[MonkeyClub]

> My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot.

Tier 1 is of course script-based, it's simply an efficient approach to troubleshooting without forgetting any angles.

The issue is when the tier 1 agent is on three or four support chats at once, or when they have KPIs for average email/chat/call handling time, going over which docks their pay.

Multiple concurrent interactions are particularly bad, and there's little opportunity to do anything more than just go through rote script steps, and resolve or escalate quickly before moving to the next one. The end result usually is that the customer gets subpar support without any actual human dimension, and the agent somes to preemptively hate the customer.

[thrower123]

Yes. Battery-cage poultry farms are about as humane as most outsourced call centers. It's not uncommon to have support desks trying to deal with 500+ requests a day with just a single handful of agents. The agents have KPIs, the outsourcing company that they work for has brutal and rigorously enforced contractual SLAs to the first-party company that they are providing service to.

It's a very dark and depressing sector to build software for.