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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”

#191

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ironmagma wrote: post #165
_3u10 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation doesn’t make unprofitable businesses exist. If the business model is unviable with support those businesses will simply not exist or cost an amount of money that is unappealing.

Nowhere has it been shown that adding support people would make these companies unprofitable.

I have worked with budgets at large companies with paid products and real human customer support.

The cost of customer support is much, much bigger than people realize. For a low-margin business, a single customer support interaction might wipe out an entire year of profit.

Even the most optimized ad-supported companies like Facebook have revenues (not profits, that's before expenses) in the range of a couple dollars per user per month. A typical ad-supported business might have profits as low as a couple pennies per user per month. A single customer support interaction that takes 5 total minutes could take years to recoup.

I know people want to speak to someone, but the reality is that they like their $0 services even more.

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

#192

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

BoppreH wrote: post #150
ChefboyOG wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "right to speak with a human" makes sense to me on an industry-by-industry basis, in the same way that construction companies and restaurants have different regulatory agencies and checks. Applying it to all businesses sounds like a bad idea, however. Financial institutions? Certainly. Healthcare companies? Makes all kinds of sense. But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide…

> But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support. Giphy hosts user-generated content and encourages sharing. Imagine someone uploads a gif of you and fake subtitles of racial slurs and calls to violence. It starts trending. Your friends and families are asking you about it. You've submitted a request to remove it, but got no response yet. You can't get hold of…

No, Giphy really doesn't need the "right to speak to a human."

It may need (I don't know if they have this already, and I don't care to do the research) a "Report" button with various options including "Hate speech" and "Takedown Request: Moral Rights" and similar.

Think about it: A political image that's offensive to one side or another could generate hundreds of thousands of protest calls, if everyone had the right to speak to a human. I mean, if you knew you had this right, and you wanted them to take down an image, then of course you're going to demand the right to talk to someone. To say that you don't like the image.

Which they could just as easily handle with a Report button and a single review of the image by a human to check to see that it satisfies the ToS.

And that's just one image. Every one that goes viral could result in hundreds of thousands of calls.

No, it really just doesn't scale. If you give people the means to call you, you need to be able to handle way more people calling than you have customers, and some companies that provide a valuable service simply don't have the margin.

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

#193

Post by pdonis »

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.

The way to get rid of bad business models is not for the government to regulate them. It's for customers to refuse to do business with them.

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

#194

Post by dmd »

coldtea wrote: post #99
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 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. Well, that's their problem. There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things. If they c…

How do you define "web based company"? If I slap together a 50 line program in a few minutes and offer it on my personal domain for anyone to use, do I have to publish my phone number for anyone to call if they have a problem with it someday?

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

#195

Post by pempem »

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…

quite a lot of modern web based companies may be doing this. definitely smaller companies.

However most services you use (ISPs, consumer internet products like gmail, consumer electronics) are making a fair share of profit and attempting to a zero human approach through other major CRM/CX players to keep growing that margin.

The amount of reliance on poorly installed, and still nascent technology is staggering and leaves many consumers in endless automated loops with no hope for resolution.

Now that offices are also harder to come by, we have created our own kafka-esque situations.

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

#197

Post by vicarrion »

Maxburn wrote: post #158

You don't have the right to tell others how to run their business. You do have the right to take your business elsewhere. In a free market people vote with their wallet and there's plenty out there that accept the zero support model with a lower price, whether they understand what they are getting or not. That's assuming they even bother to ask about support options up front.

In my case there wasn't. I had a fraudulent account opened in my name at Bank of America and it took over 5 hours of talking to different people, going into a local branch, and waiting on hold to get to someone that could actually do something about it.

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

#198

Post by rkangel »

dmd wrote: post #194
coldtea wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, that's their problem. There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things. If they c…

How do you define "web based company"? If I slap together a 50 line program in a few minutes and offer it on my personal domain for anyone to use, do I have to publish my phone number for anyone to call if they have a problem with it someday?

I would probably use the word "service" and I specifically don't mean "web based service". If someone is providing a service (for money?) then you should have the right to speak to a human about issues with your service. That seems reasonable to me.

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

#199

Post by pempem »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #178
coldtea wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, that's their problem. There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things. If they c…

> There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things. > If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close. If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer? Hacker News is free. Do you really expect to be able to pick up the phone and call someone at Y Combinator to discuss your Hacker News…

I think we can presume the author means:

goods/services I have exchanged funds for.

Additionally I would point out that Gmail makes plenty of money off our data and we all have written about or thought about how 'users are the product'.

Not sure why there's seemingly a heightened emotional response here.

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

#200

Post by itintheory »

I'm in exactly this situation. Someone signed up for a credit bureau service (Experian) with my information (e-mail address at least, though who knows?) and I can't reset the password. Attempts to reset the password are directed to call the customer service number but there's no way to reset the password through the automated system, and apparently no way to reach a person. I've spent hours trying to gain access to this account which is potentially leaking my personal information to a malicious third party, but to no avail.
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