Deliberate Accountability: an idea.
Imagine a brand had an online help desk … where you could see the person who was about to help you, on skype-esque streaming video. You … are having a genuine, real time, one on one interaction with a person who has publicly, and individually pledged to help you … Because the next phase of the Internet is about accountability … Show us your face, or we’ll assume you have something to hide.
There’s some truth to this.
Ugh.
I work for a company that takes support very seriously. The main support guy sits directly behind my desk, and he’s one of the most patient and conscientious people I’ve ever met. If he can’t sort things out, he hands it off to one of the developers, who are a similarly professional bunch (even me … or at least, I try). Everyone on the technical side takes turns doing weekend support, not just to spread the load but as a way of keeping up to date on the service and its users. Everyone involved really does their best to solve people’s problems quickly and fully and send them away happy. If something goes badly wrong, the CEO actually publishes his personal phone number and invites people to call him for more information or simply to express their frustration or demand an apology. That’s ‘deliberate accountability’ in spades, and it’s been part of the company culture since Day One.
But the idea of video support - except in specialized cases - strikes me as a bad one. There are obvious technical issues (won’t someone please think of the bandwidth?) but it goes deeper than that. The first is that face-to-face communication is often a lot less efficient than email. If someone asks a question that’s been answered a hundred times, the support guy can hit the macro button to send a stored response and move on to helping the next person. Thirty seconds, tops. With video chat, you’re looking at a five minute minimum, and you still can’t be sure that you’ve given the best answer in the best way.
Email support is asynchronous. If it takes a while to find a solution, you go away and work on it in your own time, and the user finds the answer to her question in her inbox in the morning. Video chat (or telephone support) is synchronous. If you hit a problem that doesn’t have an instant fix, you end up having to say “I’m sorry, can I get back to you later?”, leaving the user feeling that they’re being blown off.
Then there’s prioritization. If the support guy sees he’s got eight emails from users saying that the server’s flat on its back, and one email from someone who thinks his homepage is the wrong shade of puce, he can get the systems people working on the server issue before attending to the user with the aesthetically-challenged homepage. If you have to wait for the user to state their problem in a video chat, you’ll be dealing with cases in queue order, and you can’t make any decisions about how to use your time most effectively.
There are the needy users, who seem to thrive on contact. You write an answer to their first question, and they’ll fire back with three more before your finger has left the Enter button. Good luck getting them off the line in a video chat. You have a hundred other people who need your help, but they have all day.
The overwhelming majority of our users are sane, courteous, rational folks who are a pleasure to help. Even in a company like ours, however, where we all poop rainbows and there’s a constant rain of kittens falling on our desks from above (which can be very distracting when you’re trying to solve a tough coding problem), some support cases can be, shall we say, ‘adversarial’. From time to time, we get an angry user who nothing can placate. We also get cases that are just plain weird. We keep a big file of the best ones for our private amusement. Unfortunately, I can’t share that with you, which is a pity, because some of them are hilarious. Trust me, however, when I tell you that there are some support stories that don’t have a happy ending. I can’t think of a faster recipe for support desk burnout than having to deal with angry users in a face-to-face chat. Moreover, the really nasty ones will use the opportunity to curse, to wheedle, to extort or to threaten, while anything you say can be recorded, submitted to Breitbart/O’Keefe-style selective editing, and uploaded to YouTube under the title of “See how <company name> lied to me/insulted me/screwed me over.” And a good accusation goes viral a lot faster than a reasoned defense.
Video chat has plenty of other problems as a support medium. What I don’t think it does is to deliver on the promise of accountability. It’s not as if you’re seeing ‘the company’ in a video chat: just one of its salaried public faces. A large company could staff a video call center with any number of smiling salespeople trained in the art of soothing users while the real problems go unsolved. (“Sincerity: if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”) Have they really helped their users better than the small company that only offers email support but does its best to really resolve their user’s problems?
So I’m all for ‘deliberate accountability’ - in the old days, I think they used to call that ‘standing behind your brand’ or simply ‘customer service’. I’m proud to work for a company that is, I believe, accountable and responsive. But I think video chat is the wrong way to go about it in the vast majority of cases.
This is, of course, only my opinion and not that of the company that I work for. Now, if someone would just help me sweep some of these kittens off my desk, I could get back to my work …
