Today I tried jump starting things with Frontier Communications by just pasting a few sample traceroutes into a chat window. All of them pretty clearly enter 3-missed-response territory several hops into named Frontier infrastructure, likely right on the boundary between them and whoever their upstream provider is.
I might have hoped that a CSR could look at that and say "Oh, hey, yeah, that does look like an issue, we'll get someone to look at that, thanks."
But instead they went straight into the script, and eventually we ended up stalling out on a 3rd piece of authenticating info I don't know anymore if I ever did, which I can see might be needed if I was trying to change service, get money, or play global thermonuclear war, but not to try and troubleshoot an interruption of service.
Maybe ISPs don't care if tech support is good, and it's a cargo cult crosswalk button isn't designed to do anything other than let the customer feel like they've given input. Maybe simple reboot fixes comprise 95% of issues and so that's what support does. Maybe good support is much, much harder than I think it is?
Sometimes I think: ISP, you have hardware in my home/business. If it's working, you can tell. If it's not, presumably you can observe the absence of activity. If to troubleshoot further you need a client reaching out from my side to some service on your network designed to evaluate things, then pretty much all of us have web browsers which not only do HTTP but have evolved to do socket-level communication. Why do I need to answer any questions? Shouldn't this just be "reboot and hit diagnostic page"? And authentication... you've got my physical and network addresses, you know I'm on your network or I'm not.
Am I missing something? If so, what?
Potentially a couple things:
1. The center of the Bell curve is a fairly inexperienced user. My experience is a bit outdated, but something like 75% of inquiries get solved by the script. You get pretty close with "Maybe simple reboot fixes comprise 95% of issues and so that's what support does" - it's simple wifi and computer problems, app-specific issues (try a different browser? try email?), etc.
2. The impact from providing crappy support is very low. The few experienced users will slog through it. Also, there's a relatively weak correlation between customers who think they're technical and have spotted a problem, and customers who have actually spotted a problem. An example from when I ran an IXP: People who email traceroutes with stars, not understanding that some devices don't generate TTL exceeded messages… or even what a TTL is… but being completely certain (a) it's a problem, and (b) it's the cause of their (completely unrelated) problem.
3. The price premium that individual customers are willing to pay for great - or even decent - support is small and short-lived. Often the support for business-grade service actually does skip the first tier "Read from a script" support because the numbers work. Even somewhat knowledgeable people are expensive; assume a fully-burdened rate of $1/minute to talk with someone with basic networking CCNA-level knowledge. That person still wouldn't be able to login to devices or do meaningful troubleshooting.
You're also assuming that they don't know about a problem, rather than that they know about it and are trying to solve it (or have decided it's not worth solving, though that's actually more rare than people often think). You might be right, but there aren't many large networks which don't do their own blackbox latency and loss measurements (in addition to polling for link usage, loss, etc.).
So, there's not a technical reason, but it's also not an accident nor a case of ISPs acting illogically.
https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml
It used to be funny because it was true. The problem is that it's still true. But now it's true of ISPs, at least in the United States; they have regional monopolies or at most a single competitor using a different physical infrastructure as is the case of Comcast and Verizon.
The support experience sucks for people who know anything about networking because there's no profit in providing better service when most customers are incapable of appreciating it. Since there's no profit, and most customers are incapable of recognizing or demanding better support, ISPs can get away with skimping on that aspect of the experience. Just as they've mainly gotten away with skimping on infrastructure and clinging to IPv4.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Internet Service Provider."
So, you inevitably get a race to the bottom. And once you’re there, someone has to find a new bottom to race to.
So, why bother?