[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why are the FAANG tech support forums often ...
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Ask HN: Why are the FAANG tech support forums often useless?
Examples of tech/customer support forums that are useless: - Apple
(see [1]) - Microsoft (see [2]) - Google (see [3]) I often find
better answers on SO, SU, and other stack websites. Hell, even
independent blogs have better solutions. Why, then, can't these
giant companies improve the quality of their forums? [1]: https://
www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1nwpum/why_are_the_official_apple_
forums_so_unhelpful/ [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comment
s/g2nazh/has_anyone_ever_found_a_useful_answer_in_the/ [3]:
https://support.google.com/groups/thread/126332371?hl=en
Author : behnamoh
Score : 29 points
Date : 2022-07-15 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
| desindol wrote:
| Because they give incentives to people answering a lot of
| questions so in the end you have normal people working like their
| real support channels with boilerplate answers and without
| reading the posts besides checking for keywords.
| jmmv wrote:
| Hello, I'm blah blah and I'm very happy to assist you.
|
| I understand you're having problems with copy-paste-of-what-
| you-wrote. I'm an expert in copy-paste so I'll gladly explain
| what to do here.
|
| Have you tried turning it off and on again?
|
| It has been a pleasure to help.
| eunoia wrote:
| Because high quality customer service and support doesn't scale
| well. Especially at the scale and (sadly) profit margins FAANG
| companies expect.
| neura wrote:
| This. Simple, succinct and most importantly correct. Thank you
| for summarizing most of the other answers in 1 sentence. The
| second wasn't even necessary. ;)
| rurp wrote:
| The great thing about being a monopoly or part of an oligopoly is
| that you don't have to care about customers. These companies all
| have dominant market positions where competition is either
| nonexistent or just as bad.
|
| Customer support costs money and these companies care about
| making money more than anything else, so it's natural for them to
| avoid those costs as much as possible.
| sebastien_b wrote:
| They're gamified for glory - evidenced by the massive amounts of
| useless answers upvoted for popularity rep.
|
| I've had one of Apple Forums' "high reputation" members insisting
| that a clear OS bug (as per the technical definition of a bug on
| Wikipedia) couldn't be considered a bug (as in a Giuliani-style
| "Bugs aren't bugs" statement).
|
| It's all absolutely ridiculous & useless. I've filtered out
| search results from it, same as those copycat "answers" sites.
| faangiq wrote:
| Middle management overhead.
| tims33 wrote:
| Because the FAANG tech companies often have programs that reward
| top contributors. My guess is the people who judge the
| contributors have a preference for those who take the company
| line the most often which just turns those forums into an echo
| chamber of not completely satisfying responses.
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| What I find disheartening is this:
|
| I've entered a support chat with an actual, live, paid support
| agent - an employee of the company - and opened with something
| like "Hello! I'm having <issue>, I've tried <x>, <y>, and <z>,
| and looked at <URL>, but that did not help."
|
| Multiple times, that diligence and precision was repaid by the
| agent very obviously searching the issue and copy/pasting an
| accepted response from the forums, sometimes the one linked in
| the URL. FAANG support is genuinely, truly abysmal, with the
| exception of the upper tiers of Apple support. I've seen more
| thought, care, and understanding from first-tier support agents
| at a recently-bankrupt, bottom-feeding, rural DSL oligopoly whose
| executives tied themselves to rotting copper serviced with the
| utmost lack of interest. Seeing worse from the alleged top of the
| industry is really, truly, just the absolute pits.
| peppertree wrote:
| There are legal implications to what you can post on company
| forum. For example Apple doesn't allow employees post external
| links.
| toast0 wrote:
| Tech support forums hosted by a large company are nearly
| impossible to be useful. They run them because someone has the
| good intentioned idea that a lot of people have the same
| questions, and seeing other people asking and answering the
| questions could help people solve their problems faster. Also,
| some people just want to be helpful, so maybe some customers
| could help other customers.
|
| The problems are many:
|
| a) to be completely honest, many users experiencing problems
| aren't willing (or able) to read already written messages about
| their problems. Even when the error message tells them exactly
| what is wrong and how to fix it, even when the FAQ tells them
| exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, even when there's a
| forum post that tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix
| it that's suggested when they write their post, they'll still
| post their same question; or if you have a real live support
| person, they'll send it in to them.
|
| b) forums are amazingly time consuming to moderate. If you don't
| let posts go live by default, people will complain about
| censorship and how terrible it is and write the same post
| multiple times because they thought it didn't go anywhere. If you
| do let posts go live by default, people will use your forum to be
| terrible people and share malware and music and many worse
| things.
|
| c) As your product changes, many, but not all, old forum posts
| will become outdated and worse than useless. If you keep
| everything up forever, it becomes less than helpful. If you throw
| everything away after some fixed period, you lose out on some
| information that is still current; and people will waste your
| time decrying your censorship. If you put a big watermark up on
| old posts, nobody notices it. If you have someone go through and
| curate the information, that's a lot of effort.
|
| So, IMHO, a forum costs a lot of effort, and doesn't make a
| meaningful dent in the support load. Often someone had a nice
| idea to run the forums, but they couldn't get them staffed for
| more than 3-6 months, but nobody wants to be the person to kill
| the forum, so they live on as a ghost town.
|
| It's more effective, again IMHO, to automate the hell out of the
| support queue, but still have people reading as many requests as
| possible (even if it's mostly skimming and sending appropriate
| canned responses), with a path to actual responses as needed. The
| people running the support queue need to have the ability to
| influence the product to make their jobs easier. That means a)
| being able to escalate issues so that common issues are fixed in
| the product, b) being empowered to fix public documentation
| (including canned responses) so the wonderful people who read
| documentation have the right information, c) being able to either
| directly fix or escalate to have account issues fixed.
|
| Of course, Microsoft and Google tend to be more of a take it or
| leave it kind of product. I don't expect support from either of
| them. For Apple, if you want support, you have to go to a store,
| for the most part; which isn't going to solve complex issues.
| Limiting your interactions with companies that are too big to
| care is the best you can do. On the other hand, the cable company
| and the phone company will come out and fix your lines,
| eventually, if you bug them enough; they're pretty big and don't
| really care, but they do have a smattering of support.
| tahseen_kakar wrote:
| I'm going to be honest with you: I've been on the receiving end
| of many bad tech support forums.
|
| The worst one is Apple's. There's a reason why they're so famous
| for their snobby customer service: they don't need to put in any
| effort because they know most people are going to throw their
| hands up and buy a new computer instead of trying to fix whatever
| issue they have.
|
| But I also can't stand Microsoft's forums, because there's always
| at least one guy who chimes in with a condescending tone, like he
| thinks he knows more than you do about your problem. And then
| there's Google, which doesn't even have a real forum at all--just
| an unresponsive help page that sends you back and forth between
| different sections until you give up out of sheer frustration.
| Normille wrote:
| As well as the annoyances you point out, there are also the
| people who haven't a clue but decide to weigh in with their
| half-baked opinion anyway.
|
| This seems especially prevalent on the Apple forums. I've lost
| count of the number of times I've seen some poor sod advised by
| some 'know nothing know-all' that the answer to his/her problem
| is to "reinstall MacOS" when their issue could easily be solved
| in seconds by deleting a corrupt preference file, or fixing an
| incorrect permission.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I invariably find better answers on StackOverflow and have for a
| very long time.
|
| Also, has anyone else noticed that every MS tech support site has
| this weird thing where the "Accepted Answer" ALWAYS gets posted
| twice in the thread?
|
| I used to think it was just the answerer being aggressive in
| trying to attract Reputation points -- but the occurrences of
| this are just too common, IMHO.
| liversage wrote:
| I believe that the duplicated post you see in the dreadful
| forum is the accepted answer. It's displayed right after the
| question but also on the timeline of all the posts. For a long
| time this confused me a lot and I still find it jarring.
| jonjon10002 wrote:
| Because if they had a choice of paying someone to answer
| questions for free or paying them to develop features that
| generate revenue, which one do you think they pick? Yes, there's
| the whole narrative about customer satisfaction and call
| deflection and quality and whatever else. Every FAANG's got rooms
| full of people looking at data stream in, and they all say "I bet
| if we do nothing, they'll just throw it in the garbage and buy a
| new one."
|
| If you want a fast answer to a question from Microsoft, have your
| company pay two hundred grand a year (or more) for Unified
| Enterprise Support. They will be more than happy to spend hours
| on the phone with you working on your exact problem. One time I
| had them set up a conference call at two in the morning to show a
| team how to set up some byzantine Platform Builder installation,
| in Korean. Money talks.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Why would they make them any good? They have no incentive to.
|
| Are you paying them for this? Or better yet, how likely is the
| threat of you/us stopping giving them money likely to influence
| their behavior here? None.
|
| This is partly why I use Linux et. al., and why I pay for
| email/webhosting.
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