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The problem is that we (generally) "get computers".
A lot of non-techy people are told by people like us something like "if you pay this company $20/y and get this server you can do X really easily".
Non-techy person then buys that server and needs basic handholding because they have no idea, but they don't really know what it is they've bought and that the provider isn't going to help them, in their minds they spent their $20 and are expecting the X to happen.
But I don't think it's entirely the fault of clueless customers, because providers are obviously trying to maximise sales and they make promises they shouldn't. Just going back to the OP for a second, if you visit HotScram's home page, you see stuff like "customer satisfaction and convenience are of the utmost importance for us" and "If you need any help, simply reply to this message. We are online and ready to help." and "Premium hosting features included at no extra cost" and "24/7 expert support team ready to assist you. Fast response times with knowledgeable staff via ticket, email, and live chat." Not a single one of those is giving the impression that a clueless purchaser is going to end up with a very steep learning curve or disappointment.
IMHO support staff do way too much handholding for users who shouldn't really be buying a VPS at all. But the problem is that they're also marketing VPS to these same customers.
This is why I clearly mention "Limited Support" and "Unmanaged" with some of our services.
Now do I have to explain the meaning of those as well?
True, you can see a mile away if the one asking the question ( opening the support ticket ) know basic net/os stuff or not.
The ones who do, honestly, are a pleasure to work with. They’ll try to troubleshoot on their own before opening a ticket. Sometimes they come in with traceroutes, I/O stats, logs… and when you open that ticket you just go: “wow, I love this guy.”
and thank you.
Those cases are rare, but they absolutely make your day better. Respect to them
As @Layer7 pointed out, we are dealing with people from all over the world, different cultures, languages, time zones. Translation doesn’t always help either, so misunderstandings are bound to happen.
@nikio - like the way you presented script-installer as "selfhosters" or "sysadmins,
These terms have become very loose lately. Knowing how to run a script installer doesn’t automatically make someone a system administrator. That said, the issue isn’t that beginners exist, we all started from somewhere....
Where things go wrong is when people treat the ticket system as a “teach me everything or I am going to mess you up” channel. Unmanaged services don’t include that. And threats are not a bargaining chip.
The bigger issue in my view, over time, some providers blurred this line by helping more than required (for good reasons, like reputation, or other ), but that in time also created a habit where users assume everything is the provider’s responsibility.
It is not.
A support ticket is not a substitute for basic knowledge, and the person replying is not obligated to fix userside mistakes.
I will put the above error on the providers in general, as they are more knowledgeable then the beginner user. I get the fact that 99.9% of the times it is much more easy and fast to fix the issue yourself rather then to try to explain to the fella that it is not your problem ( if the case dictates this ), it is he's fault; but by doing so, when will the fella learn? other then the fact that the provider has to fix it, he bought a service, he payed, now you figure it out. - I really hope I managed to get my point clear here.
Also worth remembering: that person/employee in the Ticket System is human. By the time they read your ticket, they might have already dealt with 25 difficult conversations, were called names, called an idiot, as-hole, threatened, so..... don't be as-hole number 26 please
.
I also start to understand why larger companies turn to AI replies in the ticketing systems, it is a very stressful job for the ones involved in it.
EDIT:
Unfortunately yes. You do, and it appears so do we, probably others as well.
How did we get here?? , well, am I confident the reason is my reply above.
I hate overly verbose and nice support, the more niceties they write the lower level support it is. Tell me to go fuck myself and fix the issue and I'll give you 5 stars.
Nice, but yes, when I opened tickets and asked for stuff and I was the issue, not the service provider, and was told to go and fix it my self, I learned things. ( I was told nicely to go fuck myself and fix the issue
)
I prefer straight and to the point communication. I would not say that unnecessary rudeness is ok, but if I'm an idiot please feel free to tell me that.
On the other hand the useless commercialized fucking over the edge politeness drives me nuts. For gods sake, stop calling me mister and blather on about "your business is important to us" and "you are a valued customer". I pay fucking peanuts for the service, my value is a cup of coffee...per year!
Just give me a straight up answer, does not have to be polite but it does not have to be rude either.
I think a lot of this is a cultural thing, the American style with fake smiles and ass kissing does not really fly in Europe.
Walmart tried it, failed miserably. The employees hated the chanting and the customers were uncomfortable with the fake smiles and greetings at the door, Walmart ended up pulling out of Europe after a few years.
Let me tell you about the stress incurred dealing with LET hosts. I'm actually on a break from trying out new providers while I work to overcome my issues from the last 2 I took for a test drive. I might never recover.
Maybe I should look into using AI to deal with support.
Ok ok there's probably lots more nuisance customers than shitty hosts.
Probably.
I don’t have either, can I open a ticket with you guys
I get you, I had a chat with Stu in the weekend also.
I mean, if you give the fella a button that says "nuke em all" he would probably push it a few times a day
.
Now, I can push TOS and AUP with 3658965 pages of what is what, but let's be sincere, no one will read it.
I think I will just give the fella a break the next week, and modify he's schedule to a few times / day and step-in to help him out till I manage to increase the team.
Hi,
no. Please wait with this until we have a sexy AI in our products, so you can use him/her/it/what ever as you please and pump all your tickets inside for professional processing to cover your needs and requirements!
Oh, about that - I personally hate slop tickets (most of which aren't from paying customers). I am not a hater of LLM usage, but I hate when brains are replaced with it.
Whenever I encounter slop, unnecessary long and lacking details about customers' issue/inquiry, I am replying with a longer slop on purpose.
Sadly that level constructiveness is not always reciprocated. I once contacted a provider due to them having somehow broken their panel login. I included HTTP logs (obviously having a Host header right at the top...) and every little detail i could think of. 1,5 days later i get a reply asking which of their panels was failing. At that point i decided to not proceed any further.
Sugercoated or not isn't really much of an issue but don't let me wait 36h just to give me a pointless reply and likely expect me to wait another 36h just to tell you what you already knew...
Offering Help / details was spot on from your part
, you did your part, whatever else happened after that ball is in their yard.
For example, we have a dozen tickets saved with details from users with errors and other issues, most are not fixed yet, as we simply cannot/are not there yet.
We cannot edit the code in the aps we use, and going full custom is something that is not possible yet, but we did listen, know and thanked for the help, so continue doing your part and let the Provider figure how he can, when he can fix what you reported.
EDIT:
fact that they did not fix it does not mean they did not listen and your efforts are in vain.
Exactly. I even told them that i had no urgent need to login so a simple "Thanks, we will investigate this and get back to you at some point." would have been perfectly fine but in this case i was like "Nah, i'd rather not deal with this.".
To be fair it actually was fixed eventually. If it happened randomly during some kind of unrelated update or if some guy telling them "I don't have time for this. If it doesn't work when i need to renew i will just move elsewhere. Thanks." (the service wasn't configured to renew automatically) woke them up from their slumber will forever stay a mystery though
Interesting you say this is an American thing. In Australia, the faux politeness, artificial smiles and "we are here for you" syrup is everywhere in customer-facing roles as well. But we do one better: add in a dash of condescension and treating everyone like a clueless toddler as well - even if the person you are talking to is a tenured professor at a mechanical engineering faculty, a graybeard barrister or quant trader (not to mention us mere mortals). It is like I'm talking to ChatGPT 3.5! Maybe this is all a big city thing.
There's something called learned helplessness — instead of learning, they just outsource it to other people (now AI). Basic things such as
ssh, ssh-keygen, ls, cat, head, tail, cp, rm, cd, df,du, pwd, whoami, vi, kill, tar, ln, find, scp,<package management>...is required to manage vps. Then, basic scripting, cron, docker, etc.There's nothing that could replace actual learning. It's like telling children to not read when reading, but guess what word really means.
They're throwing a fit exactly because by experience, the "adult" will resolve their issues as soon as they act like children.
I think @PulsedMedia approach using AI to answer basic question is correct.
If I may ask — @host_c, @layer7, @tentor, @shakib, @MannDude , @oloke (um, ask @onidel first, @oloke)— have you ever find doctorate/PhD struggling with managing vps, then try to threaten your business because they can't troubleshoot?
I do not agree - I believe it is a waste of tokens and time at the end. Even complete lack of support is still better than whatever he is cooking.
As a No-KYC provider I for sure know who among my customers have doctorate/PhD.
By my experience, Academic background doesn’t necessarily translate into hands-on technical skills, and sincerely, most of the time is the other way around, Knowledgeable/Educated hands on beats Academic ( but I underline Educated here, not AI GPT/youtube/I red this by a guy level educated ), in other words, those that work and study/improve their knowledge will always beat pure academics in hands on setups. ( because of hands-on experience )
But to answer your question, sincerely, no, none had any issues, how I know we had these type of customers, they did present the flaws we had in the setups, and that actually helped us further down the road.
Hi,
not that i would know/remember. But we usually also do not ask if someone is graduated or not. So if someone does not explicitly mention it, we wont know.
But we had here definitely people claiming to have soo much experience, like senior decades of experience and never had any problems like this, but only and first time with us.
And yes, here and there are also some that are threatening us of publishing some bad what ever. We always tell them to feel free to share what ever, but asking them to share the full ticket.
From what i know about us ( i guess they refer to us, as we dont manage this trustpilot account/user ):
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/layer7.net
Okay, it certainly costs money and make errors. However, human aren't error-free.
😂😂😂😂😂 I appreciate your commitment to privacy. Some of these people would put
Dr.in front of their name.That's correct, real experience beats text book knowledge (or any tutorial on tiktok or YouTube). And holding doctorate/PhD means they're capable of learning and mastery. Those who can't are fakes 🙃🙃🙃🙃 or should be sent to grad school once more.
Yeah, unless they share the information, you won't be able to know. But, can you tell the demographic of those who said they had decades of experience under their belt by their writing? Hmm, that's too much of effort. How about this, is there a huge intersection between the two population you mentioned?
Lol
Google has a 2.3 Review, so you are good
At least you are not having but issues
I swear, these platforms are as useful as someone trying to solve quantum mechanics while drunk.
Actually, I didn't see either on your home page. The quotes I provided, however, were very prominent on your home page,
Actually, probably yes. "Unmanaged" means nothing to the very people who don't know how to manage a server themselves.
Perhaps it's not just an American thing then, I have very little experience of Australian customer service so it might be the same there, I wouldn't know. Come to think of it, I think Asia also have that kiss ass fake smile attitude, so it could be that Europe is the odd one here.
.> @host_c said:
I'd call bad business sense on her part. I mean there might be a massive opportunity but she rather chooses to bitch on Trustpilot. Disappointing.
Go fuck yourself and fix the issue
Ok guys, now I have to figure how to embed this in the ticketing system
Damn, enough of shit-posting, let's get back to work......
Well, Dr. aaa haven't opened any ticket yet
Hi,
honestly i am fine with this when the bad reviews are like:
[...]i contacted support and was told i needed technical knowledge to use it[...]
from some normal customer ( i guess )
or
"bad support ,have a stupid it"
from a spamming customer ( this one i think i remember )
I hope people will read it and not become customer if they can identify themselves with this reviews.