Hacker News Reader

Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

This is why my #1 metric to choose a service provider is support capability. Things will always go wrong and if the point of contact with the customer does not have any agency to fix things effectively, I will not deal at all. The exception is the norm, and front facing employees must be able to act instead of just reading a script and hoping the problem will solve itself.

That phrase about recorded apologies is just dystopian.

View on HN

One company that (somewhat recently) improved their support is T-Mobile.

They used to do call centers in the cheapest places but now have agents that are a) local to your time zone and b) are not governed solely by basic metrics but are actual careers with an actual progression ladder.

You’d not think these are intrinsic but it’s turned out to be fantastic in aggregate as a customer.

I have always had a great experience with their support since they updated their process circa 2018.

How do you evaluate this metric?

It's easier to discard companies by looking up their points of support. If there's not even a phone number where I can get a real person to talk to, that's an immediate out. Typically, then I just ask users about their experience. If I hear stuff like them wasting hours on the phone or not getting any meaningful replies that's also an out. In the end sometimes I end up choosing the less worse version, not going through with any service at all, but there's been rare cases where support was so good that I wouldn't even mind having trouble at all since I know there's always ways to work around them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com