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I HATE the Help Assistant!

artificer
Grafter
Posts: 1,850
Registered: ‎11-08-2007

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

with any of these systems it helps to browse around when you don't need it to get the feel of how it works.  having had the good luck to never need it, i've found some interesting information simply from clicking aimlessly to see what happens.
it's what i practise with my operating system and it works.
when a user has a problem and is faced with an unfamiliar system, panic sets in and logic flies out of the window.  i know the feeling well, so i like to be a little prepared beforehand.
pierre_pierre
Grafter
Posts: 19,757
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎30-07-2007

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

Thats how I feel when Chilly says its easy to get an Eeepc Linux to accept WPA codes, take one look and think what the H - I am a Windows man
Wheel_nut
Grafter
Posts: 893
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎03-08-2007

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

Start of Rant.....
Let me present my view to all those who believe that it is valid , or even desirable to force an already frustrated user who is spitting teeth trying to recover from a failure or inadequacy with his service, to go through a recurcive maze of inapplicable help screens before he can raise a ticket.
You are looking at this from a suppliers point of view with techie blinkers on. As a User, I want to either a) Speak to someone who can help me or b) Raise a ticket giving ALL of the information and symptoms I have and then go to bed with the expectation that it will be better in the morning. When stressed under those conditions, I wouldn't be able to appreciate the finer points of the economics of system forcing me to waste more of my time indulging the "system".
As an example, I state the case when my account was mis-profiled on the Ellacoyas by somebody loading an untested throttling profile. This resulted in my FTP download of a 15MB Driver from the HP website taking almost two hours. All I needed was to raise a ticket and after frustrating myself with not being able to see that fine print hotspot to the right of the screens, I started a discussion on the TBB forum.
Yes I know that the paths leading to that hotspot are there and VISIBLE. The problem is that if you fail to see that tiny hotspot, you end up in a recurcive loop.
Please do a Usability trial with an off-the-street User. Video it and put it on YouTube!
End of Rant.
There is no slight or malice to other posters intended. This is just my forthright way of stating my case for improving the service provided by the excellent team at PlusNet.
Robin
Anotherone
Champion
Posts: 19,107
Thanks: 457
Fixes: 21
Registered: ‎31-08-2007

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

Artificer's post (reply 15#) seemed to cover it, and I totally sympathise with Wheel_nut, because on occasions when I have just gone looking out of curiosity, I've gone round in circles or not easily found what I wanted.
So I thought I'd just try an experiment, and would you believe, I found I was mis-routed to completely the wrong page on a link!!
I started here - http://www.plus.net/support/security/abuse/how_to_report_abuse.shtml
selected the first link down the page for Help Assistant - https://www.plus.net/my.html?action=Questions
and got to here - https://portal.plus.net/my.html?membermenu=myaccount
Although it was still showing the selected  address.
So someone needs to fix that one pdq.
I'll come back with anymore "observations" as and when.
Lurker
Grafter
Posts: 1,867
Registered: ‎23-10-2008

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

The trouble is of course that many users don't want it to be easier to raise a ticket.
Plusnet was always the ISP of choice for technically minded customers, in so much as they didn't have to spend huge swathes of their income on support, and they could instead invest that cash in the product.
If PN have to move to providing answers for people who couldn't be bothered to look for the answer themselves (not aimed at anybody in particular - a general comment) the cash to support this has to come from somewhere.
So either the quality of CSC staff has to fall to allow greater numbers to be present for the same overhead, or as the CSC costs increase, the money has to be found from somewhere else.
This somewhere else must either be directly from the pockets of subscribers via increased subscriptions, or it must come from another pot with the business, perhaps from the funds which would otherwise be allocated to the purchase of network capacity.
Plusnets task *must* be to improve the quality of the online support, making it easier for customers to find the answer themselves.
The current tool follows the correct idea, but as everybody recognises, it has fallen short of the mark.
I don't want the products on offer to end up with less actual product, and more associated fripperies of supposed support, if I wanted that I would move to a supplier who already offers it.
Chris
Legend
Posts: 17,724
Thanks: 600
Fixes: 169
Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

@anotherone
I've just replicated exactly what you did and got the same page, I'll get a problem raised for this now.
Former Plusnet Staff member. Posts after 31st Jan 2020 are not on behalf of Plusnet.
Anotherone
Champion
Posts: 19,107
Thanks: 457
Fixes: 21
Registered: ‎31-08-2007

Re: I HATE the Help Assistant!

Thanks Chris.