More and more companies try to extend their customer support interfaces to various channels. It is no longer just customer support hotline, or email, chat is becoming another popular choice. The typical approach is to use so called ‘virtual agent’ which are typically implemented by certain machine learning / AI based solution as first contact point. However, after I tried to solve my issues from two companies via chat support, I started to wonder whether chat support is a good option?
My first case is quite simple, as I moved to a new address, I needed to update my addresses in various place. Most of the updates were quite simple. via companies’ website or app. Some requested supporting documents which is topic worth another post. However, for one insurance company, there is no online or app option to update address. So, I decided to contact their support. And Chat over Whatsapp is provided as one option.
My first request was sent in early June, interestingly, there was no reply at all. As I was busy and I did not pay much attention until I received a letter from the same company but sent to my old address ( I engaged mail redirection service, so my mail to the old address would be sent to my current address). I double checked my Whatsapp, no, there was no message after my question.
In the morning of next day, I asked again via WhatsApp channel. Great, I received ‘Hi’. I indicated that I would like to update my address. But there was no response. After 5 minutes, I pinged again, and the response came only 6 minutes later. The long wait started again after I supplied the info required for verification. After waiting more than 30 minutes with no response, I decided to pick up the phone and called their service hotline. However, the hotline agent could not help. It seemed that the job is just to answer the call and promised call back, as mentioned, the support volume was high and there were delay in response.
My second case is quite similar. I also requested support via WhatsApp channel and I encountered similar situation where there were long delay between my questions/responses and the updates from the support agents. The reason: high volume of demands.
Here are my guesses:
- each agent handles not just one customer, he or she probably support multiple customers concurrently.
- if so, he / she needs to work “multi-tasking” and keep track the discussions / story lines from different customers
- if so, he / she needs times to switch from one thread to another
And from customer perspective, the long delays in conversations destroyed customer experience completely, especially when the delay is not just one or two minutes, but a few ten minutes or even longer.
At initial thought, support via chat seems to be a clever approach, there is no longer long wait over phone support, it could support more requests concurrently and the virtual agent may be resolve some problems and reduce the load of human agent. However, if it is designed and implemented properly, it will be a disaster for customer expereince.
