Wait, how does that help? Low quality customer support hurts us. Low quality comments also hurt us. That just doubles the hurt for me. It doesn't compensate in any way.
It's like some guy punching me saying "For the Green Team!" and then you come by and punch me saying "For the Yellow Team!". Like, dude, you didn't undo the first punch. I'm now twice-punched. I want to be zero punched.
Unhelpful catch-all responses that don't display a shred of effort or care are the bane of my customer support experiences. Nothing hurts my opinion of a company like being brushed off like a bug.
Providing customer support based on HN comments is the worst possible approach a company can take. Official customer support channels should be enough.
I'm not discouraging people from blogging about experiences like these, it was mostly a complaint about the comments in reply to it. Replying with a story about how well your customer support request went doesn't really help (or add anything) in this case.
If you wanted to start a discussion about a company's level of support, you could create a poll or ask people to post their stories and then analyze/aggregate the responses.
It's not that it was unwarranted on the consumer's part, but rather that the common outcome of support (of no human reply) would have been not noteworthy, quickly forgotten, and probably not resulted in the upthread comment at all.
Instead, the case of having human-staffed support for a low-priced product that happens to have given an unhelpful reply to GP (but likely gave helpful replies to >50% of support cases [because most support questions are user-error]) drives home a negative [rather than null] feeling in the upthread consumer and results in the negative response above. (For avoidance of doubt, GP/consumer did nothing at all wrong then nor now. I'm talking about the incentives a company has to offer support at all for a low priced software product.)
> Complaining on the internet should not be a support channel.
Oh the many times I have written to a company's "Support" forms and never got a response. And then I wrote to them on Twitter (message) and I got my answers in 2h or less...
Unfortunately social media tend to be the escalation point..
I had a really bad experience in the past with Newegg and their lower levels of customer service. At one point I documented and blogged it, but that blog is no longer up unfortunately.
Anyway, the good news is that once I got in touch with someone higher up the chain they were like, "That never should have happened" and worked to make it right. It just took a ton of kicking and screaming to get there, which really wasn't worth it on my part, but in the end, they did the right thing.
One thing I'm seeing more and more is that companies are holding back their lower tier support employees from actually being helpful. For example, have you ever had one of those "Instant Online Chat Support" things help you out? No, they are always so unempowered its not even funny.
This is pretty clearly recency bias. I’m sorry that you had a bad experience when seeking customer support. But let’s be honest, this is deeply exaggerated and you have an axe to grind.
I hated their customer support. I had to call it more than I usually do for a company, and every time, after they fixed the issue, they tried to sell me something. Not a simple little 'no thanks' they tried hard to sell me something. I had to tell them 'no' multiple times on multiple occasions. Take that anecdote for what it's worth.
It's like some guy punching me saying "For the Green Team!" and then you come by and punch me saying "For the Yellow Team!". Like, dude, you didn't undo the first punch. I'm now twice-punched. I want to be zero punched.
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