Congratulations on achieving this milestone and probably keeping your customers very satisfied along the way, but I eagerly look forward to the future where everyone is so sick of virtual assistants, bots, and knowledge bases that a low ratio is what gets celebrated as a growth milestone rather than a high ratio.
Automated triage is great for digital companies that want to scale cheaply, but not so great for the people who need to figure out how to usefully navigate them, with the brick wall support experience of Google/Facebook/etc being the already vivid example. It helped those companies grow and court techno-optimist investors, but nobody outside of their enterprise customers is happy about the customer service experience. Eventually, that becomes dirt on their reputation and works against their continued growth and success.
When I have a problem with a service my ultimate goal is to get it solved - as fast as possible.
If I can solve my problem though an automated support channel that’s actually better! Because I don’t need to wait for a human to do something. Computers don’t sleep, take lunch breaks, etc.
The problem with google/Facebook/etc isn’t that they don’t have human support. It’s that when your account gets locked out there’s no way of getting your problem solved. If a working useful automated support system existed few would complain.
I don't think many people will disagree. But, Google has been doing it longer than almost anyone and has an amazing technical team and it's still an incredibly frustrating experience. By all means, keep investing in the technology. But have a plan B that can solve the problem.
For better or worse, slow, biologically constrained humans can often understand and solve problems when given the authority to do so. (I'm well aware there are horrible human support options.)
Honestly, you hit the nail on the head on what drives me. Before this I was a PM, and way even before that- I was an Infra Engineer. I think that brick-wall of contact when working on some Enterprise tool was what got me. ESPECIALLY so when there was a bug blocking my company and it felt like no one cared.
When I first joined- this is why I would take great pains to respond to everyone extremely quickly. When I realized that was not sustainable, the focus then shifted to really making sure that our users are heard and their concerns are acted upon. Sure first contact SLA of 30 mins is great but- doesn't mean shit if we don't solve your problem.
So I think yes, tooling should be first. I think there is just a way for that tooling to serve the developer, not some OKR.
Agreed. Where I work now (Hivelocity) is a breath of fresh air. There are so many support techs, that every ticket is answered within minutes. It's definitely not cheap to do, but the customers are always happy when they can get almost instant support for their dedicated servers.
My client bought in the marketing slides of an Indian company that there was response within x hours of raising an incident, not actually solving but response.
It's basically a "hi, we started the triage see you", in another one, DocuSign to not name, with the premium support, we are basically redirected to their help page even after 2 or 3 exchanges for clarification.
Support is just awful everywhere. Hell, our management is asking the same with our L1-L2 ones for internal customer.
Automated triage is great for digital companies that want to scale cheaply, but not so great for the people who need to figure out how to usefully navigate them, with the brick wall support experience of Google/Facebook/etc being the already vivid example. It helped those companies grow and court techno-optimist investors, but nobody outside of their enterprise customers is happy about the customer service experience. Eventually, that becomes dirt on their reputation and works against their continued growth and success.