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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”

#71

Post by xemdetia »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #10

I agree. My biggest gripe is these new pop-up financial institutions that provide insight into your credit history or loans. It's impossible to find the contact info of a real human being and in many cases the only obvious way to even open a ticket is by creating an account first. If I have evidence someone is trying to commit fraud by pretending to be me and signing up for your services do not force me to sign up fo…

This is something I see as a middle ground. I don't really think having the 'right' to a human fixes the problem. I just think the right to actually being able to get a conversation without becoming a member of the service to obvious bad behaviour from another actor or if the service decides to arbitrarily terminate service, and that to actually mean something. Right now it's clearly 'just sue' if you want things actually done. So many people are invested in social media or services in a way that a random misplaced ban can leave them stranded from actually getting help. On the other side the people in most orgs that deal with those category of issues are the janitors doing unwanted work, or that work is not prioritized. There's no fun catchall term like UX to even get people excited about fixing this class of problem.

Example of weird semi-positive was from reporting a particular serial scammer using a YouTube+Cloudflare combo where I would get always a submission receipt but then seemingly arbitrarily feedback that the situation was dealt with.

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

#72

Post by lucozade »

I appreciate that this may be a curmudgeonly view but do we really need the inalienable right to not be mildly frustrated? Is this what we want our political representatives to legislate on? Can't say it does it for me.

Now, if I have a paid relationship with some entity that includes a support agreement in the contract then, sure, I expect to receive that support. And some of the comments here appear to be for that sort of relationship. But in general? Nah.

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

#73

Post by pitaj »

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…

Let alone customers who abuse support staff: cursing them out, treating them like idiots, being racist, etc

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

#74

Post by anthk »

Spaniard here. What the banks here are doing with the elderly people it's outrageous, they are suggesting technologically handicapped people to manage their savings either over a smartphone or via internet while making in-person schedules very unsupportive.

Spaniard HN users can relate, for sure. The pandemics made that much worse for oldies.

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

#75

Post by dahart »

GoToThePub wrote: post #24

THERE IS ! See the GDPR rule on automated decision making and your right to speak to a human. The GDPR is your friend. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

This is an interesting aspect of the GDPR that I didn’t know. But I don’t see anything at all in the article you linked about the right to speak to a human. It only talks about automated decision making, internal “processing” decisions of a business, and not customer support as far as I can tell. Did I miss it somewhere?

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

#76

Post by Msw242 »

dustingetz wrote: post #23
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…

This is fundamentally about not being undercut by competition which means the costs a business can absorb are fundamentally relative to competitors' costs (especially so in high margin SAAS businesses). If everyone has to offer support and there's no way to cheat, the market will find a way to meet demand efficiently under new circumstances

At a higher price level!

It's important to write out and acknowledge that people cost money.

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

#77

Post by indymike »

Blackholes are terrible, and they become even worse based on the value being provided by the service. It's terrible when you have thousands or even millions in income from an app and it is removed from the app sotre and you are blackholed. It's terrible when someone loses their photos, documents and emails, with no recourse. For personal data (like emails, photos and documents), it should be required that a service has to let you get your data back. That should be a right, even if the service is free. Likewise, there should always be a mechanical identity process for personal accounts that would allow someone to retrieve control of their account regardless (even if there is a small fee here, that is ok) of control of things like phone numbers and email boxes? Why? Because emails and phone numbers are not really valid id's, they are just something with a reasonable expectation that the user is connected to at the time they register.

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

#78

Post by jddil »

vmception wrote: post #67
ironmagma wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your argument doesn't logically follow. I can't connect your first and second sentences to any point anyone was making.

Asking google to take down someones opinion about a business would be violating that persons first amendment right (assuming they are American). Unless you could prove libelous intent. (which luckily is very hard to prove and doesn't cover someone disliking your business)

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

#79

Post by lotsofpulp »

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…

> companies value call center staff so little that turnover is extremely high.

As do governments. No email address responses, no phone callback options. Messages that say “high call volume, call back next business day”.

I assume evil intent because any reasonable person would offer to respond to emails or return a phone call.

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

#80

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ironmagma wrote: post #27
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…

I think the point here is that it’s a bad business model. I don’t mean “bad as in won’t make you money or keep the business running,” I mean “bad for society.” Hence the desire to regulate.

While true, this is how the system is set up for at the moment, because if one company doesn't cut costs, someone else (with a lot of investor money) will come in and undercut the market.

Because when it comes down to it, people don't care about speaking to a human when they can get a product or service for less than the competition. Both corporations and consumers min/max their expenses, at the cost of service or humans.

It's one reason why I'm in favor of nationalizing things or keeping things nationalized; take away the drive for min/maxing profits and change things into a public service, and (in theory anyway) things will improve for the better.

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