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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”

#61

Post by SqueamOssi »

edgyquant wrote: post #15
tvanantwerp wrote: post #8

In 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 don't doubt being a rep is difficult. However, if customers were able to reach someone quickly without enduring maddening phone trees and were able to speak with someone who was friendly and actually empowered to provide help, I think the customers would generally be pleasant to work with. So I don't think aggressive customers are the only problem. A lot of the issue can be resolved by the company's willingness to truly help their customers. A company that is willing to commit to training and managing their staff and empowering them to be helpful will generally be greeted with delighted customers.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#62

Post by mannykannot »

kube-system wrote: post #58
mannykannot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say it does not exist, I said it does not work as a justification for actions that infringe on rights.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#63

Post by wussboy »

hwers wrote: post #31

I hope we'll see a return of libertarian values in tech culture in the future. There's been a ton of push to force every rule into law in the past few years. Not everything should be backed by force of violence. I hope this authoritarian trend reverses sooner rather than later.

Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. The tech industry’s fascination with libertarian values have brought about the disastrous consequences of putting free speech on a pedestal, with utter disregard for the harms it has caused. And libertarianism has always required choice. Choice requires a free and vibrant marketplace. But that market place requires regulation to keep it free and vibrant. The circle cannot be squared.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#64

Post by kube-system »

mannykannot wrote: post #62
kube-system wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say it does not exist, I said it does not work as a justification for actions that infringe on rights.

Sure, especially when we’re talking about rights that are almost universally agreed upon. But it could be a good justification for something like “the right to talk to customer support for Candy Crush”. The OP didn’t specify which companies he was trying to contact.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#65

Post by frereubu »

jdvh wrote: post #56

I 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 th…

> Talking to people who are friendly but clueless is at least as frustrating for me as creating a ticket that doesn't go anywhere.

Me too. I think that extra frustration is partially because I know it's not the fault of the person I'm speaking to that they've been put in that position, so I feel like I have to keep my irritation to myself, which I find hard when it's the third person I've spoken to and they've asked me to describe the issue all over again. At least with written text it's easier to look back over the notes.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#66

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

granshaw wrote: post #40
PaulKeeble wrote: post #16

I 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…

Aka the Google model

Yeah, but, probably you're not Google's customer; you're their product.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#67

Post by vmception »

ironmagma wrote: post #50
dforrestwilson wrote: post #18

This 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…

Are the criticisms accurate? That should be the main concern. This is a free speech country after all.

Can you elaborate on that? How would it be different in a non-free speech country?

Is there a country I can go to make someone legally disappear due to an online review they posted, I have a list. Let me know

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#68

Post by slfnflctd »

jddil wrote: post #46
dforrestwilson wrote: post #18

This 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…

Got to say the fact that you thought someone leaving a 1 star review on a service you don't own, google, was worth you escalating it to a real person tells me these companies are doing the right thing. And shaming the CEOs when you made the choice to use their product is a bit silly and you come off as entitled, not righteous. How do we or google know if he was disgruntled vs fired, how do we know if he didn't come i…

The problem is that Google has become so pervasive that even if you don't initiate any contact with them or use any of their products/services, a bad review on Google can have a substantially negative effect on your business. It's a real problem.

I was recently in charge of hiring various contractors for several repairs needed on a house being prepped for sale, and in almost every case, clearly non-technically-inclined people were practically begging me to leave them a positive Google review. I don't think they would've been doing that if they hadn't experienced a direct impact on their business from those reviews in some way, and I also don't think they would've chosen this situation voluntarily.

Re: Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

#69

Post by cyberpunk »

granshaw wrote: post #40
PaulKeeble wrote: post #16

I 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…

Aka the Google model

Oh yes. Have you ever really tried to speak to someone at google? It's an educational experience, it teaches you the value of patience, the impermanence of everything.

It's a bit like what I imagine being inside the total perspective vortex is like.

> The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

> Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

> “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

> And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.

> Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

> To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.

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