221–230 of 348 posts
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.
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> I bet 99.99% of people who complain about not having a human to talk don't want to pay a single dollar for that human. Guaranteed. Would the people championing this idea be willing to pay $10/month for their Hacker News account because the company was obligated to provide real human support to everyone? Or $10/month to GitHub just to be able to have a GitHub account? Or if you plan to start a website or internet co…
Probably not but if we do pay the 10$ a month i want that support
They may not make money hand-over-fist but I bet there's enough need for the service that it would be self-supporting.
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> 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 am sure there are other cases I have missed, but this should give an idea. The problem will be in defining the rules specifically enough to address your concerns, yet vaguely enough that companies will not find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while violating the spirit.
Yes, Github would fall into the categories above. If, as a result, Microsoft decided they no longer wanted to provide non-paid accounts, then so be it. Their business model was unsustainable if it could only work by abusing their users. Some things of value may be lost.
This right to speak to a human should apply to non "web" companies too.
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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.
But people are specifically saying it doesn't have to be for money. If I've made some open source tool that people use for free, do I really need to provide phone support - also for free?
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Supporting evidence: you could hire a virtual (human) assistant to drive the ticket email process forward for you. "Nobody" does.
I can't speak for everybody, but the main reason I don't do this is that I've done it and it created additional work rather than saving any.
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I bet 99.99% of people who complain about not having a human to talk don't want to pay a single dollar for that human.
Louis Rossmann talks about this in the context of his old electronics supply company. One of the reasons he started that company was that the suppliers he had previously worked with had horrible customer service, and a lot of people he knew professionally complained about it. Thought he found a niche in the market. So long story short he created a supply company with dedicated customer support, but his prices were co…
This is ultimately why consumer protection laws exist. A person is smart, people are stupid and "the market" can't be expected to always act in its own best interests.
Honestly the ability to talk to a human will not solve much if anything, most problem could be solved by extremely automatic system, not even ticket system are really needed.
The main problem is the lack of the ABILITY of solve a problem. A very simple example: one common problem that user have is not having access to some kind of documentation, like bills, contract, recepits etc... now this is very simple problem to solve, except that as operator i didnt have access to the system to recover this kind of documentation! So, i could not help them, keep in mind that i could see the documentation just we did not have the ability to send it to the customer. I wasn't even a security problem since we could verify the identity of the costumer (to the point that we could make administrative changes to their contract) simply the software did not have the button "Send copy to customer".
This is just a very simple example, but i could write here an entire book of situation like that. Most of the time i know how to solve a problem but i can't.
NOW, how we solve this? From my point of view we need two thing, the first one is more money put into the customer service/care department, right now is a race to the bottom to a unsustainable point. But also we need to rethink HOW we handle support from the ground up, right now is often a complete separate department, often outsourced, that cannot in any way "talk" to the rest of the company!! This make solving problems often impossible, since we don't have an "API"(way) to solve a specific problem, (i asked for MONTHS... to have the ability to see some configurations of customer account, i could already see every form of personal information, including numbers and the european-equivalent of a social security number, but not the language selected for the UI) the support functions need to be bake-in into the product from the initial design, not as an afterthought.
Until we change how we think about support functionality and consider the support agent job with the same "respect" (i'm not sure this is the right word) as the one of an engineer the ability to talk with a human will not help you.
edit: Also the number of times i was talked-down from the Engineering department that blame everything on the "stupid-user" is infuriating!! Sometimes user make mistake, YOUR software/service NEED to be able to handle that!
edit: grammar
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Where did I say this country is unique? Every country could be identical for all I care, that isn’t the point. The point is, here, we have the idea that you can’t shut anyone up. Maybe everywhere else they have that idea too, but again, that isn’t the point.
the adjectives and adverbs in front of 'country' suggest something 'particular' about one country or a category of countries, which is the word I used, purposefully avoiding the word 'unique' the difference now seems to be that I avoid words that I don't mean and can't rely on it seems like you mean to say that a country has a cultural misunderstanding of a shorthand version of the first amendment that is so pervasiv…
I 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…
The other day I tried to return a Verizon Home Internet modem that I initially signed up for online. I was told after 20 minutes of waiting that they couldn’t process the return in-store and I’d have to contact online support to get a shipping label made. Keep in mind that I’ve already spent 4-6 hours with support at this point to try to get it to work.
I’m sure it’s just some marketing tactic to increase the friction of returns.