Every so often, perhaps once every few months, I’ll get a call at my desk from a Yahoo! customer who has dialed the company switchboard and then punched in a random extension in the hopes of reaching a human who can help them with a problem.
In a perfect world, this would be a reasonable strategy. In a perfect world, I would know everything about every Yahoo! product, I would be able to help this poor desperate customer, and then maybe they would tell their friends what a great company Yahoo! is because they randomly dialed a developer who was happy to give them the help they needed.
Unfortunately, the world is not perfect and I don’t know everything about every Yahoo! product. I don’t even know everything about the product I work on. The odds that someone with a question about Search Assist would dial a random number and actually reach me rather than one of the other 14,000 Yahoo! employees are infinitesimally small. So, naturally, the people who randomly dial my number invariably ask questions about products that I know nothing about.
By the time someone resorts to dialing random numbers, they’re pretty desperate. Sometimes they’re very upset. They don’t care that I’m a developer working on something completely unrelated to whatever it is they’re having a problem with; to them, I am the human personification of Yahoo! the Big Faceless Corporation, and they expect me to have at my fingertips the entirety of Yahoo’s corporate knowledge.
When I explain that I can’t help them, they expect me to be able to transfer them to someone who can, and they find it incomprehensible that, as a Yahoo! insider, I don’t have a handy list of Top Secret support phone numbers. Sometimes this makes them angrier, and sometimes this makes them ask again really, really nicely in the hopes that I’ll decide to rebel against my cruel superiors and transfer them to one of the Top Secret numbers.
In the end, I’m unable to help these desperate people. I give them the premium support phone number (which is for paying customers), but usually the questions they’re asking are about a free product, for which (as far as I know) there is no phone support.
It’s not that Yahoo! doesn’t care; we do. It’s just that there’s no way we could possibly hire enough human beings to provide personal support for every one of our hundreds of millions of users (most of whom are using free products). It’s a simple problem of scale; no company in the world could afford this. Not even Google. Not even Microsoft.
Even so, whenever this happens, it pretty much ruins my day.
Obligatory disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this post are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer.
Comments
Customer support
I’ve spent the past 7 years fielding customer service phone calls while working for a business that has had fairly consistant (but minor) issues with its logistics and operations. The amount of anger, hate, blame, and general abuse that is hurled upon me, day in and day out, never ceases to amaze me. One expression that gets me every time is “you people.” I’m not sure why it bothers me, but it drives me nuts. Even after years of it and learning to accept it, it’s rare that a day doesn’t go by when an angry customer fails to get me upset in any way. I’ve gone so far as to hang up, swear, threaten, guilt trip the customer, etc. I always feel bad when I lose my temper like this. Basically, it’s just a fact of modern life in America that people think they have a right to be extremely rude to anyone who works for a company they deal with, whether or not they pay for the service. This is especially true over the phone.
Good timing...
Oh, good timing with this post… ;-)
Me too...
I work for a fortune 200 or so company and get the occasional random wacko on my phone.
There was one guy who wanted to “donate his music to [our affiliated charity]” and another who wanted to sue us over some sort of perceived discrimination in one of our stores.
Not sure why I attract the crazies, but I did manage to forward them on to the right departments after a bit of work.
Hmmm...
I’m sure if we replaced all the customer service folks with robots that no one would ever get hurt. Ever.
As a member...
As a member of the support organization at a Fortune 500 company I can tell you that I also get random calls. Luckily when I do I can usually help them (or transfer them to someone who can). I totally understand about the really angry customers though. They can be very difficult to work with. Usually they need the help the most. Since we don’t have non-paying customers I have the pleasure of always being able to help them.
internet user
i cannot sign into my email account to change it back to the old style. jay.