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0 pointsSoftwareMaven13y ago0 comments

That's because they are having five conversations at once.

  Click canned response one
  Switch to conv 2
  Click canned response 5
  Switch to conv 3
  Click canned response 1
  See there is a response from conv 1
  Switch to conv 1

Ad infinitum

The systems (especially for tier one support) have complete conversation templates. The people supporting the products at tier one often have no clue beyond trying to search for keywords in the knowledge base. Turn over is high enough that training is too expensive (of course, turn over is high due to lack of training).

In short, it's a complete joke.

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mullingitover13y ago

The article is talking about email, but in the case of live chat it varies from company to company. I did my time in chat support, but in my case I wrote my own templates and triggered them with AutoHotKey. By the time I left I'd written a bible of hotkeys for supporting our app.

You're right about there being five concurrent conversations though. Part of this is that the customers would take a great deal of time to respond, so it made more sense for me to be helping multiple people because I could juggle five conversations better than most people could handle one. The alternative was keeping all the other people in the queue while one person took two minutes per sentence to describe what their problem was.

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