The perils of agnostic support

Whether you work in the customer support industry or not, we’re aware of the general mechanisms of it, whether having to use one to sort out a parcel delivery or arrange for a product to be fixed.

But, behind the scenes, things can work quite differently. And one of those differences is whether they use agnostic support. In most support situations, particularly those that are being provided for the cheapest amount, they are very much agnostic – each person working in support will just grab another support ticket, send a reply and move onto the next. If you, as the customer need to reply multiple times, you’ll probably get different support people answering each one.

Which, on the face of it, sounds fine. But it does mean that each person needs to read the whole conversation to fully understand it. Which rarely happens – as I said, agnostic support is usually used for the more, shall we say, value for money customer support, as it requires less staff. And spending time reading fully through a conversation is unlikely to be a priority – that will seriously impact the quality of what happens, unless your question is simple and/or quick to resolve.

An example: Twitch

Let me give you an example from a conversation I’ve had with Twitch. Twitch, if you don’t know, is a place to go to watch live streams, usually of video games. Each live stream usually provides text chat as well.

Some streams insist on having a verified phone number before you can chat – it keeps the bad actors away. And this is where I had an issue. My account didn’t have a phone number set up on it but, when I tried to add it, I got a generic error. It turned out I had the same phone number on another Twitch account, so I removed it from that one but, sadly, that didn’t fix the problem.

So, I turned to their email support. And, yes, it’s definitely agnostic and, boy, is it painful.

For a while it seemed to work and there was to-and-fro as we tried different things. However, after a while, the email chain obviously got too long for them to want to read from the beginning each time, so they started skipping.

For no reason, they suddenly asked me to turn off the Two Factor Authentication (2FA) on the second account. I didn’t understand why but did it. They then said that should be the problem resolved. Erm, no. It seems they’d thought I was having problems with the phone based 2FA on that account.

I replied that it wasn’t and re-explained the issue. By this time I was getting an error saying that they’d sent me too many text messages, despite not having received a single one. They told me to wait a day, this should clear and that should resolve the problem. Again, they were reading and responding only to the last part of our long conversation and getting it hopelessly wrong.

My frustration was increasing and, in a last bid attempt, I sent them a full summary of the issue in one go. Of course, I shouldn’t be having to do their job for them.

So what does WordPress VIP do?

We are not agnostic. Kind of. People have time off. People also have non-working days. So, in this case, tickets will sometimes get passed to someone else.

So, if someone in VIP support works with a customer in the same timezone, when they stop for the day, so the customer will. The VIP support person can hold onto the ticket and continue with it the next day. If they’re going to be off or it’s more urgent, though, they can hand it over to someone else. In the case of urgent issues, they will find someone to give it to. In all cases, though, a summary of the issue will be added as an internal note to their support ticket, so it’s not required to read through the whole thing again.

It takes some managing and, more importantly, personal responsibility to ensure that the customer ticket isn’t left with no-one responding to it. But the customer gets the best service as a result.

And one of the key phrases here is “personal responsibility”. Instead of treating your support staff as if they wouldn’t know what to do unless tightly controlled, we give ours the slack required to do what they feel is best for the customer in each situation. If we don’t get it right, we call it out, investigate, feedback, and improve.

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So, the next time you speak to a company’s customer support team, see what happens when you reply multiple times. Is it the same person or different people? The reality is that agnostic support can be made to work, if the people providing it summarise each time for the next person, or if each person thoroughly re-reads everything that’s happened before. Twitch doesn’t appear to, but that’s how they’ll be keeping their support costs down.