Where’s the Customer Support?
Monday
Jul 6, 2009
In this day and age of lightning-fast email communication and instant messaging, you would expect companies to be able to provide fast customer service, too. Take for instance your telephone company, or your electricity distributor, or your cable TV company. Most of these utilities usually have a 24-hour helpdesk. This means I can call them up in the middle of the night when my water runs out while rinsing my hair, and someone would tell me when the water service would be back up.
Sadly, it’s not the case with most online companies these days.
Take for instance Skype. I’ve been a subscriber to their Unlimited World package for some time now. For only $12 or so, you get unlimited calling to the US, Canada, UK, Australia and other countries, and you also get three incoming numbers (from any country of your choice) with the package. Due to paypal issues, my account lapsed this month and I’ve had to renew manually. With the renewal, I thought my incoming numbers would be restored, but alas, I am now being charged individually for each number ($12 per three months each).
I tried looking for a way to get in touch with Skype, but apparently they don’t have online chat support. No email support. No telephone support. If you had an issue, you had to check their online help FAQ first, then submit your question if the solution is not found there.
And they only responded after about four days from my original inquiry. The response was less-than-satisfactory, so I replied with a follow-up question. To date, I have yet to receive a response.
Same goes with Twitter. I had problems logging in after I changed my password. As I was desperate to just get into my account, I tried to reach them. But similar to Skype, all one could do was read or search through their FAQ. They don’t even have an internal customer support desk. All inquiries are answered by “people powered customer service.”
No email support. No chat support. No 1-800 number to call when something screws up.
If you wanted more help on Twitter, you are asked to check the forums. I think people are taking the concept of community support too far. Sometimes you need action from someone from within a company. What if they need to change something on the database? What if money is involved? The community cannot always help you with that!
Where is the customer support?
I understand these are big companies, with millions and millions of users. Maintaining a customer support workforce would probably cost a bundle. But if you’re profiting from these millions of users (either from subscriptions, advertisements, or any other business model), then doesn’t it make sense to at least invest a little money in customer support? At least this could be the last line of defense for screw-ups. People can check the FAQs first, then community forums, and then if all else fails, call a 1-800 number, or chat online.
If you want to save on costs, why not outsource to less-expensive countries like India and the Philippines (like HP, Paypal, Dell, and a ton of others do)?
I have another idea: why not pay the community for support? For any web app or online service, there are a lot of expert or power users who are already providing help to regular users. Why not compensate these people by paying a small fee for every unique question satisfactorily answered, like how Mahalo Answers does it. This could potentially improve the quality of community support.
Or why not hire power users to accept support inquiries? Expert users are sometimes more knowledgeable about online services than paid customer service staff. But you should give these people more power than just answer inquiries. How about changing settings, or checking a user’s account from within the user database?
My point here is that companies and consumers both benefit from good customer support. It’s the least a service provider can do to make users feel that you care.
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