Ask HN: Why are the FAANG tech support forums often useless?

[behnamoh]

Examples of tech/customer support forums that are useless:

- Apple (see [1])

- Microsoft (see [2])

- Google (see [3])

I often find better answers on SO, SU, and other stack websites. Hell, even independent blogs have better solutions. Why, then, can't these giant companies improve the quality of their forums?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1nwpum/why_are_the_official_apple_forums_so_unhelpful/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/g2nazh/has_anyone_ever_found_a_useful_answer_in_the/

[3]: https://support.google.com/groups/thread/126332371?hl=en

[tahseen_kakar]

I'm going to be honest with you: I've been on the receiving end of many bad tech support forums.

The worst one is Apple's. There's a reason why they're so famous for their snobby customer service: they don't need to put in any effort because they know most people are going to throw their hands up and buy a new computer instead of trying to fix whatever issue they have.

But I also can't stand Microsoft's forums, because there's always at least one guy who chimes in with a condescending tone, like he thinks he knows more than you do about your problem. And then there's Google, which doesn't even have a real forum at all—just an unresponsive help page that sends you back and forth between different sections until you give up out of sheer frustration.

[thrwawyFrtco675]

Throwaway account.

As an employee I used to help out on the forums, giving non-PR helpful answers.

Then someone extremely angry about a semi-related issue took one of my posts out of context and emailed the executive team, using my truthful post as supposed evidence of the company's wrongdoing against its customers.

It didn't hurt my career and I didn't even get in trouble... but that is not the kind of attention you want to get from your SVP.

I don't post in the forums anymore. There are way too many angry people who will weaponize anything you say against you. Too many journalists looking for a story. Too many YouTubers looking for the next clickbait video. Not worth the risk.

[Normille]

As well as the annoyances you point out, there are also the people who haven't a clue but decide to weigh in with their half-baked opinion anyway.

This seems especially prevalent on the Apple forums. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen some poor sod advised by some 'know nothing know-all' that the answer to his/her problem is to "reinstall MacOS" when their issue could easily be solved in seconds by deleting a corrupt preference file, or fixing an incorrect permission.

[bloqs]

I believe there is an accessibility/competence matrix here.

The sorts of people who are on these are overwhelmingly types who ended up there because it was the first result on Google. You see, oddly, a disproportionate amount of 'moms' and older people who use the word 'web'.

Apple support threads where Kathy from Winsconsin or whoever suggests solutions like "oh you shouldn't need your screen to go any brighter, have you thought about getting you thought about getting your eyes checked?" Is an example of this.

The blind leading the blind.

Another good one is asking a basic question about windows performance on the Microsoft forums results in 4 people not understanding the question and suggesting things unrelated because, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

None of them got any further in the Internet, thats as far down the path as they got. They get their news from the default Bing homepage, oblivious.

[musicale]

I've had nothing but bad experiences with Apple's useless online "support" forums. Apparently they decided to follow Microsoft's approach of incentivizing unpaid idiots - or possibly robots - to copy-paste completely uselss non-solutions to every problem.

However, I've had mostly good experiences with their in-person support in Apple stores, probably because they are actual humans who have some training or relevant experience and are actually paid.

[MikeBVaughn]

What I find disheartening is this:

I've entered a support chat with an actual, live, paid support agent - an employee of the company - and opened with something like "Hello! I'm having <issue>, I've tried <x>, <y>, and <z>, and looked at <URL>, but that did not help."

Multiple times, that diligence and precision was repaid by the agent very obviously searching the issue and copy/pasting an accepted response from the forums, sometimes the one linked in the URL. FAANG support is genuinely, truly abysmal, with the exception of the upper tiers of Apple support. I've seen more thought, care, and understanding from first-tier support agents at a recently-bankrupt, bottom-feeding, rural DSL oligopoly whose executives tied themselves to rotting copper serviced with the utmost lack of interest. Seeing worse from the alleged top of the industry is really, truly, just the absolute pits.

[rurp]

The great thing about being a monopoly or part of an oligopoly is that you don't have to care about customers. These companies all have dominant market positions where competition is either nonexistent or just as bad.

Customer support costs money and these companies care about making money more than anything else, so it's natural for them to avoid those costs as much as possible.

[muzani]

I don't think it's simply "customer service costs money". They have plenty of money and the profit margins to throw more money at it.

In startups, the CEO will usually step in to do customer service. As it grows, the level of someone doing CS goes down gradually, to business managers, then CS specialists, then the public. I think it's more about humility.

The quality of customers also goes down as a business grows bigger.

[omega3]

I never quite understood the point of these support forums. I’ve spent decades with in tech and I don’t even remember one instance when these forums have been useful. One phenomenon that is interesting is that there are always people with 15000 messages, some wierd titles like “approved”, “community gold member”, “not an employee of x” etc always with a signature “If I helped you click on thank you button” that spew absolute useless, no effort advice or ask crazy follow up questions that have nothing to do with the problem. What is the motivation of these people, what do they get out of this?

[solarkraft]

... and how do they get those badges? Must be through sheer volume.

[jonjon10002]

Because if they had a choice of paying someone to answer questions for free or paying them to develop features that generate revenue, which one do you think they pick? Yes, there's the whole narrative about customer satisfaction and call deflection and quality and whatever else. Every FAANG's got rooms full of people looking at data stream in, and they all say "I bet if we do nothing, they'll just throw it in the garbage and buy a new one."

If you want a fast answer to a question from Microsoft, have your company pay two hundred grand a year (or more) for Unified Enterprise Support. They will be more than happy to spend hours on the phone with you working on your exact problem. One time I had them set up a conference call at two in the morning to show a team how to set up some byzantine Platform Builder installation, in Korean. Money talks.

[tanseydavid]

I invariably find better answers on StackOverflow and have for a very long time.

Also, has anyone else noticed that every MS tech support site has this weird thing where the "Accepted Answer" ALWAYS gets posted twice in the thread?

I used to think it was just the answerer being aggressive in trying to attract Reputation points -- but the occurrences of this are just too common, IMHO.

[liversage]

I believe that the duplicated post you see in the dreadful forum is the accepted answer. It's displayed right after the question but also on the timeline of all the posts. For a long time this confused me a lot and I still find it jarring.

[Olumde]

Amazon's customer support "call me now" feature used to be the 8th wonder of the world. IMO.

The first time I used it I was amazed to get a call instantly on December 23, one of the busiest shopping day of the year. No fuss. No jumping though hoops no waiting, no one asking for my mother's maiden name.

Now, in an obvious cost cutting measure, the service the service has now been moved to India and there are now wait times, now they want to know my mother's maiden name. Its slowly becoming like all the other customer support centers. But they still have a "call me now" feature.

Declaration: I have never worked for Amazon.

[mandeepj]

> I was amazed to get a call instantly on December 23

I never call, if chat is available; it's so unproductive. With chat open on my second monitor, I continue my other work. I only requested call back with them once, when they could not solve the problem via chat.

[tims33]

Because the FAANG tech companies often have programs that reward top contributors. My guess is the people who judge the contributors have a preference for those who take the company line the most often which just turns those forums into an echo chamber of not completely satisfying responses.

[eunoia]

Because high quality customer service and support doesn’t scale well. Especially at the scale and (sadly) profit margins FAANG companies expect.

[musicale]

Why wouldn't it scale approximately linearly with customers, which should be approximately proportional to sales?

Isn't that Apple's "genius bar" model in a nutshell? Stores/in-person support scaling linearly with customers?

[neura]

This. Simple, succinct and most importantly correct. Thank you for summarizing most of the other answers in 1 sentence. The second wasn't even necessary. ;)

[nokya]

I think it may be related to what attracts talented individuals. A talented individual who is customer oriented, who can read inquiries and understand precisely what the problem is, has the technical knowledge to identify the cause of the issue and appropriate responses, and can formulate an answer in a clear and concise language will very unlikely spend time on these forums.

I can easily guess four reasons for such an individual not to do that:

1) Those who post requests often demonstrate a despicable attitude on FAANG platforms. I think this is because they have an expectation of result once they are interacting on the editor's official support channels.

2) Because these channels are the "official" ones, I would speculate and guess that a FAANG company should hire the right people to be on these channels and help their customers. They don't hesitate bragging year after year that they earn billions, I guess billions give some latitude to hire adequate support personnel. Personally, I would rather answer a question on a stack* website than any FAANG board/support forum.

3) Proprietary platforms & non-neutral answers: on a FAANG tech support forum, you will see many, if not most, answers oriented to hide or minimize anything negative or insufficient about the products/services of the FAANG.

4) They attract condescending, and often incompetent, "specialists". When you spend a few hours looking for answers on Apple's or Microsoft's tech support forums, you clearly do not want to be part of this, of neither side.

[purplepatrick]

Because none of these companies care about customer service or are any good at it. I was a corporate google customer once - we forked over a mid six figure amount for various tools such as analytics, big query, etc. It was just as difficult to get any support whatsoever as it is for the average gmail customer who pays nothing. Among most enterprise IT folks, mentioning google and support in the same sentence is some sort of running joke. I’ve had crummy support experience with the others, too, though it appears google is exceptionally bad.

[sebastien_b]

They’re gamified for glory - evidenced by the massive amounts of useless answers upvoted for popularity rep.

I’ve had one of Apple Forums’ “high reputation” members insisting that a clear OS bug (as per the technical definition of a bug on Wikipedia) couldn’t be considered a bug (as in a Giuliani-style “Bugs aren’t bugs” response).

It’s all absolutely ridiculous & useless. I’ve filtered out search results from it, same as those copycat “answers” sites.

[jrm4]

Why would they make them any good? They have no incentive to.

Are you paying them for this? Or better yet, how likely is the threat of you/us stopping giving them money likely to influence their behavior here? None.

This is partly why I use Linux et. al., and why I pay for email/webhosting.

[desindol]

Because they give incentives to people answering a lot of questions so in the end you have normal people working like their real support channels with boilerplate answers and without reading the posts besides checking for keywords.

[jmmv]

Hello, I’m blah blah and I’m very happy to assist you.

I understand you’re having problems with copy-paste-of-what-you-wrote. I’m an expert in copy-paste so I’ll gladly explain what to do here.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

It has been a pleasure to help.

[cbsks]

I was able to reach a Microsoft support agent on the phone (1-800-MICROSOFT, I believe) when I had issues installing OneNote on a clean installation of windows 10. It was surprisingly quick to get someone on the phone. The initial agent had to escalate it to a more technical support team. They scheduled a call the next day, and someone called me and was able to remote into my desktop and quickly figure out the issue (my graphics card driver needed to be updated).

[SturgeonsLaw]

In my experience, Microsoft's tech support was the least worst of the three as well. We have involved their tech support in an issue with Hyper-V clustered storage not coming online properly, and they were very knowledgeable.

[Trias11]

Because FAANGS are essentially gigantic centralized socialist states where users and small customers are just a "blob" that needs to be used, milked and discarded.

There is not a single good reason for them to provide support beyond whats required (if any) by local government regulations.

[peppertree]

There are legal implications to what you can post on company forum. For example Apple doesn't allow employees post external links.

[toast0]

Tech support forums hosted by a large company are nearly impossible to be useful. They run them because someone has the good intentioned idea that a lot of people have the same questions, and seeing other people asking and answering the questions could help people solve their problems faster. Also, some people just want to be helpful, so maybe some customers could help other customers.

The problems are many:

a) to be completely honest, many users experiencing problems aren't willing (or able) to read already written messages about their problems. Even when the error message tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, even when the FAQ tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, even when there's a forum post that tells them exactly what is wrong and how to fix it that's suggested when they write their post, they'll still post their same question; or if you have a real live support person, they'll send it in to them.

b) forums are amazingly time consuming to moderate. If you don't let posts go live by default, people will complain about censorship and how terrible it is and write the same post multiple times because they thought it didn't go anywhere. If you do let posts go live by default, people will use your forum to be terrible people and share malware and music and many worse things.

c) As your product changes, many, but not all, old forum posts will become outdated and worse than useless. If you keep everything up forever, it becomes less than helpful. If you throw everything away after some fixed period, you lose out on some information that is still current; and people will waste your time decrying your censorship. If you put a big watermark up on old posts, nobody notices it. If you have someone go through and curate the information, that's a lot of effort.

So, IMHO, a forum costs a lot of effort, and doesn't make a meaningful dent in the support load. Often someone had a nice idea to run the forums, but they couldn't get them staffed for more than 3-6 months, but nobody wants to be the person to kill the forum, so they live on as a ghost town.

It's more effective, again IMHO, to automate the hell out of the support queue, but still have people reading as many requests as possible (even if it's mostly skimming and sending appropriate canned responses), with a path to actual responses as needed. The people running the support queue need to have the ability to influence the product to make their jobs easier. That means a) being able to escalate issues so that common issues are fixed in the product, b) being empowered to fix public documentation (including canned responses) so the wonderful people who read documentation have the right information, c) being able to either directly fix or escalate to have account issues fixed.

Of course, Microsoft and Google tend to be more of a take it or leave it kind of product. I don't expect support from either of them. For Apple, if you want support, you have to go to a store, for the most part; which isn't going to solve complex issues. Limiting your interactions with companies that are too big to care is the best you can do. On the other hand, the cable company and the phone company will come out and fix your lines, eventually, if you bug them enough; they're pretty big and don't really care, but they do have a smattering of support.

[solarkraft]

> So, IMHO, a forum costs a lot of effort, and doesn't make a meaningful dent in the support load

That's why I find it interesting that so many companies have them. Considering the way they run them they're often a drag on the brand. Often times there will be threads about how inconsiderate/dumb the company is on some topic.

I'm definitely for having a place to discuss a company's products and giving feedback like that, but if you allow discontent to be voiced, how good is it to then never respond to it?

[pixl97]

Heh, for c) forums should make a rule you post a version or the post gets deleted.

[faangiq]

Middle management overhead.