[lupusreal]

Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.

Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.

[duxup]

I’ve worked in tech support at all levels. At most companies it doesn’t matter what customer service is happy or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given. Customer support as an organization’s opinion isn’t generally valued at most companies.

Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”

[rickdeckard]

That's also my experience.

That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.

Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.

Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...

[wat10000]

The cost of providing customer support is clear and easy to measure, while the benefit is nebulous. This leads to incentive structures centered around controlling costs. That means rewards for handling more calls, and thus punishment for taking too long on a call regardless of the merits. In such an environment, it is inevitable that the reps will care about their call times instead of the customer. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.