Here's why email support always sucks

Email support for many companies is outsourced to India or some such place where staffs of employees sit and answer large volumes of email. They're distant in every way from the original company, and may not know any more about anything than the customers they're serving do.

Worse yet, despite the fact that the employees are only making 50 cents an hour, they are pushed to answer as many emails in an hour as possible. "Habib over there is answering 200 per hour, and you're only answering 150, what's the holdup?!"

How can anyone possibly answer 200 emails per hour? Simple, they don't actually read them. They just skim your email for keywords, and then cut and paste from canned responses relating to those keywords. This works fine for 95% of email they get, as most of them are questions like "how do I change my password" and "I forgot my password" and "the software keeps crashing, what do I do?"

The problem comes in when someone has an actual unusual or complicated problem, because now Habib would have to spend several minutes trying to figure out and type out a response to you, during which time he normally would be spitting out 20 canned responses to other emails. Your problem is totally slowing him down and messing up his stats for the hour.

This is why email support conversations tend to go like this:

1. you describe a problem and ask a question
2. you get a response that is vaguely related to what you said but doesn't answer your question
3. you reply and say, "that doesn't answer my question, try again"
4. you get another canned non response
5. you reply again, irritated, and say "answer the question I asked this time, dumbass"

etc, until finally you give up or perhaps get lucky and find a goodhearted customer service rep who is willing to let his stats slide a bit in order to help you out.

[IggyWH]

Anyone who works in an office knows this all too well...

Someone will send you an email where the person wants something from you. You read over this email 10 times and are still left wondering what the hell they want.

I think this is the same case when it comes to emailing these poker sites. While what your typing is clear to you what you want, that doesn't mean it's clear to someone else who reads it.

[bwana devil]

i spent 5 minutes on the phone w/ some lady today trying to get her to open and download a file. she kept insisting the file i sent her was corrupt.

turned out she wasnt following my instructions and wasnt right clicking on the attachment and kept getting an error message.

so yeah, im sure email support can suck both ways and the effect would be magnified.

[WordWhiz]

I think there should be special email support for people who have proven themselves to be non-idiots. Anyone ever write the guy who runs the Wizard of Odds website? He makes you answer five questions to prove your non-idiocy before you can send him an email. Sites should let you take a quiz where you prove that you can handle basic tasks yourself, like depositing, changing your password, reading the board, knowing that the game isn't rigged just because your AA got cracked, etc. You'd then get a password that would let you get real email support. It would, of course, be revoked if you send in stupid questions anyway.

[MicroBob]

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Re: Here's why email support always sucks

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some sites' e-mail support almost never sucks.
pokerstars qualifies (and paradise did too back when I played there).

[Freudian]

I think the main problem is that they don't have much familarity of the product they are supporting.

I have in vain tried to explain to support staff what hand histories, tournament summaries etc is and they simply can't understand. Instead they look for something to copy and paste that has no relation to the question.

In the end it boils down do this; You are much more interested in getting the correct answer than they are interested in putting in extra work to give you the correct answer.

[Ro-me-ro]

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You are much more interested in getting the correct answer than they are interested in putting in extra work to give you the correct answer.

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Respectfully I will disagree. Ultimately it boils down to the motivation of the individual answering your email. Personally I take great pride in providing good support as often as possible. I get really annoyed with myself if I make a silly mistake.

Language barriers are the biggest issues with online (and phone) support.

Rom