@Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world
Post #1360732
2026-03-20 18:56 UTC
Replies (5)
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@SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 2026-03-20 19:40
How could you tell that people were not reading the knowledge base? They probably didn't need to call if they did, so maybe you reduced the volume by 50%. I get what you are trying to say, but if they make me wait 15 minutes just because, I'm going to be pissed once I reach someone. Then the person who doesn't deserve my bad temper will feel it and I will never buy hardware from you again. And I'm saying that despite having worked at customer support for years, writing knowledge-base entries and developing the system we used to store it.
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@WesternInfidels@feddit.online 2026-03-20 22:35
I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I'm not sure it helped too many people. We didn't have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual's help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it. Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can't even argue with that philosophy. But most callers just didn't have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn't know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn't know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was "the computer." They didn't know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they'd argue with us about it. "I don't _have_ a floppy drive, my drive takes those _hard_ disks." No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.
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@SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2026-03-21 05:47
I'm currently struggling with a product that I'd love to use the knowledge base for help but they keep changing their goddamn gui every version so the knowledge base docs never apply to me. "Click on files->database->security", uhhh, there is no "security" under "database" you mother f'ers...
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@JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2026-03-21 23:24
I can guarantee making them wait won't make them read if that wasn't their first choice to begin with. All you're doing is making them angrier for when they finally do get connected to a person.
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@Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2026-03-22 14:34
My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we'd forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who'd say "I've read the user manual cover to cover and I just can't figure out how to..." And I'd just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That's means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it's a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It's a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load