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Pretty much. Support agents, especially “lowest tier” agents like chat agents and support line often don’t even work for the company- there are foreign and domestic firms that supply contract labor. They get a little binder, some web sites and a sort of “script” or “guide” to use to help answer most inquiries. When a concern is “escalated” it then usually goes to the internal employees of the actual company if the agent or a supervisor can’t handle it or it fits the criteria for escalation.

Many support agents you speak to have never used or sometimes seen the actual product, they MIGHT have received training from someone on the in house support team as part of a group training, and that may have included the actual product for demo with a CHANCE they got “hands on” time. Individual agents who frequently get poor reviews or can’t solve issues risk termination, and if a contracted support firm gets poor reviews enough or escalates too many calls they risk loosing their contract- so they are incentivized to try and solve it at that level if possible- but they usually aren’t qualified to solve certain problems, answer certain questions, and they especially cannot make statements on behalf of the company.

Chats like the one shown are sometimes real people, but they can also be “AI chat bots” which serve as a sort of “tier before the lowest tier” or sometimes to replace a more expensive human agency contract. If they cannot parse a specific phrase or word, or some aspect of a user input is on a “list” of “taboo” things- they simply have generic replies that are used to avoid the topic entirely and thus not give an impression either way. If a user says “I really like Hitler” and the bot sees “I like...” and is programmed to say “that’s great!” That could be problematic. So something like “I cannot comment on that...” is much safer than even “I don’t understand..” because the latter could be read as insensitive or in a way that would be bad- like someone saying: “Why is society so negative to pedophiles..” and the bit says: “I don’t understand..” one could read that as support.