My first example is my electricity provider. The online portal gives you an overview of the account details that you use for direct debit. Great! Unfortunately, you can only view the data, but not change it. In this case, I have to use the contact form and write my request in a text field. Of course that works - it's not much more work for me, but it's just a waste of time for the electricity provider. The ticket ends up there in an unstructured way in a large inbox. Now a responsible employee has to grab the data and probably copy and paste it from my text into some form, which then replaces the existing payment data. That's about the work I could have done for the company. The difference would have been that there would have been one less source of copy and paste errors, that I wouldn't have had to wait for confirmation via email, and that the support employee could have written or improved a help article in the meantime.
The fact that I accidentally or intentionally enter incorrect data is no longer an argument these days - the data can be validated fully automatically. The support staff cannot do this so flawlessly. Because of the request via the contact form, I have to set a follow-up appointment so that I can quickly check whether my request has already been dealt with. It is not uncommon that you never hear anything from the provider again after such a request. The next time the wrong bill is debited, you are annoyed again. In this and many other cases, fully automated would be much more pleasant for both sides.
Increased support volume due to trivial technical problems
The second example concerns the telecommunications provider(s). For several years now, almost every telecommunications provider has offered an online portal so that you can view or change your own contract data. Not to mention the user guidance of most portals - my experience is that errors in these systems are the rule rather than the exception. This applies at least to o2 and Base / E-Plus. As rarely as you visit one of these portals, you are sure costa rica telegram screening to come across faulty or simply non-functional parts of the system when you visit. Just recently, the login to one of the portals did not work. Knowing full well that contacting them takes days in any case, I wanted to try again some time later. Unfortunately, the problem with the login and also with the linked "forgotten password" function lasted several days. After you then submit a support ticket, you are happy to receive a completely unqualified answer that ignores everything you have written - in my case, I had already tried all browsers to rule out such a problem. Unnecessary frustration on the customer side.
No matter how complex the company is, the routine for renewing passwords must not be faulty for several days. If it is, then the responsible departments need to be brought closer together or the developers need to be brought back instead of outsourcing. Otherwise, savings are definitely being made in the wrong place.