I’ve had experiences with Yahoo’s customer support before, if by “experiences” you mean “nightmarish interactions with a giant email auto-response system designed to make you go away.” There are plenty of companies that provide bad service; Yahoo has raised this to a whole different level, though.
Because of their size, they’re able to make you feel like a character out of Kafka. As you try to simply find your way through a system that claims to be designed to help you, you begin to realize that it is not going to help you; in fact, it is designed to prevent you from ever getting help. It projects a cheery, “We’re here for you!” face, while pushing down rat-holes of email autoreplies that don’t answer your questions, suggest that you can answer back to get more help, and then simply repeat themselves. You are being told you’re in a happy place, but really, Yahoo has locked you into a dark root cellar, and while there’s a glimmer of sunlight coming through a crack in the trap door, you can hear them sharpening the knives nearby.
I can only guess that the people who designed and now administer Yahoo’s support functions had very bad childhoods; images of shadowy rooms, wire hangers, and authority figures who flew into unexpected rages come to mind. It must have been hard, I know; but now we’re the ones being punished.
Here was my problem: long ago, I created a Flickr account. It was so long ago that I did not even remember it, until someone found and it asked me, “Hey, is that you?” It was indeed. So I tried to log into it.
I couldn’t. I was, however, able to find out that the Yahoo ID associated with the account was an old SBC (now AT&T) DSL email address. The email address no longer exists, and hasn’t for some time. I have no idea what the password ever way. But, I reasoned, it’s also a Yahoo ID, and so maybe Yahoo’s password recovery system can help me.
Well, no. Yahoo’s password recovery system cheerfully told me that I needed to go to AT&T’s password recovery system, which of course told me that there was no such account. Back to Yahoo, where I clicked the link hidden at the bottom of the page where you can enter an email support incident. I carefully explained what was going on, why I couldn’t reset the password, and what I wanted (to either just delete the old Flickr account or associate it with a current Yahoo ID).
I received an autoreply telling me to go reset my password with AT&T.
Okay. I understand the value of automated response systems; they get 90% of the people having trouble connected with the information they need. No problem. Obviously the system scanned my entry, saw the “sbcglobal.net” email address in it, and sent the basic “go talk to AT&T” message.
There was, however, nothing in the message saying, “If this doesn’t work, here’s your next step” – which is absolutely essential if you’re relying on this sort of automation.
On a whim, I simply replied to the email. It didn’t bounce – I’ll give Yahoo credit for that. Later, I got a response.
The exact same message I’d replied to.
Is it that hard to set up these systems so that if an automated message produces a reply from the user, they never resend an identical message? Clearly, that message didn’t work. That’s the point where a human being should intervene.
Unless you’re Yahoo, at which point the business logic is, “This person needs help. How can we make them just go away?”
I went through this loop for a while.
Here’s how it finally got resolved: I followed the links to the AT&T site that Yahoo sent me. Then I clicked around an explored, and found a link to chat with support. They couldn’t help me. I tried again a little later. That agent was, it seems, especially dedicated – she DID help me. We got it sorted out. She did comment, “This is really unusual, and I’m surprised it worked.”
After that, I was able to sign in with the old Yahoo ID, at which point I got a screen telling me, “Hey, this AT&T DSL account is no longer valid!” (That’s what I’ve been telling you in my support requests…) “You need to create a new Yahoo ID!”
So I created a new Yahoo ID. Then I transferred the Flickr account to yet another one. Then I went back and deleted the new Yahoo ID. It was laborious, it took forever, and it’s something that could have been done much faster and much more easily if Yahoo actually just let a human being read my message.
But no. That can’t be permitted.
Now, I realize that Yahoo services are mostly free, so one expects less hand-holding. But guess what? Yahoo also tries to sell you Flickr Pro, mail upgrades, all kinds of stuff.
Based on my experiences with their free services, I think you’d have to be an idiot to give them money for this kind of treatment.
And all of this for… Flickr. Flickr, with its hipper-than-thou tone, its kludge of a user interface (why should options be in obvious places? why should it be easy to just click through a set of photos? who cares, at least it greets you in a random language when you log in! Yay!). Flickr, which has this whole messed-up dual account setup simply because whiney Flickr users screeched, “Waah, Yahoo is going to ruin it!” when it got acquired. (They weren’t wrong, but nothing was going to change the inevitable.)
Why do I use it? Because so many people use it, so it’s a good way to show photos, it makes RSS feeds nicely, and there are widgets to put photo streams into blogs and that sort of thing. That’s why. The day some alternative service kicks Flickr’s ass – and it wouldn’t be hard – I will joyfully delete my Flickr account and spit on its grave, saying “See where deleting a ‘e’ just to be hip gets you?”
And Yahoo? It wouldn’t be so bad if they just were upfront about being the Wal-Mart of web services, churning shit out and not helping you very much. But no, everything is “Hi there John! Whee, it’s Yahoo! Fun Fun!” It makes me ill. The worst part is the message you get when you seek support:
Companies that do it don’t need to put dorky messages like this on their sites. They just do things right, and customers remember.
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