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by xnorswap 1286 days ago
I recently had an excellent experience with live chat.

My logitech mouse1 button started doing that thing where it momentarily unclicks while dragging. If you're a heavy mouse user you've probably experienced it and how frustrating it is.

In this case, the mouse wasn't cheap and it was only 6 months or so old when this happened.

The automatic Amazon process told me to go to Logitech about it, so I did. The obviously automated chat bot was actually helpful (as long as you understood it was automatic), although it had a bug where it asked for a TOTP code but if you entered it into the chat box instead of pressing a "totp" button to enter it, it would say it doesn't understand and restart the whole long process.

Okay, so that's a frustratingly bad chat bot, but once I had realised what had happened I typed AGENT to get an agent and the live customer service agent was incredibly helpful. They understood my frustration with dealing with the automatic process and that it had gone wrong. They understood my complaint with the product. They were helpful in informing me that yes, the mouse was covered by warranty and that they could replace it if I could get a "notice to refuse service" from Amazon.

This gave then me what I needed to go back to the amazon process to get them to accept it as a return by saying I had spoken to Logitech and that Amazon needed to replace or refuse service.

Between the two chat boxes, the logitech one, despite being a more buggy experience, was far more helpful once I got to a person.

On the other hand, the amazon experience was miserable. They asked me if I wanted a QR code or a printed return label. I said, "Can I do both?" and they answered "Yes".

They then waited. A minute or so later I realised they were waiting for a prompt and said, "Okay, send me both please" and they said, "You have to pick one, QR code or printed label".

I don't know with Amazon if I was speaking to a human or not. This is very frustrating compared to the Logitech experience where I went from what was obviously an automatic process to obviously a human.

Overall, this was probably quicker and easier than had I tried to pick up a phone. Crucially though it still hinged on having a human in the loop who was very helpful.

1 comments

So, you went to the Amazon live chat. They sent you to Logitech. You chatted with their bot and had to "restart the whole long process" because of a bug.

Then you got connected to a human who asked you for a confirmation from Amazon. You went back to Amazon and asked them for a return, again.

You had a "miserable" experience with the process, there, but in the end got your return label.

Yeah, really sounds like an excellent experience.

Indeed it was, because I still got everything sorted in around the same time than I'd be on hold if I were to phone for example my broadband provider.
The issue is that (probably) your broadband provider support/reply times are terrible (on the phone) so you appreciate the (convoluted/complex) experience via chat with Logitech and Amazon as "quite good compared to ...", since every company for this or that reason has lowered down to almost non-existant the level of assistance the few times that it is bearable and somehow it leads to a solution, it appears as (relatively) good.