As an IT professional with more than 30 years of experience, I constantly use a huge number of different products and services—both at work and in everyday life. In recent years we can hardly imagine our lives without all these services.
Yet in the chase for optimization and other chimeras, many have begun to forget that a product is made first and foremost for its users. And the biggest mistakes lately, in my view, are atrocious user support—often hiding behind a façade of supposedly excellent customer care.
Everyone is trying to cut costs, and so they either replace help with AI bots or hand support over to cheap, incompetent specialists. In the worst case they remove any support at all (or hide it so well you’ll spend a couple of hours just trying to find it).
What’s the result? The product itself may be wonderful. But as soon as a loyal user runs into a problem, they look for help. They’re not interested in tons of articles on the subject; they want their specific problem solved. Preferably here and now.
And after a negative experience, they may stop recommending you (while still using the convenient features), or leave for good. Because once someone switches to another product, they almost never come back.
It’s long been no secret that most support systems are set up so the user never actually reaches support. They hide the link to support information somewhere far away, and string you along with hold music and the constant “Your call is very important to us; you are 120th in line; please hold.” Most people will spit and leave. No man—no problem. This by itself undermines trust in the product, when you’re essentially left alone with the issue.
But even if support does exist, it can still be epically bad. Typical support mistakes that catastrophically undermine trust in a product, in my view:
- An AI bot instead of people. Trendy, cheap, youth-friendly. Only it can’t solve anything beyond the obvious (though ChatGPT may soon change that). And it’s no help when you need to deal with a user’s confidential data.
- An incompetent “cloud” support service working on thousands of products in parallel, using canned playbooks. Completely unqualified people who just follow the script: see a keyword in the question—reply with a stock phrase. Like “turn your computer off and on,” “tap the wheels,” “wipe the monitor.” You could have replaced them with the bot from point 1 long ago—the result would sometimes be even better.
- Advanced product mavens trained never to admit fault. They’ll answer standard issues, but when things get tricky or they don’t understand the problem, they’ll deny everything and shift the blame onto the user. As in: “It’s definitely either you doing something wrong, or your counterparty” (and if the service works in tandem with others, 99% of the time they’ll point at the other side: it’s their fault, go deal with them).
- Support that couldn’t care less about you. They’re doing Important Work, and you, the users, are just getting underfoot. These folks try to get rid of you by shunting you to parallel structures in the same company. “You’ve got a card issue? Oh, then you need the card department.” Or simply, “I’ll transfer you now”—and that’s it, the call is dropped and nobody answers. Or, even after confirming the issue, they’ll say, “Everything works on our side.” Never mind that the user’s service isn’t working and it’s obvious. Supposedly, “Well, I checked here and don’t see a problem, so there’s nothing I can do to help.”
- The willing-to-help crowd. They’ll acknowledge the problem and apologize that it happened. They’ll even promise to pass it along where it needs to go. Only then they leave you alone with it. Either “We’ve created a ticket; if there’s time, our team will definitely fix it by 2050,” or “Yes, that’s very bad, it needs a fix, but our team can’t tell you when they’ll get to it—still, we’re on your side, you’re very important to us.” It’s especially painful when the key functionality—the whole reason you bought the product—doesn’t work.
There are others, too. But lately, from where I sit, this kind of slapdashness has started to affect a huge number of services—very large and well-known ones included.
They reach critical mass, become wildly successful, and then the so-called “effective managers” arrive and optimize user interactions—“because now we’ve got millions of them.” And those millions suddenly end up disappointed. That’s when opportunities open up for competitors.
So always think about how people will use your product—and how you’ll help them if they run into a real problem. Yes, it’s more expensive than blowing it off. But it lifts user loyalty to unprecedented heights. Say what you will about Apple, in most cases their support genuinely tries to solve the customer’s problem. Not always—but compared to many others, they still come out ahead.
