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Is this a pain in the ass for you too?

When I have a problem with a service, I find it really annoying that almost all companies now use a Help Center with hundreds (or thousands) of articles for me to find my own answer, or use chatbots that only redirect me back to the same help center articles.

Now everyone avoids human contact. I understand that this saves costs and is more efficient for certain cases, wouldn't a chat with a human be more satisfactory? Instead of a ChatBot, something like a ChatHuman. Has anyone worked on an idea that could solve this? Do you think there might be potential to create a better solution?

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    100% agree with you. I tried to contact google for a SEO issue in my website. but there is no way to contact them. only articles & a community where you can post a question. that sucks man. They are so cheap ass that they cant hire some real humans to resolve users issues while making $billions from them. THATS PURE CAPITALISM. we are 100x more better than them. at least we provide our contact email for any issues to our users.

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      Exactly.. that's my point!

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    Hi Daniel,
    If the knowledge base is done correctly, people like to avoid humans (90%+ if I remember correctly - there have been researches done - we are in this space with my company). So, in this case, I would say that the knowledge base is not managed well.

    I'm not too fond of chatbots either (it looks intelligent, but it isn't in most cases, pretending it understands and is happy to chat). I prefer search suggestions when I start typing my issue, and if I am still not able to find it, then perhaps a form to submit a ticket or reach out to a human.

    The human contact does not scale, that is the primary reason for not seeing chats with humans in most cases, and if there is a human chat, it would first screen you, whether you are interesting enough to spend resources on you. :)

    And there are many products/SaaS around trying to do this best, for example, intercom. You would go through some obvious questions with a bot and then connected to a human if still needed.

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      While I was thinking about this, I'm now testing the Zappos Live Help... and that's the kind of thing I'm talking about!

      Look my immediate experience at Zappos. In no time I found a human. How wonderful would it be to have this as a SaaS?

      -- from zappos chat live help --

      You are now connected to Sheila from Zappos.com.
      Me:hello
      Me:Hi
      Sheila:Hello, Daniel. Thank you for chatting into Zappos.com! My name is Sheila and I'm here to help.
      Me:Thanks Sheila. Sheila I'm doing a research for my university, and I want to know how many people work in the Zappos call-center? We are learning about the best customer services experiences
      Me:Do you know the answer?
      Sheila:Wow! We're super flattered that you chose Zappos to do your school project on and we would love to help however we can. However, to ensure we get you the best information possible, we recommend contacting the appropriate department via email at [email protected]. Once your message has been received, one of our friendly Zapponians will be sure to get in touch with you as soon as possible. Just in case you're interested, you can also visit the link below to learn more about our fun and unique culture.
      Sheila:You may also visit this link: http://www.zapposinsights.com/

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        They were built on extreme customer service
        There is a book about their story
        As I said before on sales facing queries it's more common than on support
        Maybe on retail it makes more sense than support cause your LTV is higher and usually queries are early and few

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      Yes, I think you have my point. We as founders always hope to avoid doing things that don't scale, but this is something that works against customer satisfaction. I think it's more costly to lose customers than to hire high turnover staff. For this case I have to re-create an account with Sendgrid, for which I am looking for a better provider.

      Probably the knowledge base is poorly written, but the problem is still the pile of articles I have to search and read through to solve the problem.

      Going through several filters before talking to a human is also a popular option, but as a user I have to go through them all to find the hidden "talk to a human" button.

      The best experiences I have had in this regard have always been when chatting directly with the human. Nowadays I could mention that Google or Stripe do it very well, but I had to go through the whole filter.

      How nice it would be to access that human faster and avoid headaches, it doesn't matter if I wait in the virtual queue, meanwhile I'm doing more productive things than reading Help Center articles and wasting my time. What I don't know is if this is a real opportunity, because for me this process is veryy painfull

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        How nice it would be to access that human faster and avoid headaches, it doesn't matter if I wait in the virtual queue, meanwhile I'm doing more productive things than reading Help Center articles and wasting my time. What I don't know is if this is a real opportunity, because for me this process is veryy painfull

        That is called a priority support in most cases and it works well as another stream of income too. Some companies might have this built in, you might have it already based on your account and its value to the company, etc.

        Anyways, I understand what you mean and the frustration there. You come to a point (as a SaaS founder), where loosing tiny percent of customers because of non-human contact is OK. And as long as you are learning from those churned users, then you are fine. You can't always please everyone.

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    There are or at least were tons to live chat solutions on the market
    Many of the chatbot have paths that would lead to human conversations, due not all and many certainly don't make it clear
    It's more common on sales facing queries
    Less common on support queries or some have a long path to get many details first

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      Yes, I know. There are tons of chat bots, actalluy I was reading this post from Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/dixa-acquires-elevio/

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    For instance. I lost my phone and so all my Two-factor authentications for all apps that I use. I'm dealing now with Sendgrid via Authy. And the help that Sendgrid gave me was: "Go and solve that issue with Authy, not with us". And in Authy I found this: https://support.authy.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012672088-Restoring-Authy-Access-on-a-New-Lost-or-Inaccessible-Phone

    Links that redirect to the same page again and again. In the section "Have more questions? Submit a request" redirects to a ChatBot, that redirects to the exact same page. Really painfull. No space to chat with a human being. I dont wanna to talk, just to chat and solve the problem. This story is the same for almost all services. Any opportunity here?

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      Its a management issue not a product one
      The support managers who manage the bots and articles and such have all the tools
      You might be able to offer a path audit service or product
      Like QA for support stories

      But in a way some of this is already built into the tools and they might not use it for some reason or maybe it's not easy enough, so you might just be an optimisation consultant

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        Yes, good point. Is a management issue.

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