How much would you pay for that right?
+1. People cost a LOT.
Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
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Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#12As ss108 said you mentioned email but for me the real challenge has always been calling customer support numbers (eg ISP) and dealing with unhelpful automated menus.
What I found really useful is to ignore all the stuff they say and just say irrelevant English. Not gibberish necessarily - you can read the script of a play, or every comment in twitch chat, or whatever. The point is their system listens to you and goes ok they're saying something but I don't understand it, guess I have to connect them to a human person.
I do agree with you though I would like a right to speak with a human or at least mandated transparency around what percent of callers speak to a human/how long it takes for them to get there.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#13That seems to preclude or seriously hamper someone trying to start a side hustle or anything small. Write an iOS app? Before you can ship it, you need to be able to take phone calls. Make a low-volume product in the evening and sell it to your fellow hobbyists, relying on your day job to pay the bills? Too bad; hope your boss understands that you'll need to take phone calls.
There are ways to handle that too. Specify a minimum customer size, revenue size, employee count, etc. Index it to GDP also so it's not an entirely different mandate in 100 years.
It's not trivially easy but it's also not impossible.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#14The root problem here is getting an efficient solution to your problem.
Even if the company provides a human to talk to there is no guarantee there will be an efficient solution (satellite ISP support come to mind here.)
I think lack of competition is probably the crux, lately many companies are virtual monopolies in their markets or territory. Without adequate alternatives they don't see increased value in a happy customer or attracting customers (because there is no choice).
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#15In my experience, companies value call center staff so little that turnover is extremely high. That means that you're unlikely to speak to someone with enough experience to solve your problems correctly. I can't count how many times I've had to call a company half-a-dozen times and received half-a-dozen different wrong or unhelpful responses. I'd like calling to be more available, but I don't believe it's a silver bu…
My first job was a small e-commerce shop that had a one person on customer support. We couldn’t keep them and the owner would say your typical stuff like everyone’s lazy etc. Well one month we had trouble finding someone so I picked up the phones when I can and…
It’s not just the company and it’s owners who think so little of CS. Almost every caller was obviously someone with an issue and they had no problem venting their frustration at the person on the phone. I began to dread every phone call and would do all of the things I hate when calling a place. I put people on indefinite holds, I let the phones ring a little more than I should hoping they would give up and hang up etc. Worst part was a felt for these people, a lot of their complaints were valid and a lot of the times they deserved a refund etc but there was nothing I could do to help.
I’m an extrovert who loves talking with people and In my younger days I worked everything from a nasty bug ranch to construction, hard jobs that didn’t pay enough with unnecessarily mean bosses, and that month of answering phones was the worst working experience of my life. I know not every place is that level of bad but I’m not sure a number you could pay me that would be worth the stress.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#16I think its important to recognise that quite a lot of modern web based companies are running their business on the 0 cents model. That is they take the marginal cost of a customer and push it down to zero and rely on scale to make a profit from it. They can't add anything to their business that would scale with the number of their customers that has any real cost, computing resources even are heavily optimised for let alone having an actual human to speak to.
What this means is that as a 0 cents customer (even if you pay them) you are completely disposable, no customer matters to them at all. This culture comes along with a cold disdain for customers and a desire to run everything off algorithms and if some people get caught up in error they just don't care. As a customer its annoying and you can loose a lot of data, but for the companies its their business model. The only way as a customer to not be in that situation is to avoid the businesses based on this model. If they were somehow forced to provide human customer support they may very well be substantially less profitable or not viable as a business anymore.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#17How much would you pay for that right?
The company profit, the executives, and the shareholders will take a share of paying for it as well.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#18This week we had a disgruntled employee leave a 1-star Google review of our shop. They have never been a customer...
I reported it as a Conflict of Interest PER GOOGLE'S OWN STATED POLICY and it was rejected almost immediately. Google could find nothing wrong with the review.
We have no recourse to escalate. No way to even interact with a human about it. It's absolutely ridiculous. I have plenty of documentation and am happy to provide evidence that this is a former employee but I have no one to give it to or even a dropbox to submit documentation to.
Sundar and Google should be ashamed.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#19This doesn't seem to be a very popular solution, but it's proven useful: limit contractual freedom for adhesion contracts.
That would mean forbidding some kinds of clauses that are often abused, but also forcing the inclusion of some other clauses and automatic procedures for certain actions like cancelations, or in this case, support.