Suggestion: Provide customer service

[Temp20201130l]

Some people believe that if you do a job poorly enough then people will stop expecting you to do it.  I imagine that this must be proudly emblazoned in the PayPal support call center.  I can think of no other explanation for the version of customer service that I've encountered over the last two weeks.  It’s terrible, and I have several suggestions for how you can improve it.  This will mostly be structured as examples of what you’re doing wrong followed by the same simple suggestion: stop doing this!

Self-Help Tools:

Your self-help tools appear to be deliberately structured to reduce the submission of support tickets.  This is a reasonable strategy and likely resolves common issues efficiently, however when a customer has a problem that doesn’t fit into a well-defined bucket then you need to give them a way to actually get help.  Instead, you’ve structured your self-help section as a labyrinth of articles that link to each other and direct you to other resources such as community posts instead of giving you the option to actually speak to a live person when you’ve exhausted the self-help options. 

Deliberately structuring your support system so that it's virtually impossible to submit a support ticket does let you keep ticket volume down.  It’ll look great on a high level report, but it gives you a false sense of accomplishment.  Tickets volume isn’t down because you’ve proactively solved problems through trending and refinement (as you should be doing).  Volume is down because you’ve made it impossible to submit tickets.  Your metrics will look great on high level reports, but the hidden truth is that you have a very unhappy customer base and all you've done is make them more frustrated.  The solution is simple:  stop doing this!

Message Center:

For starters, you really need to fire every single person I've communicated with on your message center.  I have had better support from a chatbot.  I suspect that the people providing "support" in message center are keyword searching my post, putting the top keyword into a search of your internal knowledge base, and then pasting the top search result as their response to my post.  I suspect that they’re doing this instead of reading my messages because it keeps handle time low.  Who cares how many tickets you can touch in an hour if your first call resolution rate is zero?  This is not customer service.  It’s not even a good impersonation of it.

Any good support manager will tell you that if it takes a dozen touches to resolve an issue then your support process is broken.  Now, I don’t know what you’re actually doing, but I can tell you that I've had over a dozen different people respond to my latest thread in message center.  Each one has responded as though they are seeing my post for the first time.  No one is reading the history.  No one is looking to see what’s been said on previous touches.  I know this because I've had multiple different people offer up the same "solution" that doesn't actually address my question.  It’s not just that it’s the wrong answer—it’s answering the wrong question.  I’ve clearly stated my question several times but no one has answered it.  They keep responding with boilerplate text that a keyword search might suggest as the correct answer, but if you actually read my question it’s clearly not the correct response.  The solution, once again, is simple:  stop doing this!

Management:

Perhaps you should start by firing your SVP for Global Consumer Product & Technology.  It's against your rules to post his name, so curious people will have to Google him.  I'd also put your Head of Global Sales Operations & Vice President on the chopping block.  I don't know who actually owns customer service between them, but they are doing a great disservice to your company.  Every miserable, useless, time-wasting interaction I have with your support team is the best advertisement for your competition that I've ever seen.  I've been banging my head against your support firewall for two weeks and it's having the desired effect.  It's encouraging me to become a former customer.  I’ll say it again:  stop doing this!

This is not customer service.  Make it easy to connect with a live person when you need to.  I don't care if you have to schedule call backs for two days from now.  I'd even be happy with a call back next week at this point.  At least I'd know that there was a live person who was going to speak to me, understand my concerns, and take ownership of them.  Oh, and if you do implement something like this, make sure the live person is either empowered to resolve issues or has a clear and simple escalation path so that I can actually get to the person capable of resolving my issue with a minimum amount of pain and suffering.

If you need someone to show you how to do all of this, I’m available as a consultant.