Support via Chat

Organizations see chat as a very efficient support channel mainly because it can be automated. Yes, even before ChatGPT, chat bots had ben in a full swing. Sadly these automated chat actions have often been failing miserably.

On the other hand a chat with a real person has proven (from my own experience) to be super effective. There is probably no worse support experience than hanging on a voice call in a waiting queue, listening to an elevator music of super poor quality. To be honest phone calls today are clearly the thing of a past, mostly due to the voice quality. We have moved to Internet - based teleconferencing and when someone dials in with a phone, they sound like dinosaurs. On top of that the new generation does not simply want to talk over phones. Text is the new king.

Email support has been available for much longer time, but it too has many drawbacks. With chat you have instant confirmation that someone is reading, responding and generally acting upon your request. Email is just one-way, send-and-pray medium with no guarantees of delivery, nor timely action whatsoever.

At the same time a real time text chat with a human on the other end is super effective. Even if the entire session takes a long time, you can do many other things in the mean time. No need to hold your ear to the handset playing this annoying elevator music.

My experience of completing / resolving things via text chat is awesome. Be it airlines (from United 1K to Ryanair) or shopping (Target) or banking (Revolut). Yes all of them first put you through an automated identity check (but that is no different from a voice IVR: "enter your card number followed by the # key") but then typically the conversations is very short, to the point, no language accent issues, and after it is done, you typically get the full transcript saved just in case.