Yahoo Customer Service

I am a devoted fan of Yahoo, and use many of its services (email, news, calendar, IM, etc.) on a daily basis. But I have to say their so-called customer service is the pits. Now, I understand that I am a tech professional, and so have a pretty good understanding of how things work on the web. But when I consistently have more understanding of their applications, just by using them and reverse engineering in my mind, than the group designated to support that application, I get frustrated.

The best example of this was a couple of years ago. I use Yahoo Instant Messenger. The client supports HTTP proxy access to the servers so that users behind a company firewall can use the application. This worked fine, except they forgot to add functionality in this proxy support for proxies which require authentication. Without that, I could not use the client at work. Other IM clients, e.g. AIM, had the support for authentication. And it's not a big deal to support. So, I sent a note to the IM support suggesting they add this. That set off a chain of emails from the support center, with "helpful" tips on things like how to enable HTTP proxy support (which I obviously knew how to do if I was pointing out a deficiency in this support). Finally I got fed up and told the support team that if they could not understand what I was saying, to take my email to someone in development because they would immediately understand. The next release of Yahoo Messenger had support for proxy authentication.

This weekend, I installed the Firefox web browser at home to try it out. The only issue I have found is in Yahoo Mail's composer page. In Internet Explorer, Yahoo serves up a full HTML editor for email composition, similar to what Blogger gives for editing posts to my blog. But in Firefox, Yahoo serves up a composer page with a simple text box; I have to manually insert all the HTML tags. (Now, this has been an issue with Yahoo for years. Back in 1999, I used Netscape at work, and that browser had the same problem.) So I sent a question to the mail help desk asking how this could be fixed. The first reply was a canned reply about how to enable JavaScript. Every viable web browser for the last 8 years or so have come with JavaScript support, so this is quite silly, not to mention useless. I replied that everything else on the composer page that used JavaScript (menus, auto-fill, etc.) worked fine. It was just the mail editor itself. Their "helpful" reply was to recommend upgrading to a more modern browser, like Netscape (which has the same problem) or IE. This was truly pathetic, since the Mozilla browsers are newer than any version of IE, and Netscape (which they recommend) has the same problem and is built in the same foundation as Firefox.

It's become evident that this help desk does not have the faintest clue what Firefox is, even though it is one of the fastest growing alternatives to IE, just like they didn't understand what proxy authentication was. But if they don't know what I'm talking about, why don't they find out? That would actually be helpful! The responses I get are all canned responses. So it looks like the help desk person just types in some keywords for a search in a database of answers and emails the first one that pops up, even if it's a ridiculous answer. I have been a team lead on a support team. If my team members worked that way, they would not have lasted long. (I know my experience is in a completely different realm and scale than Yahoo's help, but the concepts are similar.)

Yahoo should be embarrassed by this.