Online Support Is Dead

title: “Online support is dead” tags: online, support, blame, business —

From my experience there is no such thing as Online Support anymore. Support phone, where you can actually call and get answered by support. Support email, where you can actually send your support question. Contact support form, where you can actually write your question and a mean to contact you back. All this is diying or already dead.

All means of reaching the actual help is covered/buffered/greased/hidden and poisined. You will see links or buttons that “suddenly” do not work.

FAQs that you need to steer through to find out an answer how to contact their support (which will just open another door in that labyrinth). FAQ generated by “AI” to “help you” – another layer of dust and bullshit to distract you. Chat with “support” is just another blanket to bump you off the actuall support (if it even exist for that company). It will be a “smart” “AI” bot that will rip your soul asking stupid forms and answering obvious things. Like my recent experience, when PostNL app messages you “Your post is delivered to you and is in your brievenbus!” – I was at home the whole day and at the moment of the message too, nothing was actually delivered and nothing is in my door’s post-hole. You check that post’s track-n-trace and it says “Delivered 10 min ago and post in your door” – quite stupid. You go to the PostNL “support” and end up in chat with “AI” bot. You ask for help as a post was not delivered to you, he asks for a track-n-trace id, and then replies to you like nothing happened: “Delivered 10 min ago and post in your door”. And then it’s a scenario of a phsyco movie: you talk to a dumb asshole, who holds your fate in his hands and nothing moves to resolution.

Support via ServiceNow tickets – “nice one”: you click on “Create a ticket” then you are on a page saying that first you’ll be tried to help by their “AI” – which is a dumb search over their dumb collection of beuracratic instructions… and it finds nothing about your problem. Fuck yes, because I know what is the problem (need to reset a cache in Nexus repository proxy but I lack permissions and is trying to find someone who can do that) but I need to go through “AI” help first. After “AI” surrended I am able to fill in “more details” and a “link to the problematic page” (which does not pass the validation due to presence of fragments in the link, Merry X-mass) and then… good luck to find that small button “submit” (which was initially on the page and was just non-valid until) you pass that torture with “AI”. Ah, forgot to mention – the snowflakes animation on that “support” page was amazing :sarcasm:.

I believe I can easily find more examples of “support” bullshit we are diving deeper with every day.