521–530 of 563 posts
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The world is so much more than these few tech giants where everybody at HN works.
Then give examples. You can't give 0 examples (while the comment you're replying to gave a list) and pretend you know better at the same time.
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As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace. For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose is…
>an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be? > So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve the…
I worked in Europe where it was not acceptable to address the customer in broken English. Easily $15 an hour. But what you are paid is not what it costs the business, (desk, training, IT support, part of a manager, etc), that can easily be double what they are paid. For anything outside the script someone with supervisor access and the authority to make high level decisions needs to get involved, those people cost even more. Some customers call several times for a complex question. $30 was just the average for complex queries.
> Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action
Most of these instances are much cheaper to solve by fixing the UI to allow the customer to do it themselves, if it isn't then it's usually cheaper to lose the customer. And you do not want to make something like "refunds" too easy.
> leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable
I'm sorry to say it, but dissatisfying customers that are expensive to service is often exactly what you need to do to maximise profits, as long as you manage to avoid damage to your brand. It's even better to encourage those customers to go to your competitor. What may "feel right" to you, is not what "feels right" to an MBA. Engineers tend to underestimate that.
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Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support. TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it. The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garb…
> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
That's the TAM he's mentionioning.
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Communication preference is one thing. But what a lot of modern "online" support is really about is preventing people from getting support and forcing them into a dark pattern doing what the company wants and not what they want. If I could unsubscribe, deal with billing errors, resolve complaints, etc online I'd love it. But most support systems try and trap you in some Kafkaesque faq hell that never lets you get nea…
It's ironic, but at the company where I provide support (50-ish employees), one of the most common things I have to tell people is that they actually have to sign in and cancel their memberships themselves. They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves.
Anyone that has ever interacted with a customer service chat bot knows this is pretty stupid. I’m not sure why people (esp. those in the tech community) think we have evolved the technology in any meaningful enough way to replace people yet. How do we know this? Those same people would be against AI chatbots replacing their children’s teachers.
I've tried Amazon's chat function and it's put me in an infinite loop on several occasions. I don't know why they didn't have an agent available (it was business hours). I was surprised that a company with Amazon's resources doesn't have a better handle on this, until I remembered that this is the company that doesn't let you say the reason is "wrong size" when returning clothing items. They're not stupid — they're t…
How do you think they got to be that big?
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>an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be? > So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve the…
> outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe I worked in Europe where it was not acceptable to address the customer in broken English. Easily $15 an hour. But what you are paid is not what it costs the business, (desk, training, IT support, part of a manager, etc), that can easily be double what they are paid. For anything outside the script someone with supervisor access and the authority to make high level…
Even though they spend millions of dollars a year on support, they easily cost us more than that to help them. Simple issues that we had documented solutions for (and explained to them dozens of times preciously) were just as critical as outages to them.
We had to throttle the support we gave them in order to provide a better experience for everyone else and try to train them to be better customers.
I'm looking at you Tata and Vodaphone >:(
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> But they simply aren't designed for a full shopping cart which includes a ton of non-barcoded items. Huh. Everything at my grocery store either has a barcode or is produce that needs to be weighed, so there's no speed advantage for a cashier. And they've gone through different sizes of self-checkout, some of which actually had more room than the cashier checkouts.
> Huh. Everything at my grocery store either has a barcode or is produce that needs to be weighed, so there's no speed advantage for a cashier. An experienced cashier knows what side and corner of the box of Wheaties the bar code is on without having to look, and has the produce code for the bananas memorized. If I have a lot of things, I always go to the cashier rather than the self-checkout. They can always do it f…
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Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support. TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it. The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garb…
> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unknown reasons so we're stuck with the smooth talking asshole. Not that we had one, I've seen almost a dozen in my career and apart from one, all were useless _to us_.
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> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc. The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unkno…
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> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc. The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unkno…