Live data from Hacker News

For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

blog.tomayac.com

101–110 of 178 posts

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#101
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% Customer support representatives, with very few exceptions, are just going to tell you whatever they think will get you off the phone. In I.T., this is generally accomplished by blaming whatever adjacent equipment/services they can plausibly pin the issue on.

Huge competitive opportunity here. All you have to do is hire customer support who is empowered, knowledgeable and actually cares. Source: support is a competitive differentiator for $CURJOB.

When support needs are infrequent enough on the customer end, this effectively becomes a market for lemons--a customer can't know how good your support is until they've bought your product, and by then it's too late for them. People can advertise world-class customer support for one-time purchases because the few customers that encounter the awful support won't move the needle that much compared to shifting money from long term support teams to sales teams.

That being said, I realize this dynamic is likely much different for frequent/long-term buyers such as B2B solutions where quality support does translate to better retention and word-of-mouth advertising.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#102
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author works in Google developer relations, and while devrel aren't quite marketing they will use the latest and greatest Google hammer.

His demo is pretty slick, though. Less than 100 lines of code to get “the box I want on literally every customer service site.”

Provided one is using ChromeOS "standards".

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#103
I hate the word "leverage" as a substitute for "use".

I remember this being absolutely endemic in the Microsoft world in the 00's but the first time I heard it was in the 1980s when the current commander-in-thief was a young upstart punk who leveraged the word "leverage" every chance he could get. For him the real use of leverage in business (e.g. "debt") rapidly turned a moderate-sized real estate empire into a hole in the ground and he recovered by becoming a television performer.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#104
I was thinking the samething about subway. Ideally everyone would just order a sandwich online and by the time they arrive its ready to go. You scan a QR code(or enter a code) and your sandwhich pops out of hole. Having the option to make or in front of you slows down production and is awkward talking over fans and such.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has a side job doing repairs, I charge more when customers try to repair things themselves. There is a whole class of people who are smart enough to fix simple things, but not smart enough to recognize their limited ability. They will strip out all the screws on the machine and then claim warranty after replacing random electronic components on the control board. In reality the problem will be a dirty…

On the one hand what you're saying seems somewhat fair, but on the other hand, I prefer encouraging the attempt. A portion of the people who do this will never have to call you, having managed to solve the issue, and any experience gained with the attempt will go into doing it better next time. In a world where people know less and less about how to solve problems themselves, I think repair skills are incredibly impo…

Yeah, I had the pump on my washing machine go out. I called the repair guy, he said there was nothing to fix, it just needed a new pump. He told me he could do it for $X (on top of the call-out fee), but it wasn't that hard and I could find the replacement pump online for ~1/3X and do it myself. I did that and it took 20 minutes. We will definitely be using that repair company in the future for anything that isn't immediately obviously trivial

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#106
post #41

> Electrolux washing machine I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a signific…

I don't get why people care about about whether a TV is "Smart". I have a "Smart" TV and never use the features, and it doesn't bother me. I have a PiHole in case it tries to do anything funny, and that's good enough for me.

Don’t forget about DNS over HTTPS which bypasses PiHole

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#107
post #41

> Electrolux washing machine I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a signific…

My LG washer and dryer send a push notification to my phone when the load is done, or I can check on the minutes remaining from anywhere. The other stuff I don't care about, but that feature is pretty useful for me. Having an open API would be better, but I know 99% of their customers wouldn't know what to do with that.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#108
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% Customer support representatives, with very few exceptions, are just going to tell you whatever they think will get you off the phone. In I.T., this is generally accomplished by blaming whatever adjacent equipment/services they can plausibly pin the issue on.

Huge competitive opportunity here. All you have to do is hire customer support who is empowered, knowledgeable and actually cares. Source: support is a competitive differentiator for $CURJOB.

Honestly, I'd rather have a product that works so I don't have to call support when it breaks ...

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#109
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they come in OLED now?

Yup, at least from LG: https://www.lg.com/global/business/oled-signage

The parent post saying they “cost a bit higher” is, AFAICT, understating it a wee bit. LG’s consumer 65-inch 4K OLED TVs run between $1200 and $2500 at retail, from a quick search; the 65-inch 4K OLED “professional monitor” linked on that page—e.g., the one that’s closest to an actual TV—retails for around $8000 at B&H. The cheapest OLED commercial TV I could find at b&H was a 55” LG for $3K…and as far as I can tell it’s really just a Smart TV, complete with all internet connectivity, for twice the price because it has the word “commercial” in its name.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#110
post #59
post #41

> Electrolux washing machine I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a signific…

It was a pain to do, but I have a Sony "Google TV" that I fixed to remove or hide the Sony bloatware and Google adware. I hated how the home screen would display full screen loud ads and the TV would constantly want to update so that it could display an even more obnoxious screen layout with more ads, so I loaded a simple launcher that always displays a static list of hand-picked apps. It required (or successfully da…

Open the remote, put insulator over the contacts. Works on Roku/Samsung - voids warranty but, it looks like you're already past that (or moving in that (correct) direction)
Post reply on HN