Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human” • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #222

rdtwo wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not but if we do pay the 10$ a month i want that support

With all of the recent stories of people being locked out of their Google Accounts with no recourse, it would be great if Google offered one-time customer support for, say, $50 that would work with you to restore access to your accounts. They may not make money hand-over-fist but I bet there's enough need for the service that it would be self-supporting.

If there ever was a shortfall in a given quarter, maybe companies could now dial up the strictness on suspicious account suspensions?

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

#262

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

sillystuff wrote: post #223

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A heuristic such as, right to speak with a human, if a) Customer pays for the service b) Service stores any data of the customer's (e.g., email provider, cloud storage provider, facebook, youtube, instagram, etc., but would need a threshold i.e., a simple throwaway comment would not have enough value to trigger, but an article, photo, or document would). c) Service acts as IdP where being locked out might result in b…

What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person. If you called instead of ticketing, you'd talk to the same person, which now means responses would be slower because phone calls take more time than ticket handling. The phone person won't be any more empowered than the ticket person, so you'll still not have the issue resolved. The only difference is that there's a human to yell at.

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

#263

Post by tedunangst » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

anonymoushn wrote: post #166

tedunangst wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair, though I wonder if that's indicative of the problem not being as simple as just explain it to a human.

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

#264

Post by rkangel » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #257

rkangel wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that is important to you, what prevents you from only doing business with companies who will operate on terms you find agreeable? Is it necessary to force others to avoid low-touch, low-cost companies/services that they appear to be perfectly happy with?

The varying answers to this are effectively political positions. I would suggest that in this case (like in several others) competition is insufficient to guarantee that I have that choice. If I have a GSuite account, but I think that Google's support is rubbish who else can I go to that provides a similar level of service?

To use another example - there are various consumer protection laws in the UK and EU. They cover all sorts of things like guaranteeing safety standards and requiring companies to accept returns. They have arisen over time to cover situations where consumers aren't capable of making the decision (e.g. safety which is complex or you might not find out for 10 years) or it's not something companies compete on but it's something you want for customers (e.g. returns).

Different political approaches, such as the more liberal one in the US leaves it more up to competition, the idea being that competition provides for consumers and it's easier to grow and operate businesses so the economy flourishes and everyone does well that way.

I'd suggest that it's not a perfect system and that you have to fill in the gaps. This is why America is rediscovering the union - in theory companies compete for the job market. If one job is incredibly shitty then employees can leave and get another one. This should provide competitive advantage to companies to make jobs non shitty and companies that don't can't hire and die out. In practice, for reasons that I don't fully understand, that hasn't worked out. Covid has been a trigger for some movement here and therefore some pressure, but it hasn't solved all the problems. Instead an alternate approach can work where employees can bargain collectively.

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

#265

Post by billpg » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

"This is Bill. His job is answer the phone, type in to the computer what people say to him and read back to them what the computer says in response. He is not permitted to exercise any initiative and he's been told in no uncertain terms that he'll be fired if he tries."

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

#266

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

rkangel wrote: post #264

sokoloff wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is important to you, what prevents you from only doing business with companies who will operate on terms you find agreeable? Is it necessary to force others to avoid low-touch, low-cost companies/services that they appear to be perfectly happy with?

The varying answers to this are effectively political positions. I would suggest that in this case (like in several others) competition is insufficient to guarantee that I have that choice. If I have a GSuite account, but I think that Google's support is rubbish who else can I go to that provides a similar level of service? To use another example - there are various consumer protection laws in the UK and EU. They cov…

If no one offers GSuite or a similar competitor to you under terms that you find acceptable, do you have a right to demand that they offer “just like GSuite, only with an additional telephone hotline”?

For me, that answer is a clear no, in that you are not (and should not be) guaranteed that the market provides you such a choice nor does it offer you the choice to deny others the freedom to choose GSuite as it sits today in features and pricing.

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

#267

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

ironmagma wrote: post #256

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hu…

Haven’t you tried calling the DMV before? It’s a nightmare. Governments are not significantly better at this than private industry. Private industry can be great at it, they just have no incentive to be currently.

Here in Maine, the DMV is super easy to deal with, and very reliable.

In fact, my girlfriend's state job involves working with people over the phone to fix problems and help them get what they need, and she's great at it.

A reminder about state governments; You get exactly what you vote for, and no more.

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

#268

Post by pdonis » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

ironmagma wrote: post #254

pdonis wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is, not every business you need to contact is something you are doing business with. For example, a business that has unwittingly published your contact information. Or, alternatively, Equifax, a data broker that makes plenty of money and controls your destiny to some extent yet which you do not pay directly. Besides, there is no way to know in advance that you will have a problem that requires a phone ca…

> not every business you need to contact is something you are doing business with

While this is true, it's not an argument for a blanket regulation that requires all businesses to provide human phone support. The cases you describe (a business unwittingly publishes contact information that you have kept private, or a credit reporting agency that has incorrect information about you) are specific types of situations with legal implications, not just a general "I want something from this business that it's not giving me".

> there is no way to know in advance that you will have a problem that requires a phone call

There is no way to know in advance lots of things. That's why we all need to be prepared to accept tradeoffs. For example, that if you want a product or service that a particular business provides, and they don't offer human phone support, you have to decide whether you're willing to use the product or service with that limitation.

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

#269

Post by mrguyorama » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #191

ironmagma wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My company sells gift cards. Until we were purchased by a very large company, we had customer support agents from day one. They worked in the same office as me, and I was one the team that helped build tools for them to do their job.

The cool thing about having real, talented human beings doing that job instead of some undertrained call center? We treated them as part of our Fraud department. Someone calls in and tries to illicitly get access to cards they don't own, and the support agent had the training and knowledge to often be able to spot that and prevent it.

We didn't charge customers a cent for this privilege.

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

#270

Post by jjav » Thu, Mar 24, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

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…

> What this means is that as a 0 cents customer (even if you pay them) you are completely disposable, no customer matters to them at all.

This summarizes well why the only solution out of this growing nightmare (of accounts and data being disappeared left and right, no recourse anywhere) is through legislation. It is not possible for the companies to fix this of their own initiative.