[webignition]

In my experience, the usefulness of live chat features varies wildly.

If the live chat service connects me to a human who is able to resolve my query in a timely manner, I'll take that any day.

Phoning a large company can result in waiting in a call queue for a long time. My attention is on the phone call instead of anything else. A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.

Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.

A live chat service that does not provide an easy means of interacting with a human and which instead easily allows getting stuck in a bot loop is a great example of poor customer service and, for me, a great way of quickly finding out who to not do business with.

That said, a poor live chat service for a business that I absolutely have to contact (most recently when terminating internet service after moving house) is an exercise in frustration and annoyance that is hard to replicate in any other manner.

[rkho]

> A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.

Some live chat implementations have taken the liberty of requiring an input from your end every X minutes, otherwise the chat terminates. Support agents have literally told me "please wait a while while I look into this" followed by "are we still connected?" just a few minutes later.

[Sakos]

I hate this so much. I get the idea, but it's infuriating if I have to repeat the whole process just because I was distracted for 5 minutes.

[FrontierPsych]

I know what you mean.

However, you can't expect a company to tie up a support person for 48 hours on their screen and you get back to them 2 days later, that is ridiculous.

Where is that line drawn that is not too short and not too long? I don't know, but there has to be a line.

I do think it is my responsibility to continually check my screen to see if there's been an answer to my last message. There are two sides and both must be responsible actors. I think 5 minutes is plenty of time, for example. As the saying goes, "You snooze, you lose."

And it has happened to me and everyone else, of course. BUT, and here is the cool thing - when I get back on the chat, I just say that I was chatting and got distracted...but then the tech support person can go review the notes and quickly get up to speed on the conversation.

I love chat.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> Where is that line drawn that is not too short and not too long?

48 hours seems reasonable. Because that support person isn't tied up, they're answering other chats until you reply.

Otherwise, at least several times the time it took the agent to meaningfully respond.

[thesuitonym]

I find that if you just reply after their message, the chat status goes to "waiting on agent", so you don't get disconnected while they look.

[anon56]

Before signing up to a new service, I tend to contact their support first to assess how difficult it is to contact them.

If I have to wait for an hour to get support, or navigate through some maze to reach them, or find it difficult to attempt to terminate my contract, I'll go with someone else.

When I really need help or something is wrong, that's not when I want to find out that it is almost impossible to reach them.

[akiselev]

Note to self: Use ChatGPT to immediately respond to any support request that aren't from existing users so that potential customers have to perform the Turing test.

Plot twist: the chat bot is also running the Turing test. If the potential customer passes, they can sign up. Otherwise, “Contact us for pricing” and I don’t mean it as an anti-bot feature…

[JaimeThompson]

Why would you exclude so many modern MBAs from using chat? :)

[luckylion]

> Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.

I've had the same experience, and I don't understand why. In both cases, someone needs to read what you write and reply to it with a message. Why can't the just treat email just like live chat?

I dislike live chat because it forces me to wait for their responses (I'm looking at you, Amazon, minutes to type 10 words?) and dedicate time to it instead of putting all the information into an email and sending it and communicating asynchronously.

[usrbinbash]

Exactly. Good chat implementations are great; meaningful automated information, fast handover to human operators while also providing them with the relevant information, and all that in the comfort of my browser window is a great experience.

Being stuck in a loop against what's essentially a buggy ELIZA-Clone however, or a system that somehow is incapable of authenticating me even though I've logged into my account on their website, is not.

[jimbob45]

Are they better than a well-stocked FAQ with a search function?

[logicalmonster]

A lot of the people on HN might be very willing and able to search a FAQ to try and answer their own questions.

But you would not believe how many average people refuse to spend even 10 seconds trying to answer own question and insist on reaching out to a human even when the answer is very obviously readily available. Sometimes this makes sense; there's some scams out there and at least speaking to a native English-speaking person is reassuring when it comes to who you trust your money with. But sometimes some people are just miserable and want to annoy others.

[eitland]

> "well-stocked FAQ"

Do you have examples?

When I think of FAQs, IIRC almost all the time it seems like they wrote it before release and never upgraded it with actual questions.

[DiggyJohnson]

NearlyFreeSpeech has an incredible FAQ: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq

[dazc]

From the other side of the fence - you can base your FAQs on actual questions (to the point of highlighting and bolding the most common) only to keep getting a significant amount of requests with that exact same question multiple times a day.

[eitland]

Absolutely.

But in most cases I think it is both: FAQ isn't updated/relevant && people don't check it.

[jaclaz]

I can confirm that - at least in my experience - FAQ's are pre-made (and never or rarely updated), when a new service/site/whatever starts, it is logically nonsense that there is even one FAQ.

In theory everything should be clear from the info/documentation/manual, and when it is not so (as it often happens) and something is actually frequently asked, not only an entry in the FAQ list should be added (together with its FGA[0]) but the sheer fact that it is frequently asked should mean that the topic is not clear enough in the info/docs/etc and these should also actually be corrected/updated.

As a "disciplined" user (who actually did read both the FAQ's and the documentation) when you (manage to) contact (via mail/chat or phone) the assistance with a question/doubt there are usually three possibilities:

1) the assistant knows less than you on the topic and cannot answer properly

2) the assistant is competent and manages to answer your question, though with some difficulty (you made an original question)

3) the assistant is competent and answers your question easily because it has already been answered by him/her tens or hundreds of times (your question was not so original but never made it to the published FAQ's)

#3 is the clear sign of a failure in the way FAQ's are managed.

[0] http://jdebp.info/FGA/fga-not-faq.html

[BeFlatXIII]

> Acronym for "frequently asked questions"; a list of answers to frequently asked questions that can be presented to a community (be it a forum, Usenet newsgroup, or software user base) so that the same questions need not be asked over and over again. In the entire history of their use, not one has ever been used for its intended purpose.

From the BonqQuest glossary https://www.jerkcity.com/glossary.html

[satvikpendem]

What the chat should have is something like a chat interface that exposes the FAQ via question and answering, through natural language processing, basically like ChatGPT but it doesn't need to be that advanced.

If the bot can't find the answer, connect to a human. That way, the company's support burden is decreased while still being able to talk to a human if needed.

[nathias]

This could be an email, but of course the business doesn't want this as it would create a record of interaction. Whenever I had to use live chat it was a tactic to wear you down.

[NeoTar]

A decent amount of the time I've been asked at the end of a live-chat if I would like a transcript emailed to me.

[luckylion]

I just now chatted with Amazon, and not only do they not send (or ask to send) a transcript, they even clear the chat once the agent has left so you can't even save it yourself.

I can't imagine any other reason but "we don't want the customer to be able to have a record".

[nathias]

in my case it was very much just a dark pattern used by a local ISP (they also removed all possible email contacts)

[badwolf]

These are almost always saved by the business/chat app.