TL; DR: When someone calls support, resolve the issue first, then point them to resources you think should have helped them solve the issue on their own. Long version: I spent about an hour today trying to resolve a billing issue. Specifically, I needed an actual invoice to explain the large credit card payment we made because we prepay annually. For some reason, you choose not to generate that automatically, and you just provide the customer a line item recording the payment, with no information about what it's for. To get the invoice I needed, I was required to speak to someone in billing support. I first called support and went through the AI gatekeeper. The gatekeeper likes to direct customers back to the website to help themselves, but I'd already been on the website- it's how I got the support phone number- so that step wasn't really necessary, from my perspective. I waited on hold, then spoke to a person who immediately told me to go to the website. I did so, even though I'd already been through those steps, and we reached the same conclusion together: there was no invoice online that provided details. At this point, the phone call was disconnected on your side, so I called back, went through the AI gatekeeper, and sat on hold for 30+ minutes. Fun fact: your AI decided to send me to tech support, not billing support even though I called the number listed on your website as billing support. That meant more time on hold for me as I was transferred. While I sat on hold, I resorted to Twitter. The only response I got from Twitter support was directions to go to the website, which didn't work in my case because, again, I needed to request a custom invoice. After about an hour I finally got a human being who was able to create a custom invoice and send it to me. The problem here, from my point of view, is your support model. When you immediately refer people back to the website to help themselves, you aren't actually listening to what the customer is saying. That means you're not really resolving the issue, at least not without creating a lot of unneeded frustration for the customer. My suggestion is, when people reach out to support, assume that they've already tried self-help. Listen to them. Resolve the issue. Then, provide self-help resources, if applicable. Sometimes things like this get pinned on an individual customer service rep, so I just want to stress- I don't think that's the case here. To me it's a problem with your approach to support. Filtering questions through existing resources makes sense online, but it's not as reasonable offline.
... View more
