[Sohcahtoa82]

Three things are true:

1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.

2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.

3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.

The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.

My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.

I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?

[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.

[gspencley]

The word "need" is loaded and almost seems to be besides the point to me.

Your father-in-law wants to talk a human rather than self-serve. What's the problem with that? Honest question. The fact that he can self-serve is an undisputed fact. But why should he be expected to?

It might be more expensive for companies to offer the level of service that a lot of customers are asking for. If they want to offer that level of service they might have to raise their prices. If people want to pay those prices in order to get that level of service then who cares?

At thbe end of the day, a company is selling its products to people. And people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and have all sorts of varied preferences.

There are people out there who do not want to own a smart phone. Who don't want to have to study a web page. They paid for something, they want it to "just work" and when it doesn't they want the burden of fixing it to be on the company they are giving their money to.

If a company doesn't want to offer that level of service, they don't have to. But they should expect to lose a certain demographic as a result. I don't think the chief complaint is that self-service options exist but that industries in general tend to chase trends. AI support can keep costs down for a company, great. But the trade-off for that is that there are people willing to pay more for human support and they often find themselves without options because everything always seems to be "all or nothing" with trends in business.

[Telaneo]

> My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.

I've had the same thing happen with my grandma. 'You know you can do X online [on a website she already uses for some other reasons]? - I don't want to do it that way.' If I start probing for an answer, she doesn't respond with anything tangible (she does in other cases, so it's not like she's incapable of explaining the problem at hand).

The only thing I can conclude with is that they either A.) want to do it the way it's always been done (applicable in some cases), or 2.) They want to do it the hard way. They somehow don't care that it takes 7 times the time and effort to do it whatever way they've figured out. Never mind that they're paying double the insurance rate they need to. They're fine with that. They're not fine with switching, since that will introduce change.

There's one case that sticks out in my mind that really was like this. I think it's a close relative of a whole family problems in IT along the lines of 'user has a 27 step process to convert a .docx to a PDF, which involves a printer, a scanner, a website, and probably more, and they also don't want to just 'export to PDF', since they're fine with the way their process works'. Most people seem to be happy to make processes like that more efficient, especially if they're done regularly. Others treat them like rituals, where nothing can change.