“Support” can be an Orwellian word
GRRRR! I am trying to decompress from dealing with some online “support” that is typical in that I suspect that, although it’s masquerading as a real live person with a real live first name, it’s actually a bot.
I sent an initial email, discussing the problem briefly and clearly, and I got a stupid boilerplate response that had little to no relation to my complaint. At the end, of course, it politely added, in the modern way of wanting feedback:
I hope you found this information helpful. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
Best regards…
So I wrote back “No, I did NOT find the information helpful…” and then went into the problem again. This time I got a reply from a supposedly higher-up actual person who asked for some very specific additional information, which I then furnished.
Today I got a reply, which was essentially the same reply as before.
This time I responded even more clearly, with the most important points highlighted in ALL CAPS so that even a bot should be able to SEE THEM.
The modern world—the semblance of service without the actual service at all.
Have a nice day! 🙂
I have a GPS with lifetime map updates and I haven’t been able to download any updates for two years since the company changed their update app. When I asked for help the company simply sent me an email of what I had read on their update site and which didn’t work. I told them the instructions didn’t work, the maps wouldn’t update, so they emailed me a copy of the instructions that didn’t work.
Ray:
I think there is an element of sadism at work.
I’ve had a few experiences with customer service/support that were excellent on the first go, but just a few. Each involved a human interaction with someone authorized to make decisions on how to address my issue. All my other situations – not that there have been a ton – have been similarly frustrating as yours. These latter episodes usually involved email correspondence, automated phone interactions, or bots. Achieving a satisfactory result always required that I escalate to a human.
In my experience Amazon is the worst.
Can’t spell support without torts.
Did the Bot talk English? That’s always fun to discuss an issue with someone who is not a native English speaker. I get the phone calls from “Microsoft Support” which isn’t. I finally lead them on a bit, then ask if what they want to do will remove my porn sites (no, don’t really have any), ask them if they like porn, then about that time they catch on and hang up on me.
“I get the phone calls from “Microsoft Support” which isn’t.”
When I am in a particularly evil mood, I ask them what their religion is. This confuses them, and they ask why I want to know.
“I’m just wondering what Hell is like in your religion, because you’re going there”
Once upon a time there was a thing called phone tree.
“Unexpectedly”, they eventually included promotion of “other services” whle on hold between recorded message redirection blurbs.
SOMEHOW, the traditional “Press 0 to speak to a representative” vaporized, and
“Please stay on the line for the next available representative” replaced music with “ads”.
‘Puters are GREAT! They deliver us into this system more efficiently, without the need for more than ONE person to redirect to the RIGHT person, with no “expertise” other than rereading the phone tree FAQ!
How many times have you entered a phone tree, not been given a useful option to choose, pressed the wrong number, gone round and round, been essentially dumped into a dead end, where you couldn’t get out except by backing out, ending the call.
Starting all over again and, then, again until, you make the correct guess, and move on to talk to an actual human being.
And then, of course, there is the so-called “music” that you have to endure, in endless and usually broken repetition.
That, too, is part of the phone tree “experience.”
Labyrinthine phone trees, mind numbing “music,” no actual human easily available–and if or when you finally get to a human–this human, more often than not, doesn’t speak recognizable English.
This is clearly a new form of Hell.
Back in the mid-‘eighties and early ‘nineties, it became increasingly apparent (to me, at least) that customer “support”– particularly in respect to getting my car serviced properly, but everywhere else as well– markedly declined as the World War II generation began leaving the work force en masse. Granted, an absurdly outmoded concept had long been making the rounds amongst that particular (WW2) generation—that being the concept that there’s such a thing as objective truth; that there are things objectively right and things objectively wrong. Along with this corollary: that human beings–all human beings– ought be treated with respect and dignity; and that hell itself awaited those who, without repenting, demeaned and treated indifferently their brothers. Apparently, those same WW2 numbskulls were so lacking in coolness, they were completely unwilling to take advantage of their successes and make of themselves enlightened, irreproachable modern gods: gods equal to, or even surpassing, say, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Well, decades after our WW2 generation left the work force, our enlightened, irreproachable, modern mortal gods have arrived. Indeed, the scapegoating fascists that the WW2 generation so soundly defeated, are back—in the form and fashion of modern mortal gods who not only routinely breathe their own self-concocted truths (and creation itself, apparently) into the world ex nihilo, but who concoct their own narratives out of that same thin air. And our narratives as well. These deities have lately ranged so far Left around our oval-shaped spiritual-cultural-political spectrum, they’ve landed smack-dab at the Fascist Far Right (albeit a fashionably fascist really cool Far Right which the Left makes out to be the greatest thing since organic peanut butter). Neo, when you get the creepy “service” you’ve just described, it’s no accident. It’s how our increasingly creepy, utterly indifferent, amazingly demeaning, ever-scapegoating fashionably fascist elite—cool and groovy though they be– do their thing. It’s their MO. Right now, they’re just sort of letting us know.
Damn. Does that sound paranoid. Sorry. Had a bad day.
“they’ve landed smack-dab at the Fascist Far Right”
Mussolini, the developer of Fascism, was an Italian socialist and communist. Mussolini had a problem with communism, how do you have a proletariat revolution if you have no proletariat to speak of? Mussolini decided that no proletariat revolution was needed and developed Fascism as the Italian version of communism, communism lite if you will.
Thanks, Ray.
There are political implications to these awful customer support operations. Most people deal with corporations a lot more than they deal with government, so when conservatives point out that socialism will be a lot like dealing with the DMV all the time, people tend to react, “Can’t be any worse that Verizon–Bank of America–Aetna–etc”
See my post Mindless Verbal Taylorism for thoughts on a major causation factor behind these problems:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/8034.html