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by fivre
3130 days ago
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My experience with doing phone support for applications is that it is excellent if well-augmented, and absolute garbage otherwise. Due to a variety of factors, my previous employer provided about 50-50 phone and email support, often with phone as the first point of contact. That worked because phone calls came in with proper context (essentially providing information about who is calling and information about their account status) and I had tools to guide callers when something wasn't extremely basic: most applications are primarily visually- or textually-rich environments, and verbal descriptions require a high degree shared context on both sides (e.g. you are a competent CCNA contacting Cisco TAC, and both parties share a common verbal language to describe non-verbal tools). Absent that, screen-sharing capability is critical, as otherwise phone support is endless dead air of "I'm looking at things you can't see while you describe things I can't see and have no context for, let's both black box everything and pray for telepathy." My current employer doesn't provide that, so phone support devolves into a push button for customers to say, "this issue is urgent!" while support says "probably, but we can't send you screenshots over the phone, so please go away while we write a response that actually provides useful information--you can remain on the phone if you want, but it's going to just be dead air or us talking you down from panic mode while not actually doing anything to address the problem." |
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I cringe when I have to dial into a regular phone bridge. And as much as possible, I try to keep my landline in non-operable condition, so that support requests come in on a more useful channel.