Customer Service or Customer support whatever you call it how it works? Like if I call to Samasung customer support. Does their CS (Customer Support) employees are from Samsung or they are from different BPO companies?
I have never understood this thing, how does it all works?
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Step 1: Ask for help. Step 2: Get transferred 5 times. Step 3: They ‘accidentally’ hang up. Step 4: Contemplate your life choices
Most of them are outsourced to other companies. Your call goes to a call centre where some barely trained minimum wage employee follows a script.
Can be either. If they are providing technical support specific to one company’s products, probably for the company.
If they are only answering general questions, then they might be third party.
[edit] though in 2025, the latter is almost certainly handled by recorded messages that you navigate to… or are things you’d just go to their website for.
Some companies have their own in-house customer support call centers (or at least a set of employees dedicated to customer service calls who may work in different locations, or even from home), other companies retain the services of companies that have call centers that serve multiple companies, and their phone systems route calls to employees who handle a specific company or group of companies’ customer service calls
There could also be different levels of customer support that go to different places. For example, an inbound customer service call might initially be routed to an outside call center that is able to handle lots of routine customer service issues (like how to send in returns, basic questions about the product or a warranty, etc.), but if there’s a more complex issue (or a more aggressive customer), that particular call may get redirected to a more advanced or in-house team responsible for addressing those sorts of matters.
There’s no hard and fast rule, and given the ability to handle calls from anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world these days, call centers and employees can be scattered all over the globe.
These days it’s quite a multi layered operation.
Step 1 – You get to a chatbot/call bot. You explain your issue and the bot will try to get you an article or some other resource so you can maybe solve the issue on your own.
Step 2 – if you insist to talk to a person, you get to a level 1 agent. These agents usually work from a “playbook”, have answers/solutions pre-written and in a checklist style, so they walk you through the steps. If they find out you need to be redirected to a different department (account, billing, sales, etc.) with your issue, this is where that happens.
Step 3 – When the issue cannot be resolved by the level 1 agent, it escalates. Either to level 2-3-etc. in case of larger teams, or to the support manager. If you’re a Karen and ask for the manager, usually it gets passed to a level 2 role-playing as the manager and trying to placate you.
This structure is true for most of the support types, eg. phone, chat, email.
Also, you have the right to ask for transcripts and chat logs, call recordings due to GDPR. Many people miss this and can be useful.when escalating and making your point.
Source: Customer Support Manager with 5yrs of experience
Edit: As for the “is the guy working for Samsung” part: Usually not. Most of the big companies outsource support to cheap countries, or SSC companies (operateing in cheap countries). At higher levels, or if you’re a large business customer, you get to talk to Samsung