*Crazy good tech, zero support. *
At 4:23 a.m., while I was lying in bed, the dry cold air from the conditioning woke me up with an idea that could not be unregistered.
After using Chinese technology services for so long — and, by the way, loving many of them sincerely — there is still a red elephant in the small room, blocking my way to the bathroom, while I sit there freezing and annoyed.
It is no secret that the Chinese did not prosper by ticket size, but by volume. They create something exquisite — a new model, a video editor, a coding agent — and then make it so cheap, so stupidly attractive, that you feel like an idiot for not buying it.
And then you buy it.
At first glance, you think you made a brilliant financial decision. And maybe you did. The pride of having enjoyed such an irrefutable offer is enough to make you close one eye to a few defects and bugs, especially when they are quickly repaired by engineering teams so good that you almost want to invite them to your house for a night of wine appreciation, leave at three in the morning singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” under the penumbra of the streets, and wake up the next day with no regrets about how you behaved.
But there is a tradeoff that does not delight me about many of these companies — and I believe the reader feels the same.
It is the strange three-to-five-month phase that follows the launch of a new Chinese product.
Stand down. The members who were once glued to Discord are now unreachable. Support emails take weeks, sometimes months, to be answered. And yes, most of the time they are eventually answered, after a heinous amount of time, but the ticket remains unsolved and you are left to endure the sacred liturgy of “my hands are tied” or “your email has been forwarded to the responsible department.”
The Tech Chinese ghosting
Another thing that is truly annoying is the lack of support training, when we are lucky enough to find support at all. CapCut almost gave me a heart attack. They can fool you like no other.
When I set up my video editing team almost a year ago, a support agent told me — after I bought the Standard plan, even though I wanted the Pro plan — that there was no other way. Everything was lost. In other words, I would have to create another account, buy a Pro plan, and only then live happily ever after.
That was not the case.
The months that followed, with remarkable and fair reasons to cancel both plans, were filled with headaches, dozens of support tickets, and chats with support agents who were honestly pitiable. The worst part is that the poor customer service representative is often alienated inside a script, while the manager is probably shopping in the most varied stores of the rich neighborhoods of Shenzhen.
Why?
We will never know.
They will never comment on that post.
Not Z.ai. Not Trae. Not CapCut. Not anything.
We will use their services of our own free will, knowing that, although they are good — except CapCut, I do not believe — they will not give a shit about you after the Stripe screen.
And that is really, really infuriating.
Publicado originalmente no Substack.