Customer support is SNAFU (Situation Normal, All F—ed Up)

A personal perspective of enshitification

One night, just before going to bed, I saw a chat message pop up on my screen: Hey, is your website down? I tried to send someone to it but looks like it’s not there.” I let out a big groan and shot off a chat message to the person who maintains my website. I didn’t have high hopes of reaching her, as her social media posts are from a European beach where she’s meeting up with a long-lost friend this week. I went to bed and slept poorly, knowing that I would have an extra tech troubleshooting task in the morning. But the day is my day off so I braced myself to climb that self-serve tech mountain.

Come the morning, I had a missed call from my web person, and a message asking if I was around. She’d tried to log into my hosting service to fix the problem but the password failed and she’s in the middle of a family day with her husband, two children, and various other factors that will make it hard to get to this situation. Before I even have coffee, I am on my laptop and trying to figure out where to change the “A Records” to the destination she’s given me. I find various places where I can change domain destinations but they don’t look quite right. I start googling “is an A Record the same as a Nameserver” and multiple variations but the results are jargon-filled explanations that don’t help me.

Three interactions, three customer experience fails

On the website of Tsohost, my ISP, I try to open a ticket but got a message encouraging me to use their chat instead. But their chat doesn’t open until 9 AM (no time zone mentioned) so that transaction goes into the Pending list. (And I dread the context switching, where there will be a window of time spent remembering what the problem is, why I’m getting in touch, and how to explain it to them.) Eventually I’ll get there, but after a multi-detour journey. (They’re very helpful once they do answer the chat.)

In the middle of this, my ASUS laptop display turns to a screen filled with “static and snow”. It’s been doing that sporadically for a while now. I’ve downloaded new drivers, twice now, and that doesn’t seem to help. I’ve spent a lot of time on their forums – first, I had to set up an account so I could participate. After posting my question, I got two answers, neither of them particularly helpful, but I was prompted to choose the “right” answer so I picked the least inaccurate one. The suggestions were about updating things and removing things (like I’m about to open up my laptop and start playing around with wires!). It must be a software thing but not a driver thing, and I have no idea, so getting the laptop sent for repair is the best option.

Getting to and navigating the ASUS repair option is another exercise in frustration. The wording is vague and it seems like actually clicking “click here” will wipe my laptop. My partner suggests that I wipe my laptop first, which means I have to ensure that all of my files are backed up. Again, not my first rodeo, and when I had my laptop set up, I asked that any file with data be inside of a folder that gets backed up to the cloud. (Never mind all the alarm around training AI using personal data. I’ll worry about that next week.) But I do take the time to move things off my desktop and make sure that any files I need to work on imminently are on my backup laptop. (What, don’t we all have a backup laptop in case one craps out and you need to keep working?) I work my way through the screens, answering all sorts of questions that require looking through my control panel, clicking all the disclaimers and warnings, and get to the last screen where they want me to upload a proof of purchase. Ostensibly this is to determine whether the repair is covered under warranty (I know it’s not, I just the laptop made usable again.) I go to the site where I had purchased the laptop and download the receipt, because it’s easier than finding the one I downloaded two years ago. I attach and send, and wait for a response.

During all of this, I’ve laboriously copied the laptop’s serial number from a photo I took while balancing the laptop on its side and trying not to drop my phone in the process. But where to paste the information (because this isn’t my first rodeo and I know I’ll end up needing it again, and possibly again and again). Ah, open up a new Word doc and paste it there for the moment. That is, after the cheery messages about something or other that I swat away like flies. (Got It, I click. I have no idea what I just clicked, and really don’t care. I’m carrying as many short-term facts in my brain as will fit right now about whatever new-feature-I’ll-never-use is being promoted.)

A response arrives from ASUS. The laptop is out of warranty. (No shit, Sherlock.) If they’d provided a place to input some text, I could have told them that. So now it’s another go-around with the same interface. They want £45 for shipping, and then the ability to charge the cost of repair to my card without telling me the amount. I get nervous about the idea that they might charge some exorbitant amount, and I bail on the interface. My partner, who manages an electronics exchange shop, offers to navigate that process for me if I’ll just wipe the laptop. He gives me instructions and I set the laptop up for a reset.

Bank interactions are particularly painful

Now, what was I doing again? Ah yes, I need to provide my credit card. My Barclaycard credit card had been declined a couple of days earlier (not wrong password, etc, just out and out declined). I tried to get to the bottom of it because there was no reason to be declined. Went to the banking app and … get a message that the app needs updating. Of course it does.

Sigh. The “Law of Prerequisites” (wherein any given task has one or more associated tasks that must be undertaken before the original task can completed) has escalated to the point where I need to take notes because my short-term memory is overloaded. And I still haven’t fixed my original problem. And now I’m on my third detour, over an hour into my “day off”.

Now, Barclays doesn’t use the usual method of app update. No, they tell you to go find the new app in the app store and install it. So I delete their credit card app and their banking app, go to the app store, download the banking app, and …. the app won’t install on my phone. Do the usual stuff – turn the phone off and on again – but no luck. Guess it’s time to call the bank.

I dread calling the bank. (Barclays one of the big UK banks, and while they try to stay current, they always give off vibes of grandpa trying to “get down” with the grandkids.) The disembodied voice unhelpfully tells me my balance, and then offers some options, one being “do you want to know your balance” and because there’s no option for “your $&!* app won’t download”, it takes me over five minutes just to get through the voice assistant by which time I’m shouting and swearing in frustration. Eventually, a lovely but clueless middle-aged agent tells me they have no idea why the app won’t install on my phone (“do you have over version 5 of Android” – erm, I just told you I have a new phone, and it’s on v13 – and” try cleaning up my memory” – WTF? before I realise that she’s texting their tech group and relaying their responses to me). As I’m now, in fact, locked out of my bank account, I ask her to make a transfer for me and why my credit card was declined. The answer: it must have been a glitch at the venue end because it’s all working as should be. With all due respect, madame, no, nothing is working as it should. The entire system is broken.

Users left with the option of fight or flight

I wish I could say that the self-serve nonsense ended there, that I worked my way back through the Law of Prerequisites to fix the bank situation, then the laptop situation, then the website situation. But the amount of tech in our lives means that fighting with unruly software becomes a weekly, if not daily, occurrence. Corporate greed desire to make even more money for shareholders, at the cost of the sanity of users, is driving even the most stoic of us to self-destruct. During the week, I still had to fight with software that that replicated the shit show customer experience I just described.

• A Microsoft software license subscription issue which took ages because I couldn’t solve the problem online, had no email option, was then confronted with the standard “longer than usual wait times” message for phone, and being directed by their chatbot to a link that led to a non-existent page. And some interface text telling me to contact my IT department for support. (What IT department??) In all fairness, once I went around in circles for about twenty minutes, I finally got to a real person. He was knowledgeable and could untangle the knot of licenses that I was paying for and not using, and got me sorted with exactly what I needed.

• An Air Canada interface that wouldn’t take my input, had no email option, and the standard “longer than usual wait times” message for a phone option with an over 120 minute wait. And after not recognising the tones from my phone, they hung up. Added bonus? They want me to do their UX work for them by asking how I could make the Air Canada experience better. This time I chose flight, wondering if I can find an airline with a less awful experience so I can close my 30+ year user account to simplify my life.

• Another airline I needed to deal with, British Airways, had locked me out of my account. Their interface that wouldn’t take my input, had no email option, and the standard “longer than usual wait times” message simply hung up on me. One less airline account will simplify my life, as I guess I won’t be dealing with British Airways again. (And I did tell the corporate travel agency to book me on a different airline whenever possible.) Definitely flight.

• The Southwark leisure centre’s new website is confused about whether or not I have an account. Logging in doesn’t work, but when trying to set up a new account, the message says my email is already associated with an account. Eventually, my sleuthing pays off and I’m rewarded with access to a degraded interface with a terrible user experience. But at least I can book in for an activity. Well, if I’m willing to fight with their software a few times a week.

SSDD (Same sh*t scenario, different day) in the support (sic) world

The time after all of this is early afternoon, and half of my day off has been spent on these broken self-serve experiences. When my partner asks, “Are you working?” I reply, “Yes, I’m doing unpaid work for the companies that are saving on their operational costs by pushing the burden downstream to their customers.” Don’t think we don’t notice – this “savings” for you has become an unbearable burden for your customers.

Fast forward a few days, and it’s my partner’s turn to waste his day off doing unpaid work for brands, complicated by being in the middle of a switch-over from BT to Sky broadband.

• Sky’s customer service line had an interesting twist meant to create “delight” – a trite term that is the equivalent to offering a child a cookie to make them smile, in compensation for leaving them standing, underdressed, in the snow until they get sick. The hold message provides the usual “high call volumes” and acknowledges that waiting online sucks and allow you to choose the genre of hold music you must endure. My partner’s reaction? Well-played, but what would impress me is if they would hire enough staff to get rid of wait time. Of course, the eventual connection to a person meant they could discuss the problem, but it was not solved. Evidently it’s the fault of BT for cutting off our internet service after Sky informed them to delay for a week.

• I braced myself for the interaction with BT because of the overwhelming dread I felt having to deal with Yet Another Support Bot. Surprisingly, this experience was the least frustrating of all of the interactions to date. They recognised my phone number, sent a text saying they would run tests and inform me of the result, which they actually did. Then, if the problem persisted, I could enter a code word to get someone to call to figure out the problem. Which actually happened. Unfortunately, BT says it’s Sky’s fault that our internet service was not extended because they were never notified, so a good experience still led to a poor result.

Given the time sink and the emotional toll it takes to deal with these brands, the option that would cause the least trauma is to live without internet for a week. For a digital-first household, that’s a pretty telling statement.

No brand loyalty when customer “support” is a farce

Post-sales support is supposed to be a new proof point in a marketing strategy, not an experience that triggers an anxiety attack. If this has become the state of the world, the efforts are falling flat.

When brands have the absolute gall to ask me how to make their experience better, my brain hears: could you do some free User Experience consulting for us because we aren’t investing in that as paid work. To this, I reply with a terse:

1. I’m never going to go through the painful “support” (sic) experience unless I’m desperate and it’s complicated, so give me an option to chat with a human.

2. If you’re going to push people to a chatbot or voice assistant, make those options work for real people, not just a few scenarios dreamed up by your product manager.

3. If I have to interact with a bot, give me an option for “nothing is working, now what do I do”.

4. Don’t expect us to pay any attention to your marketing claims – they mean nothing unless you back it up with good customer support. And we’re on to you.

All the loyalty your marketing department craves will come to nothing if your post-sales experience sucks, because the post-sales phase is a lot longer than the fleeting encounter with the marketing phase. It’s kind of like a bait and switch of a short-and-sweet engagement followed by a long, troubled marriage. Why be loyal to companies that treat you like a housewife trapped in a 1950s bad relationship? If anything, you’re going to constantly be scanning for a better alternative. Customer experience has reached peak farce, and that noise we hear are the rumbles of extreme automation awaiting an explosion of volcanic proportions.

This post was originally published in 2023. It was not updated because the situation has not changed. If anything, the frustrations have gotten worse.