Of course, companies rated best for tech support often charge more for their products or they may charge a subscription fee for enhanced customer care so the cost of helping you is baked in, as with Apple’s customer support service, AppleCare, and the Amazon Prime subscription service. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Not surprisingly, cable and mobile service providers are consistently ranked by consumers as providing the worst customer support.ĪT&T, Comcast and Verizon Communications did not respond to requests for comment.Įspecially frustrating when talking to tech support is not being understood because you are trying to communicate with machines or people who have been trained to talk like machines, either for perceived quality control or because they don’t speak English well enough to go off-script. The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service. “Some organizations have even monetized it by intentionally engineering it so you have to wait an hour at least to speak to someone in support, and while you are on hold, you’re hearing messages like, ‘If you’d like premium support, call this number and for a fee, we will get to you immediately.’” “Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service,” Mr. Many organizations are running a cost-per-contact model, which limits the time agents can be on the phone with you, hence the agony of round-robin transfers and continually being placed on hold, said Justin Robbins, who was once a tech support agent himself and now oversees research and editorial at ICMI. Worse, just as you suspected, companies are aware of the torture they are putting you through.Īccording to a survey conducted last year by the industry group International Customer Management Institute, or ICMI, 92 percent of customer service managers said their agents could be more effective and 74 percent said their company procedures prevented agents from providing satisfactory experiences. Getting caught in a tech support loop - waiting on hold, interacting with automated systems, talking to people reading from unhelpful scripts and then finding yourself on hold yet again - is a peculiar kind of aggravation that mental health experts say can provoke rage in even the most mild-mannered person. You shout things into the phone that would appall your mother.Īnd you are not alone. But all that goes out the window when you call tech support. You may consider yourself even-keeled, the kind of person who is unflappable when those around you are losing their cool.
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