Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1. People cost a LOT.
You can hire a lot of people for a small portion of a CEO's salary
Maybe, but the CEO can probably get good support already.
Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
51–60 of 348 posts
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#52This 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…
[deleted]
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#53I recently had the experience of trying to do a banking operation that required an in-person visit. For some reason this bank required me to do this operation at the branch that I originally opened the account, which is not where I live anymore, and it's very inconvenient for me to go there.
So, while I was in another city of that country, I decided to try and handle that problem. I went to a branch and asked them to do the operation, saying that there must be a way to do it without me having to travel hundreds of km. The person absolutely refused to even try to help me. "No, there's no way to do it, you'll have to go to your branch office." I begged, I got angry. (This was after leaving this issue for a couple of years -- travel has not exactly been easy, so there are reasons I didn't manage to do it yet, and was getting desperate.) All to no avail, the person just. could. not. help me.
Fine, I left, very annoyed. The next day, I went to a different branch, told the same story, and explained how extremely inconvenient the whole thing is. I went in expecting failure. To my surprise, the person responded kindly, said "okay, I can send an inter-branch memo, I'll do the operation you pay this much, done and done." I signed something, walked out smiling, and the next business day, received a confirmation email from my branch in the other city.
Moral of the story: I completely agree with the premise here, but just keep in mind that even if you talk to a human, your millage may vary greatly depending on who you speak to and what side of the bed they got up on.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#54Do your business with companies who offer human support. There exists one of these for everything you need.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#55I 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 l…
>> I think its important to recognise that quite a lot of modern web based companies are running their business on the 0 cents model.
You mean the zero fucks model. What they really want to do is build a money-making machine that requires no humans to operate and somehow generate MRR for them. Hey we all would like to retire some day which requires low effort MRR, but a business serving people often requires a bit more than some fancy infrastructure and a drink on the beach.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#56I agree that companies have a responsibility to listen to and address customer complaints. The problem is that a small percentage of customers create the bulk of the customer support burden. With phone support this gets even more skewed. You can't have engineers do phone support or they won't be able to get any real work done with all the interruptions. You can have engineers investigate and address all complaints that arrive by email. I strongly believe email support that goes directly to the people most knowledgable to fix the underlying problem is the best approach.
Companies that provide bad customer support just don't care. They'll provide phone support if they feel they have to, but they'll outsource it for cost reasons. Talking to people who are friendly but clueless is at least as frustrating for me as creating a ticket that doesn't go anywhere.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#57In 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…
> 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.
The people who call into customer service are those with issues they want to have addressed. By throwing up roadblocks, you're making it even harder for them to get to a solution. They expect the people on the line to provide help, but this behavior puts them in an adversarial mindset by the time they actually talk to someone.
It does seem a like a tragedy of the commons situation here: people only have so much empathy to give, so we all individually pull back, which makes everyone worse off.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#58How much would you pay for that right?
The whole thing about rights is that you do not have to pay for them. If I have a right to vote, you cannot justify doing something that denies me the option to vote by claiming it is worth something to me. I am principally concerned here with the actions of organizations that create problems for third parties, such as when their actions, or failure to act, facilitate fraud against people who are not their customers.
What makes you think there is no financial cost to the right to vote?
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/electi...
It’s a cost we can all agree on, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#59I agree. You mentioned email, but to me the main issue is when one calls a support number. I absolutely despise calling a customer support number and having to listen to the "automated" response that gives one menu options that one navigates via numbers on the telephone (it's only automated for them, not the for the end-user, who has to manually chug through this process, with menu items that don't even necessarily c…
The sheer cardinality of ways they mess it up is impressive. 1. Long intro message with hours, location, website intro, email address and to hang up and call 911 if it’s an emergency 2. “Our menu items have recently changed” years after changing them 3. “We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volume” 100% of the time 4. No “other” option 5. Listing options 2, 3, 4, 5 and then the most common option “1,…
I think of this sometimes like a roller coaster park where you pay a flat rate to get in and then ride as much as you want all day. The ideal scenario for the visitor is to go in and ride continuously, not waiting for anything. However, the ideal scenario for the park is for you to spend your whole day in queues, not taking up space on the rides, and not running around making the park feel "crowded". The equilibrium is the park studying what people's upper tolerance is for wait time and then ensuring there are just enough rides that everyone comes close to that but few exceed it.
Obviously it's not a perfect analogy, but having people wait in line on the phone does serve an important function for the CS department in the sense that it gives those folks an extended opportunity to either solve it themselves some other way, or give up. Neither of these are great for long term brand loyalty, and the cost of the added frustration is probably mostly borne by the hapless agents who do finally end up taking those calls. But from the point of view of short term bean-counters, I would guess that it's unlikely any of these dark patterns are an accident (even if they don't implement the patterns themselves, they would hire the consultant who "streamlines" the after-sales experience to optimize for cost).
Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
#60I agree. You mentioned email, but to me the main issue is when one calls a support number. I absolutely despise calling a customer support number and having to listen to the "automated" response that gives one menu options that one navigates via numbers on the telephone (it's only automated for them, not the for the end-user, who has to manually chug through this process, with menu items that don't even necessarily c…
And (in Australia anyway) you have to listen to a machine say "This call may be monitored for quality" - but they don't "monitor" the awful 5-45 minutes of waiting, then pressing buttons, more waiting etc to eventually get through to a real person – the low quality half of the call, from the customer's perspective. I hate that.
I often make a point of vocalising my frustration/description of what's going wrong, just in case...
Recently I had to type a number when I thought I'd been prompted to speak it, for example. Then when I did type it, there was no way to correct an error (account number & DoB, seemed like it might be critical), so I had to hang up and try again.