Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

thecolumn.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 277 posts

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#41

Post by fcarraldo »

version_five wrote: post #10
subradios wrote: post #2

But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible t…

Automated call centers save money by disincentivizing calling in, and by making people give up. Most people don't think about customer service or support when they are buying stuff. Actually solving the customers problem is way down the list of objectives for most phone systems. It's easy to see this by comparing the quality of phone support with the kind of market power a company has.

That is an interesting thought. Google, for most consumer products (and a good number of business ones) notoriously has next to no phone support at all. Is this an indication of being a market leader or of being a digital monopoly?

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#42

Post by taneq »

subradios wrote: post #2

But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible t…

Depends on the call centre. Some are great and answer your question straight away. Others are newspeak-laden smokescreens designed entirely to either funnel customers into doing what the company wants, or to waste their time until they give up.

“Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#43

Post by teej »

markus_zhang wrote: post #37
Eisenstein wrote: post #35

> Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters This is why it is a good idea to be nice to the people you deal with on the front lines, and write a very politely worded letter to the head of the department at the company you are dealing with, and potentially letters to their boss, and their boss, etc. Mail it, if possi…

How do I find the mailing addresses of the bosses? Actually how do I find the names of the bosses? Maybe from LinkedIn?

This is a real benefit of public corporations: anyone with significant ownership is public. The names of the owners and executives are trivial to find.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#44

Post by Eisenstein »

phreack wrote: post #15

This is why my #1 metric to choose a service provider is support capability. Things will always go wrong and if the point of contact with the customer does not have any agency to fix things effectively, I will not deal at all. The exception is the norm, and front facing employees must be able to act instead of just reading a script and hoping the problem will solve itself. That phrase about recorded apologies is just…

How do you evaluate this metric?

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#45

Post by PradeetPatel »

rqtwteye wrote: post #13

It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.

This is most likely a very US-centric view of the world. As someone who primarily worked in India and the Middle East, where tipping culture doesn't exist, it wasn't so much of an issue.

With that said, workers in the US tend to have significantly more bargaining power than those in countries with more diverse and relaxed labour laws.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#46

Post by maxbond »

subradios wrote: post #2

But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible t…

My experience is that customer service is often trying to convince me that there is no problem or that my problem is my fault and there's nothing they can do about it. I bet many people here can sympathize with me when I say I know from experience that when customer service asks what operating system I use, the correct answer is "Windows," even though I run Linux, because I will never get help with any issue of I admit I'm using Linux (even for issues not at all related to my OS, like issues with my router - I don't call for Linux issues, because I can diagnose and fix those!). They will tell me Linux isn't supported... By their browser app or broadband service or what have you.

The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you.

(I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#48

Post by barbazoo »

Eisenstein wrote: post #35

> Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters This is why it is a good idea to be nice to the people you deal with on the front lines, and write a very politely worded letter to the head of the department at the company you are dealing with, and potentially letters to their boss, and their boss, etc. Mail it, if possi…

How would you go about finding out how to access the manager of some department within MegaCorp? All one can do these days is fill out some contact form and maybe someday getting an email from some noreply email address. I'm also chuckling at the thought of me mentioning that I'm a stock holder. This feels very detached from reality.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#49

Post by phpisthebest »

rqtwteye wrote: post #13

It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.

The problem here is that workers now want to be "paid properly" (what ever that means) and still get tips.

There have been restaurants have tried non-tipping models, consumers and staff both hate it. First the highly productive staff often make less under that model (where poor performers make more), consumers hate it because the menu prices increase, and you end up with McD's level customer service where drinks are never refilled, and service overall degrades.

Re: SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

#50

Post by barbazoo »

teej wrote: post #43
markus_zhang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I find the mailing addresses of the bosses? Actually how do I find the names of the bosses? Maybe from LinkedIn?

This is a real benefit of public corporations: anyone with significant ownership is public. The names of the owners and executives are trivial to find.

And at that level you get people who absolutely don't care if some Joe Shmoe was unhappy with their service or something.
Post reply on HN