. The rest of the conversation was full of more bullshit, but that isn't relevant.
Chat support: I'm on site migrating a dead computers data into a new computer, and there's this industry specific software that needs to be reinstalled and have the data restored. The website is a fuster cluck of documentation, so I hit the live chat option. The person on the other end was quick, had correct answers, and I had the info I needed to do the migration in short order, and lo and behold, it *worked* the first time.
Now, in both cases you have a very experienced technical person on one end of the line, and in the second case apparently, two. Had my customer been on chat in the second scenario, they'd probably STILL be trying to figure it out. So, it has its places, such as when both parties are literate enough (both computer and English) to have a normal conversation. But for "normal" people who type in "my internet is broke" even though they have to BE online to type that... yeah... welcome to my hell.
Re:The user is saving his time - not yours (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really disagree with your overall point - but I must point out:
The user doesn't have to put up with surly condescending attitude on a chat call.
A person can be a condescending jerk just as easily over chat as on the telephone.
The user doesn't have to put up with poor language skills or a heavy accent, or a shitty phone connection.
Yes, yes they do. I've had a live support chat with a tech who barely understood English. And I've had live support chat sessions die for no apparent reason.
The user doesn't have to give out a telephone number, and be monitored and recorded for quality control purposes.
A text chat can be monitored and/or recorded quite easily, and it can be easily tied to an IP address.
Depends heavily on user type (Score:5, Insightful)
A technically-savvy (eg.: Bob McHacker) user should be a lot easier to communicate with via chat than a non-technical user (eg.: Joe Sixpack).
To start with, expert users typically type almost as fast as they speak (seriously: if any of you out there work in IT for a living and cannot touch-type, it is an investment well worth it). As others have pointed out above, both user and helper can multitask; and many computer tasks end up involving huge amounts of staring at a progress bar. You can copy&paste error messages and links back and forth. You can actually think your answers through while you type them, and not waste anyone's time with errr, uhh, yeah, and other "are you alive/i am alive" on-the-phone protocol overhead.
In TFA, there is no coherent explanation of the type of support / users that this "Pro" is addressing. The article is less than a screenful of general ranting against not having the undivided attention of a user. Nothing to see here, move along.
I dislike both... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm one of those stereotype geeks who doesn't like talking to people, outside a small circle of friends (and I find talking to them stressful at times). I'd rather just e-mail support with details and get an answer "whenever". If they need more information, they can ask for it.
I do not need everything in my life to happen *now*. I am perfectly content for things to take a little time, so long as no-one is taking the piss. Which is just as well, because IT at work will get round to dealing with your problem whenever they feel like it and you can't actually phone them anyway, you have to submit support tickets.
Re:IT Pro =! working via chat desk (Score:3, Insightful)
The word "professional" just as much applies to a 1st level helpdesk tech just as much as it applies to anyone in the higher tiers. Perhaps you would like to consult a dictionary?
Not sure why you feel like you need to be a condescending and demeaning asshole about it.
Opposite experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this has to do with the type of customers you get on the other side of the line (ours might know more).
Love it (Score:4, Insightful)
Live chat support is one of the best things ever invented. When you type, I can't hear your accent, which removes a huge barrier to communication for most phone support call centre's i've had to deal with. And I can type faster than I can speak (which is slowly for the benefit of the english-is-not-my-first-language person on the other end of the line). And after i've typed the person on the other end can take their time to digest what i've written, and I can look back over what i've written and amend anything I might have missed, and they can cut & pasted into their own internal knowledgebase.
As for the submitter, I have these questions:
. In what stupid world is account verification information not submitted via a web form before the chat session is initiated? Sure, there might be some people who don't have the required information and it has to be done in the chat session itself, but that should be a rare exception.
. As above, why isn't a summary of the problem also provided via web form before the chat session begins? Most chat support web site's i've seen make you enter a description of your problem, and then offer a few possible resolutions based on a keyword search, alongside the "begin chat now" button, which is a huge timesaver for when people haven't checked the FAQ's first.
. If seeing the users screen is a requirement to do your job, then there is _plenty_ of software available to fill that need. Is something like gotomeeting or teamviewer really out of the question? (i'd never let a remote tech that I didn't know into _my_ screen, but that's not the point :)
Re:Opposite experience (Score:5, Insightful)
It also seems like some of the problems described are a result of a badly designed support-chat system, or a properly designed one with bad policies in place, attempting to shoehorn the phone-based workflow into a rather different environment.
Sure, if I call you, you need to confirm some sort of account/service tag/serial number/customer ID/something because I might be calling you from just about any phone number and automated phone mechanisms are a pretty painful way of entering anything nontrivial. But if I'm starting a text chat over the internet, you can just have a form that requests that information before setting up the chat(and hey, why not send me directly to the right subsection of your support apparatus based on the answers I provide, just for fun?) and then not waste everybody's time by having me re-type it unless there is some specific point of confusion/uncertainty/disagreement with the database.
Similarly, 'I can't see your screen' is one of those problems that can be solved by technology... Your internet chat system doesn't have a way for me to upload screenshots, diagnostic logs, etc. to your support people why exactly? Yeah, you can't do that in phone support, so people make do; but you could do better in chat support.
Obviously, none of this is the poor support guy's fault, it isn't his system; but a chat-support system that is more painful than a phone support system, despite vastly greater ancillary capabilities, is just plain broken.
Re:Opposite experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opposite experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opposite experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Easier to deal with foreign CSRs (Score:4, Insightful)
I also found it funny, because my assistance by chat was ALWAYS several times better than phone support. Try for example dictate your full name or an email address by telephone.
I've found that it's also a lot easier to deal with foreign CSRs via chat than it is via phone. I think most Indians are better at reading/writing English than in speaking. Also, there is little concern over trying to understand each other's accents.
Definitely a big fan of the "live chat".
Re:Opposite experience (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think that the login system would eliminate the initial exchange of information, but in my experience with tech support that's rarely the case. Put in my name, my product info, a brief summary of the problem, and invariably it's "Hello, my name is Mary. How can I help you today?" Well, "Mary", you could help me by reading the information I just took five minutes to look up and type into the login page before I got here.