Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”
Over the past few weeks I've been in five separate instances where I needed a company to help me something, and I could not reach a human. Instead, I had to open tickets that went nowhere, reply to tickets via email, be told conflicting things by different people via email... It's so frustrating, and I'm sure there are others who experience this.
Part of me thinks (perhaps naively) if I had the ability to speak with a real person over the phone, we could sort this out instead of constant emails or creating tickets that go into a black hole. As more companies outsource, automate, or severely cut their customer service department, there needs to be some kind of pressure to stop these frustrating experiences from happening. Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.
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 let alone having an actual human to speak to.
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 culture comes along with a cold disdain for customers and a desire to run everything off algorithms and if some people get caught up in error they just don't care. As a customer its annoying and you can loose a lot of data, but for the companies its their business model. The only way as a customer to not be in that situation is to avoid the businesses based on this model. If they were somehow forced to provide human customer support they may very well be substantially less profitable or not viable as a business anymore.
This is fundamentally about not being undercut by competition which means the costs a business can absorb are fundamentally relative to competitors' costs (especially so in high margin SAAS businesses). If everyone has to offer support and there's no way to cheat, the market will find a way to meet demand efficiently under new circumstances
At a higher price level!
It's important to write out and acknowledge that people cost money.
exactly!
I think the right should be there - but the cost must also be associated with it. For example, there should be a plan for which you pay an upfront cost and get a human.
Cool. What, about $5 a year? Totally worth it.
HN logic:
A) my skillset deserves $300k/y in comp B) I'm not paying another $10/m for my bank just because they'll have to have a human spend a few hours a year supporting me
This is an assumption that a cost increase must certainly be reflected in increased price. Companies price based on customer perceived value, not costs. Particularly in venture funded SAAS, where the profit margin between cost and price is large. And companies have made little effort to invest in live support; if such an investment was necessary we would expect to see live support costs streamline as the industry of live support sees sudden increase in demand and investment.
People cost money, yes. But when you're distributing that cost across thousands (or tens of thousands) of customers every year, those costs are a pittance. Single digit dollars per year on the outside.
Not exactly a bank breaker for a vast majority of businesses.
> costs are a pittance
That is completely dependent on the support burden at the margins of an additional customer. If your business is high-touch, your business won't scale.
Which is perhaps the problem. Companies should not scale beyond what they ought to (when additional scaling hurts those at the margins).
I think the point here is that it’s a bad business model. I don’t mean “bad as in won’t make you money or keep the business running,” I mean “bad for society.” Hence the desire to regulate.
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 humans.
It's one reason why I'm in favor of nationalizing things or keeping things nationalized; take away the drive for min/maxing profits and change things into a public service, and (in theory anyway) things will improve for the better.
> It's one reason why I'm in favor of nationalizing things or keeping things nationalized
I have a business in NJ where the state unemployment department has made an error. After hundreds of phone calls and multiple physical letters, we have received no response in over 16 months. The issue is still outstanding. Governments are no better than businesses in this matter.
You can call them the minute the offices open for a month straight, and get the same “high call volume, call back next business day” message.
The solution is to get a state politician’s ear who back channels their way into getting a government employee to take up the problem. But that is the same as getting a post to top of twitter/Reddit/hacker news and hoping a google employee decides to act.
So you think communism will out perform capitalism? History has proven this to not be true. Once you take away the drive to make profits you take away all drive for innovation or to make quality products.
Yeah the army is communism, so is pensions. God I hate the communist healthcare system in the UK that costs less and has better performance and care than America's.
The more you nationalise the more communism you have and if you have too much you die as we all know. Its a meter god put to balance Pvp in the endgame.
> History has proven this to not be true.
Norways energy grid is nationalised and it is one of the best investment funds in the world
Meanwhile the UK privatised trains in the 70s and has the oldest, slowest and most expensive trains in europe.
History exists outside of 1970s america vs soviet russia stereotypes
You can cherry pick random examples all you want. doesn't make you right.
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.
My current one is fine too. That doesn't mean the DMV in general, for most Americans, doesn't suck. There's some amount of randomness to it, especially the population/density of the area, so I would argue it's not exactly what you vote for, it's also random.
Regulation doesn’t make unprofitable businesses exist. If the business model is unviable with support those businesses will simply not exist or cost an amount of money that is unappealing.
It's your baseless assumption that people are unwilling to pay money for these services.
It's not whether there are people who are willing to pay, but whether there are enough such people so that mandating this would not lead to substantially less number of services provided by companies such that society collectively will be worse off. I.e. a regulation like this proposal will raise the cost of business which ultimately consumers have to bear, and the question is how much cost it will increase overall and if the consequence of that increase is actually acceptable for the society. I don't know anybody knows the answer for sure - it's possible the cost increase is marginal and can be easily absorbed, but maybe not.
It’s your baseless assumption that it’s a baseless assumption. QED.
You might want to lookup what the word if means.
As a prime example look up peoples common complaints about airlines and then ask them why they don’t just fly first or business class, in most cases a cheaper price is favorable to most of the people complaining about airlines. I have a feeling that whatever services this guy is complaining about that a company offers a product that is much higher priced that includes knowledgeable and helpful support that they have simply chosen not to buy.
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 per user per month. A typical ad-supported business might have profits as low as a couple pennies per user per month. A single customer support interaction that takes 5 total minutes could take years to recoup.
I know people want to speak to someone, but the reality is that they like their $0 services even more.
If you are paying $0, you aren't a customer. You aren't a customer of Facebook typically, you are a user. Facebook does have customers, which are advertisers, and they get live support (unsurprisingly). [1]
Besides, we really aren't talking about low-margin businesses. If you are a low-margin business, chances are, your overall impact on society is not that high, and the importance of regulating you is not high either. If we introduced regulations like this it would be restricted to businesses of a certain headcount and revenue, probably.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2476867112525530?id=3...
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.
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.
Agreed! I like the idea of disclosure-based regulation: the onus is on the business to disclose relevant information (like no human support provided), and customers can choose accordingly.
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 call.
> 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.
Yes, and it's quite obvious that businesses are rife with negative consequences, especially in the way they create externalities.
> we all need to be prepared to accept tradeoffs
Do we "need" to be? This is why we have laws. We don't "need" to accept that murder will happen, for example. We can legislate that no, you can't just kill someone because you feel like it. Similarly no, you can't just not answer the phone because you just don't feel like it.
> Do we "need" to be?
In many cases, yes. Not everything in the society you live in is going to be arranged the way you want. That's just a fact of life.
> you can't just kill someone because you feel like it. Similarly no, you can't just not answer the phone because you just don't feel like it.
These cases are not at all equivalent. You don't have a right to have everyone answer your phone calls the way you have a right to your life.
It was an existence proof. I'm not saying they're equivalent, I'm saying sometimes we don't need to accept tradeoffs.
The fact we don't have this right is a problem, and that is the point here: we should. There are many other rights Americans enjoy, and the wealth that companies enjoy here is more than enough to balance out one requirement, especially in the light that the requirement would benefit most businesses anyway.
To draw another analogy, think of anti-monopoly laws. To the standard businessman, they "suck." But on the macro level, for most citizens, and even for most businesses, they are good.
> I'm saying sometimes we don't need to accept tradeoffs.
Sometimes, sure. But we're not discussing "sometimes" in the abstract. We're discussing a particular kind of situation.
> The fact we don't have this right is a problem
The fact that we don't have what right? The right to demand support from businesses that say up front that they don't provide it? No, I don't agree that we should have that right. As others have said, all that will do is make it much harder to start a business.
> There are many other rights Americans enjoy
Not everything that is claimed to be a "right" in today's American society actually is. The actual rights embodied in our Constitution and laws are not rights to demand that other people do things for you. They are rights to have other people, and the government, not do things to you that deprive you of your liberty, like jail you for speaking your mind or search your house without a warrant and probable cause or force you to testify against yourself. To compare those things to a business not providing you with the support you think you're entitled to, when you haven't paid for it and the business explicitly says it doesn't provide it, and say the same kind of "right" is involved in that case, is ridiculous.
If you really think it's a problem that businesses offer products and services but don't provide the support you want, here's my suggestion to you: start your own business that does the things you complain that other businesses don't do. I think you will find it a very enlightening experience.
> To draw another analogy, think of anti-monopoly laws...on the macro level, for most citizens, and even for most businesses, they are good.
No, they're not, they're terrible. The main effect of their application has been to make products and services more expensive for consumers, not less. The "monopolies" that were driven out of business or forced to break up under such laws (e.g., Standard Oil or Alcoa Aluminum) got their huge market share by providing their products more cheaply and in greater quantities than any of their competitors. The anti-trust suits against them were not instigated by consumers who weren't being well served (there weren't any); they were instigated by the competitors, who found it much easier to get the government to invoke laws to their benefit (and to the detriment of their customers) than to actually compete.
> As others have said, all that will do is make it much harder to start a business.
And as I said, this rule would only apply to companies of a certain size and revenue.
> The actual rights embodied in our Constitution and laws are not rights to demand that other people do things for you
Not true. First amendment guaranteeing right to exercise your religious choice is useless if nobody is out there enforcing that right, protecting it for you. Its very existence demands someone protect it for you. If they don't... well, you don't have that right anymore. The fifth amendment guarantees your ability to use a grand jury. What use is that if the jury simply refuses to serve you? Answer: They're not allowed to not serve you, thus they are forced to do something for you.
Monopolies are bad for consumers because no one can compete with them effectively. To offer "just compete with them" as a solution is just ignorant to this concept. With scale comes efficiency, and when you are efficient enough, you don't need to compete anymore.
> start your own business that does the things you complain that other businesses don't do. I think you will find it a very enlightening experience.
It wouldn't be Hacker News without an assumptive, sneering remark like this. Consider that this is a website full of startup entrepreneurs and that maybe you can't safely make this assumption after all.
> Not true.
Your reasoning is specious. The government is only obligated to protect particular rights under the Constitution, not any "right" you dream up. A grand jury is not serving you; it's serving the government, in the course of the government protecting your rights. If we want the government to protect our rights, of course we have a duty to do things like serve on grand juries. But that is not a service to the individual defendants; it's a service to us as a society, through the government.
> Monopolies are bad for consumers because no one can compete with them effectively.
If no one can compete with them because no one can offer the same products and services at an equally low price and in equally large quantities, that's not bad for consumers. That's good. What's bad is when the government steps in at the behest of the failed competitors to break up the monopolies, raising prices, lowering supply, and making things worse for consumers, as in the historical examples I gave.
If no one can compete with them effectively because they've bought special privileges from the government (which is often the case--for example, that's how railroad barons in the US in the late 19th century avoided competition, by getting the government to give them exclusive rights over particular routes), that's a reason to have less government regulation, not more.
If no one can compete with them effectively because no one is even trying, then someone should try. For example, if having guaranteed human phone support is something valuable to customers, then customers will pay for it. So there's an obvious business opportunity (and all the startup entrepreneurs you refer to on this site should be champing at the bit to take it). If it's not valuable enough to customers for them to pay for it, then why should the law step in and require it?
There is a wide category of things afforded to ordinary citizens categorized as "rights" which aren't in the constitution. [1]
> A grand jury is not serving you; it's serving the government ... it's a service to us as a society
These are contradictory. If it's a service to the society, it's a service to me as well, as I am part of the society. True, not "just" me, but I also never advocated for any right that applied to just me. The discussion was always about creating a right for everyone to discuss with (reasonably sized, reasonably financed) companies, their reasonably-chosen concerns.
> If no one can compete with them [...] that's not bad for consumers. That's good.
Yes, individual transactions become cheaper when the business is large. However, choice is greater when the business is small, because then there are more competitors. We can agree that it would not be efficient for the economy for every establishment to be its own business, meaning that every hardware store and every restaurant was its own corporation. However can we not agree that it is also not efficient when a very large business goes bankrupt and we either have to urgently reshuffle the economy and/or bail them out?
And additionally, do you not think predatory pricing is a thing? This is something recognized to be used by institutions such as Wal-mart and Amazon.
> if having guaranteed human phone support is something valuable to customers, then customers will pay for it.
How would I even tell the company I want this feature, if I can't get through to them on the phone in the first place? How would they know it's wanted, if they never hear from anybody? And if they can't even answer to people who have paid them for their core product, why would they to anyone else?
[1] https://www.hg.org/consume.html
> If it's a service to the society, it's a service to me as well, as I am part of the society.
You're quibbling. The grand jury has to do its duty regardless of how the defendant has behaved. A business does not have to give you what you want regardless of how you behave. These two things are not in the same category, no matter how you try to twist words.
> The discussion was always about creating a right
Yes, "creating" a right that currently doesn't exist, just because you feel entitled. That's not how rights work.
> choice is greater when the business is small, because then there are more competitors.
And the best way to discourage such choice is to pile more and more regulations on businesses. If you want more small businesses to provide choice, you need to make it easier to start a business, not harder. All these "rights" people think businesses owe them have a cost. If you as a customer are willing to pay the cost, then it's not a matter of "rights" at all; it's a straightforward business transaction, value for value. If you as a customer aren't willing to pay the cost, where is it supposed to come from? Things like grand juries ultimately get paid for by all of us as taxpayers. Are you willing to raise your taxes so the government can pay for phone support for all businesses?
> We can agree that it would not be efficient for the economy for every establishment to be its own business, meaning that every hardware store and every restaurant was its own corporation.
No, I don't agree to that. What size of business is most efficient in a free market gets decided by the market. What size of business is most "efficient" in our current society, which in many ways is not a free market, gets decided by lots of things, most of them having to do with various ways the government interferes in the economy. See further comments below.
> do you not think predatory pricing is a thing?
No, I think it's a buzzword used by people who have a political axe to grind but don't understand basic economics.
> This is something recognized to be used by institutions such as Wal-mart and Amazon.
And claims like that are, as I implied just above, bogus. Wal-mart and Amazon have the market positions they do for two main reasons, one good and one bad. The good reason is that they make use of economies of scale to provide products and services at prices nobody else can match, which is good for us as customers. The bad reason is that part of what enables them to do that is taking advantage of government interference in the economy (such as cheap loans for building facilities like warehouses and distribution centers that they can get but mom and pop small businesses can't) and bullying their supply chain in various ways that often cross the line into regulatory violations, but of course those regulations aren't enforced the way regulations are enforced against small businesses who don't have deep pockets and lots of lawyers.
> How would I even tell the company I want this feature, if I can't get through to them on the phone in the first place?
This is silly. Do you call companies on the phone to tell them about all the things you would like them to provide? Of course not. Nobody does.
Companies don't adopt these business models because they don't know that support is a valuable service. They adopt these business models because they don't think they can provide the support people would want at a price people would pay for. And in many, if not most, cases, I suspect they're right. That's not something that can be fixed by government regulation. It can only be fixed by either customers changing how much they are willing to pay, or some innovator (like, oh, I don't know, a startup entrepreneur on HN) figuring out how to provide that kind of support more cheaply and selling it as a service.
> That's not how rights work.
For every right, before it was created, it didn't exist. This seems tautological. Why would it have been created if it already effectively existed? The whole idea of rights is that it legally enforces something that wasn't any kind of guarantee before, and its absence caused all kinds of problems.
> No, I don't agree to that. [...] What size of business is most "efficient" in our current society, which in many ways is not a free market, gets decided by lots of things, most of them having to do with various ways the government interferes in the economy
You were just arguing that a monopoly is the most efficient thing to do business with on account of how it's cheaper. So now you are saying that it isn't necessarily. So I can only assume this means I can now argue that just because something became a monopoly, does not mean it is the best entity to do business with. And yet, it is a monopoly, indicating a non-ideal situation for the consumer, because there are more efficient ways to spend your money, but because they're a monopoly, you can't spend them that way. Hence how it's not ideal for consumers.
> This is silly. Do you call companies on the phone to tell them about all the things you would like them to provide? Of course not.
What do you think a user research call is? How do companies build their backlogs at all? Normally not by not talking to customers or potential customers.
> they don't think they can provide the support people would want at a price people would pay for.
This is the exact problem. Companies don't know the exact value of providing phone support because it is hard to measure. It's especially hard to measure at a societal level. At the very least, lack of phone call becomes an externality like pollution.
> For every right, before it was created, it didn't exist.
What if people's basic rights weren't "created" by anyone? What if they just have always existed? Or at least have existed at least as long as human societies have?
This is pretty much the view the Founders of the US had. They did not view the Constitution as creating rights but as acknowledging that people already have certain rights and requiring the government to respect them.
> This seems tautological.
I think you need to expand your thinking. See above.
I don't have anything further of substance to add to the discussion at this point.
The constitution was the result of several heated debates (conventions) and versions of it were rejected. If the rights already existed, people would not have had to fight about what they should be. It would also mean we would have the exact same rights as are had in any other country, and it’s clear that this is not true.
Seems hard to regulate the model... but y I agree we can regulate the requirement to have a no-dark-pattern way to reach a human.
Obviously, we need to avoid abuse especially automated abuse, and this in turn becomes difficult.
So... perhaps it makes the most sense to roll this issue into regulation against dark patterns.
Or... fund an organization exposing dark patterns and helping consumers choose companies that avoid them.
Aka the Google model
Yeah, but, probably you're not Google's customer; you're their product.
Most people who complain about Google are either paying for G suite or ad partners in the Adsense program. Those are Google customers and partners
Oh yes. Have you ever really tried to speak to someone at google? It's an educational experience, it teaches you the value of patience, the impermanence of everything.
It's a bit like what I imagine being inside the total perspective vortex is like.
> The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
> Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
> “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
> And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.
> Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
> To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion.
>Have you ever really tried to speak to someone at google?
Thought such thing wasn't even possible.
It’s very easy if you’re a Google Ads customer. Really underscores the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” saying
>> I think its important to recognise that quite a lot of modern web based companies are running their business on the 0 cents model.
You mean the zero fucks model. What they really want to do is build a money-making machine that requires no humans to operate and somehow generate MRR for them. Hey we all would like to retire some day which requires low effort MRR, but a business serving people often requires a bit more than some fancy infrastructure and a drink on the beach.
This basically boils down to: it's okay to inflict damage upon customers that don't make you money. That is not only unethical, it should be illegal. There is no way for a customer to know beforehand that this will happen to them, and at the sheer scale these companies operate, voting with your feet is impossible. The reason is that 99% of customers will never run into a problem, but the 1% that does gets damaged disproportionately without repercussion.
>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 can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.
> If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.
This 100%. It reminds me of the similar issue of zero-hour contracts and living wages. One person I know complained that putting restrictions on zero hour contacts, and upping the amount that he would have to pay workers, would mean he couldn't hire any (for his extremely early-stage startup with no investment(!)).
In a similar vein, the answer is the same -- if you can't afford to pay employees, don't hire them.
And this applies more generally than either of our examples -- if a company cannot afford to do something ethically, then it shouldn't do it at all. A business that cannot survive when forced to comply with the bare minimum of ethical practices deserves to fail. You cannot simultaneously believe in a capitalist market without embracing with open arms, the failure of companies that couldn't stick it.
But you can comply with ethical business practices without hiring employees to deal with hundreds of thousands of callers. Automated moderation is a thing, and actually responding to support tickets instead of ignoring them is also a thing.
I think you underestimate how many services you rely on that wouldn't be able to survive with a legal requirement that they were required to take calls from any human that wanted to contact them. Presumably those services are useful to you and you wouldn't want them to be closed down, yes? And similarly, you wouldn't want to be paying the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center to deal with not only customers but potentially affected non-customers (as in the Giphy example in the parallel comment thread).
>the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center
You're estimating what, that every customer would on average spend at at least an hour a month on the phone with each and every service they do business with?
>potentially affected non-customers
There is a reason that most companies make it hard to talk to a human before you've already exhausted all other support channels.
Make something like that a right and people will use it. Maybe 99% of the time you won't need a human for a particular service in a month, but there will be users who are on the phone every day, maybe multiple times per day.
And your monthly fee would need to exist to pay for the users who abuse the right.
>if you can't afford to pay employees, don't hire them.
If you can't afford to work a job, don't take it.
Wage slavery is a fact and inevitability of capitalism
A "right to speak with a human" makes sense to me on an industry-by-industry basis, in the same way that construction companies and restaurants have different regulatory agencies and checks.
Applying it to all businesses sounds like a bad idea, however. Financial institutions? Certainly. Healthcare companies? Makes all kinds of sense. But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support.
> But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support.
Giphy hosts user-generated content and encourages sharing.
Imagine someone uploads a gif of you and fake subtitles of racial slurs and calls to violence.
It starts trending. Your friends and families are asking you about it. You've submitted a request to remove it, but got no response yet. You can't get hold of any human at Giphy. You get a call from your company's HR.
Giphy definitely needs human customer support.
Has this actually happened?
Additionally, you are not a customer of giphy. So now giphy has to reasonably have the amount of human customer support for non-customers? So, essentially everyone on earth?
The scenario above was fictitious, but people need content removed all the time. Here's an article [1] from The Guardian about Pornhub being slow to remove revenge porn and CSAM. And in this thread you'll find a business owner trying to remove a bad faith review.
Yes, you'll need more staff depending on your business' impact on people's lives, regardless if they are "customers" or not. If you have so many complaints you can't pay enough people to deal with it, you should not be in business.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
Aren't there laws in some jurisdictions requiring a company to provide and/or delete all data about a customer upon request? In which case there absolutely must be a way to contact someone, in order to facilitate this process.
Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. Giphy has the choice of one of two extremes: provide human customer support to everyone, or provide no customer support predicated on the idea that take down requests necessarily require human level support?
No, Giphy really doesn't need the "right to speak to a human."
It may need (I don't know if they have this already, and I don't care to do the research) a "Report" button with various options including "Hate speech" and "Takedown Request: Moral Rights" and similar.
Think about it: A political image that's offensive to one side or another could generate hundreds of thousands of protest calls, if everyone had the right to speak to a human. I mean, if you knew you had this right, and you wanted them to take down an image, then of course you're going to demand the right to talk to someone. To say that you don't like the image.
Which they could just as easily handle with a Report button and a single review of the image by a human to check to see that it satisfies the ToS.
And that's just one image. Every one that goes viral could result in hundreds of thousands of calls.
No, it really just doesn't scale. If you give people the means to call you, you need to be able to handle way more people calling than you have customers, and some companies that provide a valuable service simply don't have the margin.
> 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 account? Do you really think it's a good idea to make this a legal right?
Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account.
The whole idea is ridiculous. Unless you want most of the free internet to disappear completely (or move overseas) then it's a non-starter.
I think we can presume the author means:
goods/services I have exchanged funds for.
Additionally I would point out that Gmail makes plenty of money off our data and we all have written about or thought about how 'users are the product'.
Not sure why there's seemingly a heightened emotional response here.
There's always an answer.
If you don't pay for it: "You're not the customer, you're the product."
If you do pay for it: "You get what you pay for."
If you pay for it and have a contract specifying you will get it: "Not worth taking it to court."
If you do take it to court: "We must stop all these frivolous lawsuits!"
There is always an answer.
Respectfully, you’re begging the question that it would be frivolous. If the contract says they must have a human respond within so much time and the company fails to do that, the lawsuit would not be frivolous to a rational person.
It wouldn't be frivolous, it would be called frivolous.
Like how the McDonald's coffee case was called frivolous even when it manifestly was not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
> The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman, suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region when she accidentally spilled coffee in her lap after purchasing it from a McDonald's restaurant. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.
[snip]
> Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20°F (11°C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.
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 being locked out of other services (e.g., "login with facebook/google", Okta, etc.)
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.
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.
Personally, I want a "human" option to be on the first menu of every phone robot menu. A site that only supports a web-based chat option would have to have humans at the other side rather than some crappy chatbot. 'Contact Us' pages should include email addresses that are monitored by humans. It would be a huge improvement if contact a human via any means was available at every company.
But, having the last resort option to speak to a human even when there is the ability to reach a human via other modalities can be useful.
There is a large "enterprise" company where the support folks always ignore everything I submit to the ticket, and then ask for all the things already provided. The only way to make progress with them is to get on a call. You are correct, it shouldn't be necessary-- but it is. And, if you do not have that last resort method, good luck. You may be stuck having to reply with the same information to a series of support folks without making progress on the case for weeks.
Extending your point: the status quo probably leads to more lawsuits because there’s no way or working with the company directly (between customer support ticks) and a lawsuit. Twitter? Lol
This doesn't address the question I asked. What does speaking to a human accomplish? Why does that solve your problem in a way that a ticket doesn't?
You seem to be implicitly assuming that the human on the phone has more power than the one behind a ticket system, but there's no reason to believe that. If the rule is that you need to provide specific information to recover your account, speaking to a human won't fix that when you don't have the information.
It at least changes the cost dynamics away from the companies just shafting users because only the users wear cost.
Clearly companies are en masse externalizing the costs of support onto users, and plainly not supporting users in fixing real problems with systems that are now required to live in society. It's at the stage where it's breaking our well functioning civil society and turning the first world into a third world kafkaesque dystopia.
I believe this is an economic race to the bottom and regulation is the answer to fixing it.
Here's the basis of an idea for how to fix the power dynamics so the market works properly
1) an ombusdman that can fine companies for user abuse of wasting user time, and redistribute the fine to the users 2) regulations of how long a company can on average keep users on hold, such as no more than 10 minutes to speak to a human, otherwise the speak to a human option is useless as the company makes it take longer than the median user can afford 3) regulations of threshold of acceptable customer complaints against a company, otherwise the company will make the service operators unable to actually fix anything as you note 4) a process with the ombusdman where when the number of complaints exceeds a threshold the company is fined and the fine distributed amongst the complaining users 5) some sanity check here to prevent user abuse, such as checking the average wait times, and confirming the customer service actually never fixes issues from a number of tests. The tests could be made in collaboration with a subset complaining customers.
But see this is my point, it's not just about "speaking to a human", it's about having an empowered ombudsperson who can circumvent the normal systems of authority at the company to resolve user issues for certain people.
That's a much, much, much bigger ask than just "speaking to a human".
> You seem to be implicitly assuming that the human on the phone has more power than the one behind a ticket system, but there's no reason to believe that.
It is not necessarily about power, it is about judgement. However clever or 'smart' the systems we design, there is still a vast gap between what automation can understand and what a human can understand. There are countless examples of a system only doing what it was told to do, where any human with an IQ higher than 80 would immediately recognize that the system is being incredibly dumb and wrong in this particular case.
There needs to be some last resort for the victims of those errors when there are real consequences to these mistakes.
Of course it's about power. If the answer is "we can't recover your account by security policy", speaking to someone who believes you isn't going to help you (and in many cases, this is a good thing, as tricking account recover techs is something scammers are good at).
>What does speaking to a human accomplish? Your ticket was probably reviewed by a real person.
It's hard for my not to wish you to have the kind of horrible automated ticket/service experience that makes everybody who had gone through it immediately understand the value of speaking to a human.
What happens then when companies decide to outsource speaking to a human. Each human agent only handles very specific set of things. When you call you are constantly redirected and on hold. Nobody is willing to help you because your specific problem is outside of what they are comfortable with. Nobody cares about customer service because they are just outsourced. People who are working at outsourcing company's are underpaid and don't care much about any individual customer. In order to keep you from giving them a bad review/comment they just transfer you.
For instance I had an issue with my phone, I had to call support. I got redirected to 5 agents at 3 different companies before I finally started getting anywhere. Note some of those agents even gave me the wrong phone number and basically ended up taking me to some random unrelated companies. The end result was to start doing things over email (basically same as ticketing). After hours of phone calls and even longer on hold I'm finally (maybe) getting somewhere using emails. Still haven't gotten to the destination but maybe I will soon
> Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Sure, it's convenient to have a free github account. I get it, I have one.
But what motivates github to give out free accounts? It is most definitely not that they are a benevolent company doing it as a free community service because they're nice. No, they do it for three main reasons:
1. Get individuals familiar with and hooked on the service so they'll promote it as a paid service at their workplace.
2. Build the network effect that helps them. "Everyone is on github", so you must be too.
3. Build a moat against up and coming possible competitors. If the baseline is free, it's harder for a newcomer to build revenue in that space to compete.
All of these are self-serving interestes, they help github (which is fine) but they also hinder potential competition (not good) and build a tendency towards monopolistic services (very bad).
The internet isn't free; we pay with our privacy! I would be far happier if I could pay for random internet services with credits from my browser (possibly refilled by my ISP every month) rather than selling my privacy off to some unknown advertiser I never really wanted to be associated with if I actually knew what was going on. Micropayments built into the browser would really be an improvement and better align the interests of platforms with the interests of their users.
I agree with you, but, unfortunately, research shows that only 5% of customers care that their privacy is being sold off. The rest don't care. Accuweather, for instance, (which is so lousy with ads that it compromises the experience of using the app,) offered a deal where you could pay $5/year and not be tracked or have ads. I took advantage of the offer. But so few others did that Accuweather cancelled the service. I guess it wasn't worth their trouble to keep track of who had paid and so didn't get ads for less than 5% of their users to sign on.
I too won't bother to sign up for a $5 per year subscription to a website, as the pain of a potential credit card compromise is more than the $5/a subscription is worth. That's why I think it needs to go via a browser / ISP based system. Using credit cards is simply too much friction for micropayments. Give me one place to signup that covers the majority of websites that I use and it's a completely different value proposition.
>If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer?
Places where you "don't pay" still have certain regulations they need to pass.
If you give free food to people on the street (for some marketing event or charity or whatever) you still need to pass the cost of sanitary inspections and such.
>Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account. The whole idea is ridiculous
They way you've framed it, perhaps. Or maybe not.
For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.
Second, notice the strawman phrasing: "If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account". How about them being forced to giving it to anyone with a PAID account?
> For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.
It's not a win for the hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries who cannot justify the costing. The free account model has massive value to an unimaginable number of people in the world, whereas to those like you and I it's of minor benefit.
How do you define "web based company"? If I slap together a 50 line program in a few minutes and offer it on my personal domain for anyone to use, do I have to publish my phone number for anyone to call if they have a problem with it someday?
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?
You're not providing a service though are you? You're providing intellectual property for people to do things with.
And if I throw an instance of it up on my web server that runs on a raspberry pi next to the cat litter in my basement? Now do I need to provide phone support to the world?
Minimum headcount requirement would render this irrelevant, and make sense in the spirit of the regulation.
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.
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.
Should we have minimum wage, FDA certification, or workplace safety requirements or should we let the market sort all that out too?
Now that you’ve brought them in: I don’t think it should illegal to contract for work however you like and think that cannabis being an FDA Schedule 1 drug is a ludicrous overreach far out of proportion to the facts or what I think the proper mandate of government is, so yeah, I do think the individuals in a market often have a better answer than government bans on individual freedoms.
If you slap together 50 lines of code, can you attempt a valuation and get funding for it?
:shrug:
Are you 'side hustling' to make money and thus having customers?
What's a customer? I don't charge money, but neither does Google. Where is the line drawn?
ooo good point. Like if you have Google ads running on your page generating trivial income, yes it would become more challenging to define a customer.
I think this would probably be addressed in a minimum size (headcount) before the regulation is required, which makes sense because the problem is businesses scaling their customer base and scope beyond their physical resources.
Generally if you're making money off of me or if I'm giving money in exchange for services - customer.
Here are some real world examples that would hold up pre-current state: Club: even if I dont pay for a beverage or cover, I am in fact a customer. Shown by the fact that if I get injured at said club, or other events occur the responsible parties are managing/own the club.
Print shop: Go into a shop, pay for a thing or service, are a customer.
There was a time, that many of us can remember, where automated phone services were nascent, there was no IVR and there was definitely no complex intent recognition paired with sentiment analysis.
The smallest little business needed a phone. When it rang, they answered it. Those businesses afforded it and frankly the min. wage has barely gone up since then so a business, one that exchanges a service/place/goods/my information for money, can afford to do it.
I am in full agreement with my perception of OP's comment.
I hear you, and you're point seems logical to me. However, would this not put an end to the public web as we know it? Specifically self-hosting.
What do you think about implementing this with a minimum organization size? I just do not see this same problem happening with small firms, generally they are easy to get in touch with. I wouldn't want them regulated unless the nature of the problem changed.
Completely okay with it being restricted to a revenue generation or size of company.
I'd make the discrepancy of revenue generation because otherwise a company may just find itself full of contractors and not enough FTEs to qualify for having this 'right to speak with a human' (like Uber).
wdyt
I think a better requirement (that is, more likely to achieve the desired result) may be to make it clear on signup that there will be no human support provided. I suspect this would be enough to allow customers to make an informed decision, so that folks that value real support can choose companies that provide it. Today, I can sign up for a service online and only find out in my moment of need that there's no hope of getting help from a real person. But perhaps people would still just choose the cheapest option regardless.
> If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.
Why do you choose such a company to do business with at the first place?
> Part of me thinks (perhaps naively) if I had the ability to speak with a real person over the phone, we could sort this out instead of constant emails or creating tickets that go into a black hole. As more companies outsource, automate, or severely cut their customer service department, there needs to be some kind of pressure to stop these frustrating experiences from happening.
Look at Dell or HP customer service. Google, Github or Digital ocean will become the same. Yes, you will never get the product designer or systems or devops engineer from those companies. The customer service will repeat the same thing million times over. (I lost Apple account, and unlike Google, I could reach Apple but they just repeated the same thing. (i.e) password is wrong; not our problem).
Also note that if there is direct connection to devops or dev, people ask silly questions to waste time. (i.e) These companies pay just $5000 per year to run their entire business with profits 100X and expect $10,000 per month DevOps will troubleshoot their problems.
> Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.
Example please. As long as it is not w e a p o n s all is wide open market.
The problem is companies compete and the ones that reduce their costs for support drive the other ones out of business.
This has evolved to the stage where it's endemic in what used to be well functioning societies, that day to day civic economic interactions are now broken, which is what the posted talked about.
The answer is regulating to avoid this race to the buttom.
I agree with you, but it does make me wonder what the outcome would be like? What goes away? I genuinely don't know.
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.
Once one realizes this, one sees the value of paying for goods and services. Being the customer and not the product. The next step is seeking out the best service providers and rewarding them with dollars.
I totally agree and think this way. It's just that we are 0.01% of the market. Or, can we even call a "market" such a small group of people? We might be thousands, perhaps dozens of thousands, or even a hundred thousand. Yet, this isn't enough to sustain the sheer amount of services we'd require in our modern lives.
It's pretty hard to avoid being the product regardless of whether you're the customer.
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 correspondingly higher (those extra salaries have to come from somewhere). Most people just went with the cheapest option every time, one of the reasons that business failed.
People are stupid. They don't value certain value adds like good support until it becomes important. But more often than not by that point its too late. People are short sighted and value price over everything else.
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.
> professionally complained
If I told my cost center that I went with a more expensive vendor because "they were friendlier", that would pretty much open an investigation...
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.
That has been my experience as well, by and large. The "virtual assistant" thing propagated by the 4-hour work week crowd only works under very specific circumstances.
Fair, though I wonder if that's indicative of the problem not being as simple as just explain it to a human.
> 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 company, do you really want to have to put your personal phone number on the project to comply with such a law?
I feel like this was solved decades ago with toll-numbers (vs. the 800-* toll-free numbers). Want to call? it costs $2.00 per minute.
I agree, just charge whoever needs the service. People won't pay premium for support as an insurance. When something go wrong, they'll happily pay.
Probably not but if we do pay the 10$ 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?
And when they dial it up a bit too much and people start moving to some new platform in frustration, they can just use those service fees to buy that!
I would be thrilled to have it taken out of the c-suite bonuses for organizations that large. Without hesitation
The line that support would render billion dollar multinationals penniless is so tired at this point. Google made 257 BILLION dollars last year and has a 2 TRILLION dollar market cap. There's enough compensation in there to pay for the greatest support team the world has ever seen. There is simply no will to do it
quite a lot of modern web based companies may be doing this. definitely smaller companies.
However most services you use (ISPs, consumer internet products like gmail, consumer electronics) are making a fair share of profit and attempting to a zero human approach through other major CRM/CX players to keep growing that margin.
The amount of reliance on poorly installed, and still nascent technology is staggering and leaves many consumers in endless automated loops with no hope for resolution.
Now that offices are also harder to come by, we have created our own kafka-esque situations.
> 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.
Not all business models are legal, nor should they be. All businesses must plan for and absorb the costs associated with complying with applicable regulations. I fully support the idea of requiring businesses to provide support channels for issues that are important to society. I'm looking at you Google: I should be able to call and report the ad you just served up to my elderly father for a phishing website for a completely innocuous web search, and Google should have to take appropriate actions since it's virtually impossible to do that today. Business models that cause harm to society deserve to be regulated.
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 do the operation, saying that there must be a way to do it without me having to travel hundreds of km. The person absolutely refused to even try to help me. "No, there's no way to do it, you'll have to go to your branch office." I begged, I got angry. (This was after leaving this issue for a couple of years -- travel has not exactly been easy, so there are reasons I didn't manage to do it yet, and was getting desperate.) All to no avail, the person just. could. not. help me.
Fine, I left, very annoyed. The next day, I went to a different branch, told the same story, and explained how extremely inconvenient the whole thing is. I went in expecting failure. To my surprise, the person responded kindly, said "okay, I can send an inter-branch memo, I'll do the operation you pay this much, done and done." I signed something, walked out smiling, and the next business day, received a confirmation email from my branch in the other city.
Moral of the story: I completely agree with the premise here, but just keep in mind that even if you talk to a human, your millage may vary greatly depending on who you speak to and what side of the bed they got up on.
My partner bought some clothing in Brazil and wanted to exchange it at the store for something else. Unfortunately she lost the receipt, and the alternative which is providing your SSN is not available to her (not a citizen). The exchange was denied.
We walked into another store location. They were sympathetic to the foreigner situation, and made an exception.
Takeaway: Computers can't see that a process is flawed and go outside it when it makes sense to do so. Computers also can't provide feedback to the company that the process is flawed.
Aside:
Brazilian bureaucracies, even commercial ones are extremely unfriendly to non-brazilians:
- Poor bilingual support (EN or ES).
- Expectation of a SSN for all customers (this included booking pre-flight Covid tests).
- In many situations a foreign credit card will not work for online purchases (SSN & brazilian zip code will be checked against your card). Fry's "shut up and take my money" meme was extremely relevant here, as many times I wanted to make a purchase, but it wasn't possible to do so.
There is no SSN in Brazil.
CPF - Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPF_number
I'd expect he's referring to the Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas, just doing so by a more recognizable term.
Just a small point, but if you take any time on Brazil, you are expected to get a CPF, it's not only for citizens, it's for people that pay taxes.
That doesn't mean it's ok for stores to require it. It's not ok.
So glad I don't have to deal with a bank but have the option of non-profit credit unions for all my financial needs.
Now if medical-coops would just become a thing :p
This. Humans aren't a panacea for getting problems solved.
I would much rather open a ticket than wait on hold for hours to speak with a human in a call center in a low wage country half way around the world, with whom I can't easily communicate either because they have a limited mastery of English, or just because we speak very different dialects with very different accents and have limited shared cultural context with which to understand my problem, and who has no ability to solve any problem not contemplated by their script.
Humans don't solve problems. Thoughtful humans who can understand your problem, and put in a genuine effort to get it solved, and are empowered to actually do so - those are the things that solve problems, and they're much much more rare.
Also, we're more and more moving to the situation where the humans might as well be computers. 1. They don't have the training or judgment to think about your problem and route you in the right direction and/or 2. They are disallowed from doing anything besides what the computer tells them they can do. So you tell them what you want, and if it doesn't fall neatly into one of the enumerated buckets of Things They Can Do, you're out of luck. Reminds me of the Hospital Customer Support scene [1] from Idiocracy.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXzJR7K0wK0
Yes, but at least you have the hope that talking to the right human would fix the issue eventually. Talking to automated systems repeatedly and each time hoping for a different outcome is akin to Don Quijote battling the windmills. Even in a Kafkian bureaucratic nightmare there’s a chance a human would eventually help you out but with automated systems there’s no reasoning because they’re poorly automated, edgecases are traps you can never get out of.
> just keep in mind that even if you talk to a human, your millage may vary greatly depending on who you speak to and what side of the bed they got up on.
It goes even deeper than this. Often times when you "speak to a human", the capabilities of that human are essentially limited to just putting things into an internal ticket system. A lot of companies set up their systems this way - front end support who talks to customers and really isn't empowered to do anything, and a back office that acts on those requests (iff a request is well-formed).
Even traditional businesses like brick and mortar banks can operate this way, with your local rep at a desk calling into a call center to straighten out account issues. Regional banks seem to be the worst offenders here, having gotten large enough to implement a system but not large enough to address it's failings. So don't think that simply talking to a "person" will save you!
I used to judge banks until now I run a company that handles deposits. On the third day of launch I ran into a small bug that allowed some rogue users to drain all the money in our account at the time (which was about $400 only at least). Right then and there I fully understood why an organization dealing with money needs red tape as more of a safety harness than anything
This is empirically a false dichotomy. You can have flexibility and safety. It just takes the right culture. You have to do away with hierarchy, blame, etc.
In fact, I believe flexibility can ultimately lead to even greater safety than bureaucracy, which is, as Graeber put it, active stupidity. And while aiming for stupidity might rule out some classes of errors, it definitely introduces even more of them.
I think I disagree. In security (not just financial), security and user convenience are almost always at war with each other. And "culture" doesn't seem to fix it.
Have you read anything by e.g. Sidney Dekker or Nancy Leveson on "human error"?
It sounds like you're picturing fully automated systems in which case you're right; flexibility is at conflict with security (as far as we know now, anyway.)
But once you throw humans into the loop, allowing them to be autonomous and not rule-bound, command-obeying robots can improve security a lot.
There’s a really interesting book called “Black Box Thinking” about the culture of safety & reducing errors. The author uses the airline industry (highly focused on the end-result of safe operations and expressly avoids placing blame) to illustrate how culture can indeed have a huge impact on these things. The “fatal” errors often aren’t just one big point of failure but many small issues in combination. A culture where employees aren’t afraid to speak up about the small issues is really valuable because often many of the big problems could have been solved by preventing just one or more of the smaller underlying problems.
Brick and mortar stores are becoming increasingly useless.
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.
I agree that companies have a responsibility to listen to and address customer complaints. The problem is that a small percentage of customers create the bulk of the customer support burden. With phone support this gets even more skewed. You can't have engineers do phone support or they won't be able to get any real work done with all the interruptions. You can have engineers investigate and address all complaints that arrive by email. I strongly believe email support that goes directly to the people most knowledgable to fix the underlying problem is the best approach.
Companies that provide bad customer support just don't care. They'll provide phone support if they feel they have to, but they'll outsource it for cost reasons. Talking to people who are friendly but clueless is at least as frustrating for me as creating a ticket that doesn't go anywhere.
> Talking to people who are friendly but clueless is at least as frustrating for me as creating a ticket that doesn't go anywhere.
Me too. I think that extra frustration is partially because I know it's not the fault of the person I'm speaking to that they've been put in that position, so I feel like I have to keep my irritation to myself, which I find hard when it's the third person I've spoken to and they've asked me to describe the issue all over again. At least with written text it's easier to look back over the notes.
Let alone customers who abuse support staff: cursing them out, treating them like idiots, being racist, etc
Finding someone skilled enough to fix complex technical issues and is willing to pickup the phone each time is incredibly difficult. By the time you're skilled-up, you're done dealing with the abuses of the general public.
In my experience, companies value call center staff so little that turnover is extremely high. That means that you're unlikely to speak to someone with enough experience to solve your problems correctly. I can't count how many times I've had to call a company half-a-dozen times and received half-a-dozen different wrong or unhelpful responses. I'd like calling to be more available, but I don't believe it's a silver bullet solution.
My first job was a small e-commerce shop that had a one person on customer support. We couldn’t keep them and the owner would say your typical stuff like everyone’s lazy etc. Well one month we had trouble finding someone so I picked up the phones when I can and…
It’s not just the company and it’s owners who think so little of CS. Almost every caller was obviously someone with an issue and they had no problem venting their frustration at the person on the phone. I began to dread every phone call and would do all of the things I hate when calling a place. I put people on indefinite holds, I let the phones ring a little more than I should hoping they would give up and hang up etc. Worst part was a felt for these people, a lot of their complaints were valid and a lot of the times they deserved a refund etc but there was nothing I could do to help.
I’m an extrovert who loves talking with people and In my younger days I worked everything from a nasty bug ranch to construction, hard jobs that didn’t pay enough with unnecessarily mean bosses, and that month of answering phones was the worst working experience of my life. I know not every place is that level of bad but I’m not sure a number you could pay me that would be worth the stress.
> I put people on indefinite holds, I let the phones ring a little more than I should hoping they would give up and hang up etc.
The people who call into customer service are those with issues they want to have addressed. By throwing up roadblocks, you're making it even harder for them to get to a solution. They expect the people on the line to provide help, but this behavior puts them in an adversarial mindset by the time they actually talk to someone.
It does seem a like a tragedy of the commons situation here: people only have so much empathy to give, so we all individually pull back, which makes everyone worse off.
I think they understand that logically.
But they are put in a position where that is their least painful move. The incentives are wrong due to poor management.
Yeah I was in the wrong for sure, I am not qualified to be a customer support rep and I was a web dev at that job who picked up the slack for an infilled position. I was just trying trying to explain that dehumanization goes both ways and that is why CS is such a crappy field in almost every aspect.
As frustrated as we get with these systems we have to remember there’s a human on the other side and no one wants to be engaging with each other + most companies don’t have CS to actually help anyone they do so to check of a box and prevent any potential legal issues from popping up. In a lot of places, especially commerce related, those you speak to don’t even have many/any tools to resolve your complaint. The job is quite literally being a punching bag, if you manage to help someone that’s little more than a nice to have.
I don't doubt being a rep is difficult. However, if customers were able to reach someone quickly without enduring maddening phone trees and were able to speak with someone who was friendly and actually empowered to provide help, I think the customers would generally be pleasant to work with. So I don't think aggressive customers are the only problem. A lot of the issue can be resolved by the company's willingness to truly help their customers. A company that is willing to commit to training and managing their staff and empowering them to be helpful will generally be greeted with delighted customers.
I’m not sure what you’re saying - IF everything were different, things would be better? Sure, but we live in a reality where CS is expensive but also underpaid and customers are mean.
There's a lot of things companies can do to make it easier for customers. I try live chatting all the time and it's typically answering 10 questions for a stupidly dumb bot, finally getting someone online and then answering the exact same questions. Then telling CS my issue in detail and being given a macro answer that ignores everything I just wrote.
The level of training of CS is bad in a lot of companies and I can become that mean customer. I don't use abusive language but I'm upset having to explain myself repeatedly and getting nowhere.
I think you hit on something here. In phone situations where I'm able to help, I've found them to be generally positive, even if the person started off a little angry. It's the ones where you're stuck between company policy and an angry customer who also happens to be in the right where it really grinds you down. That said, there's only so much you can take of people coming in angry at you and having to cheer every single one of them up.
> companies value call center staff so little that turnover is extremely high.
As do governments. No email address responses, no phone callback options. Messages that say “high call volume, call back next business day”.
I assume evil intent because any reasonable person would offer to respond to emails or return a phone call.
I agree. You mentioned email, but to me the main issue is when one calls a support number. I absolutely despise calling a customer support number and having to listen to the "automated" response that gives one menu options that one navigates via numbers on the telephone (it's only automated for them, not the for the end-user, who has to manually chug through this process, with menu items that don't even necessarily correspond to their specific question).
I absolutely abhor speaking to a machine via voice as well. From Alexa to saying dumb shit like "pay my bill" to a system over the phone, I will not do it. I think it's disgusting.
The sheer cardinality of ways they mess it up is impressive.
1. Long intro message with hours, location, website intro, email address and to hang up and call 911 if it’s an emergency
2. “Our menu items have recently changed” years after changing them
3. “We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volume” 100% of the time
4. No “other” option
5. Listing options 2, 3, 4, 5 and then the most common option “1,” last.
6. Following a huge phone menu and getting a busy signal at the end.
I could go on. There need to be legal consequences at some point just to counteract the mental instability we undertake as a nation as a result of this insanity.
The worst is when they won't accept new calls in queue, and just hang up.
Aflac has recently (past year) 100% stopped their phone support. Calling their phone support tells you to log in to their website.
I hope you don't have trouble with their website!
I was able to get my issue sort-of resolved by making a complaint to a regulator -- I now have a direct line to someone capable of taking my phone call. But that's not an option for every company.
The IRS dumps you after navigating their call tree if you need less popular options that aren't clear.
Me: I want to comply with tax laws but have a question.
IRS: Oh, you submitted paperwork and want to follow up on a letter we responded with? Hey, good luck. Maybe get an opinion from a tax attorney or CPA on what we mean in our comms.
I ran into this issue before. I was calling IRS to ask for simple clarification on the taxes.
Me: Hello, I have some question about the taxes and I wish to have clarification on-
Agent: Sorry, I cannot answer your question.
Me: Oh, then where the correct resource for me to get that information?
Agent: Sorry again, I cannot answer your question.
Me: Why you cannot answer my question? I am asking for a clarification on the taxes and IRS is the correct place for me to contact.
Agent: Because the law said so. You are asking tax-related question during tax off-season which we cannot answer nor help you. I'm sorry I cannot help you because the law prevents me from doing so. If you want your questions answered by the IRS, then you would need to wait until the tax season.
Me: Are you serious?
Agent: Unfortunately yes, there is nothing I can do at this moment. If I attempt to help you, I will be facing federal charge for the violation of the law. Your best chance is to wait until tax season.
Not even on hint of advisement to check with my CPA because that would consider helping the consumers.
Oh btw, they send their 2FA via regular mail.
WTF IS UP WITH THAT
How hostile
Practically designed to convert people libertarian
Got this from IRS recently. "We're not giving you $FIVE_FIGURE_SUM of your return because we won't tell you why, if you want details, call our number". Calling their number says "we have too many shmucks to call us already, you're out of luck, bye-bye". I foresee it's going to be very, very frustrating experience.
Same here, also with Aflac - had lots of emails, and actually managed to even speak to someone on the phone, with no use. Had to file complaints to every place I could find to complain for them to fix the issue - which was a totally trivial issue like they have requirement to have form called "Foo Bar" and the form my provider produces is called "Foo Baz" and it's obviously the same thing but since it doesn't have the same words they expect nobody dares to make that determination. Took me several months to get through it. Can't see any ads from Aflac that advertise instant cash payoffs without laughing bitterly.
I think of this sometimes like a roller coaster park where you pay a flat rate to get in and then ride as much as you want all day. The ideal scenario for the visitor is to go in and ride continuously, not waiting for anything. However, the ideal scenario for the park is for you to spend your whole day in queues, not taking up space on the rides, and not running around making the park feel "crowded". The equilibrium is the park studying what people's upper tolerance is for wait time and then ensuring there are just enough rides that everyone comes close to that but few exceed it.
Obviously it's not a perfect analogy, but having people wait in line on the phone does serve an important function for the CS department in the sense that it gives those folks an extended opportunity to either solve it themselves some other way, or give up. Neither of these are great for long term brand loyalty, and the cost of the added frustration is probably mostly borne by the hapless agents who do finally end up taking those calls. But from the point of view of short term bean-counters, I would guess that it's unlikely any of these dark patterns are an accident (even if they don't implement the patterns themselves, they would hire the consultant who "streamlines" the after-sales experience to optimize for cost).
There is an important distinction between “this thing is done for a reason” and “this thing is done for a good reason.”
Even in the long term, this might look like a good thing to a CEO. However, my point is that it isn’t.
"Our call volume is currently very high and the wait time is X minutes. Please press 1 if you would like to be put in the queue and have an agent call you."
I wish more companies did this so that I can actually get on with my day without spending it on hold.
Except they either won't call back at all, or will call back way later than promised - usually when you decided it's not going to happen and moved on with your day, and now you don't have any of the documents and data you need with you and actually are driving, so the callback is useless.
And (in Australia anyway) you have to listen to a machine say "This call may be monitored for quality" - but they don't "monitor" the awful 5-45 minutes of waiting, then pressing buttons, more waiting etc to eventually get through to a real person – the low quality half of the call, from the customer's perspective. I hate that.
I often make a point of vocalising my frustration/description of what's going wrong, just in case...
Recently I had to type a number when I thought I'd been prompted to speak it, for example. Then when I did type it, there was no way to correct an error (account number & DoB, seemed like it might be critical), so I had to hang up and try again.
Very frustrating dealing with these systems, as it's known ahead of time that the experience is going to be a fruitless slog. Perhaps this increased friction is by design, to reduce the incoming support call volume?
Fortunately, for some of these systems, ignoring the menu and stating "Operator" over and over does lead to a human, when there appears to be no path through the menus to otherwise reach one. I've heard that cursing at the automated system also leads to a redirect to a human, too.
The results of this are that delivery companies still occasionally "lose" my address and tell me it's invalid and cannot be reached, despite having previously done so numerous times! I have no way to get through to the proper resources to fix their system after over a year.
Yeah, I find usually scrambling the keypad or repeatedly pressing 9 or # can yield a person.
I bought a sump pump, and called their number to ask some question. 30 seconds and one menu option later I was speaking with someone who clearly had a lot of technical knowledge of the sump pump. I was very pleasantly surprised since I am used to expect no human interaction and if I get a human on the call, it would be someone who can only provide "common sense" level of support. I wish this were the case for more companies.
I have no need for a sump pump but I kinda want to give money to this company. If you wouldn't mind sharing the company name I'd love to have it. They may well make something else I do need and I'd love to reward a company who is such a good job.
This week we had a disgruntled employee leave a 1-star Google review of our shop. They have never been a customer...
I reported it as a Conflict of Interest PER GOOGLE'S OWN STATED POLICY and it was rejected almost immediately. Google could find nothing wrong with the review.
We have no recourse to escalate. No way to even interact with a human about it. It's absolutely ridiculous. I have plenty of documentation and am happy to provide evidence that this is a former employee but I have no one to give it to or even a dropbox to submit documentation to.
Sundar and Google should be ashamed.
Maybe try suing them in small claims court.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1...
Google appealed and won, apparently. Frustratingly there appears to be no rationale for the reversal.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
Threaten to sue for libel.
They would bury you in legal paper work and it would end up cost 5x the original problem.
Got to say the fact that you thought someone leaving a 1 star review on a service you don't own, google, was worth you escalating it to a real person tells me these companies are doing the right thing. And shaming the CEOs when you made the choice to use their product is a bit silly and you come off as entitled, not righteous.
How do we or google know if he was disgruntled vs fired, how do we know if he didn't come in as a customer after he was fired and was treated like shit?
I'm imagining the situation where in your world where every business who got a bad review would be calling google. Imagine the number of bullshit calls they would get? And how much all of us would have to pay to support that?
If you want a real person to help you, pay for it. Plenty of companies are willing to sell you a service contract, even google, if you're willing to pay.
Vote with your dollars (even if the original poster preemptively tried to say why that won't work ... it's the ONLY thing that ever has in my experience)
The problem is that Google has become so pervasive that even if you don't initiate any contact with them or use any of their products/services, a bad review on Google can have a substantially negative effect on your business. It's a real problem.
I was recently in charge of hiring various contractors for several repairs needed on a house being prepped for sale, and in almost every case, clearly non-technically-inclined people were practically begging me to leave them a positive Google review. I don't think they would've been doing that if they hadn't experienced a direct impact on their business from those reviews in some way, and I also don't think they would've chosen this situation voluntarily.
^ This times 1 million.
Per Google's own policy employees, present or former, are not permitted to leave reviews of businesses at which they work or did work. For obvious reasons.
Google ratings impact our search rankings directly.
Read the policy before you start casting aspersions about the justness of an employee review. If Google wants to change that policy, fine. But as things sit they are failing to enforce their stated legal guidelines.
It is also worth noting that Google does not permit reviews of its own HQ. Why not open the floodgates for Google employee reviews on Google if you believe that it should be OK?
> The problem is that Google has become so pervasive that even if you don't initiate any contact with them or use any of their products/services, a bad review on Google can have a substantially negative effect on your business. It's a real problem.
If this is true, it's because your would-be customers listen to what Google says. If people trust them, it's probably because they are the least bad option for gathering information on a lot of companies.
> ...when you made the choice to use their product...
Where did the poster say/claim this? Your entire argument is based on if they are a user of Google services or not?
I don't think you understand the impact that negative Google reviews can have on a small business. You are totally beholden to them.
Are the criticisms accurate? That should be the main concern. This is a free speech country after all.
Can you elaborate on that? How would it be different in a non-free speech country?
Is there a country I can go to make someone legally disappear due to an online review they posted, I have a list. Let me know
Your argument doesn't logically follow. I can't connect your first and second sentences to any point anyone was making.
Asking google to take down someones opinion about a business would be violating that persons first amendment right (assuming they are American). Unless you could prove libelous intent. (which luckily is very hard to prove and doesn't cover someone disliking your business)
> Asking google to take down someones opinion about a business would be violating that persons first amendment right (assuming they are American)
ah, there it is. since Google is not the Government yet, them taking action would not violate that person's first amendment right, and asking Google to do so would not violate that person's first amendment right
I wonder what the person I initially replied to thinks
its hard to tell which people just completely misunderstand the first amendment, and which people are talking about a "philosophical" free speech that they made up on the spot to bolster their point
We aren’t talking about law, we are talking about spirit. It’s perfectly legal for you to ask Google to take it down and for them to take it down. The point is, that goes against the spirit of this culture, which is that you really can’t and shouldn’t silence someone in general.
Again, I ask, are they lying or do they have accurate points? This is best taken as a learning experience because treating it as a battle is going to get you nowhere.
> We aren’t talking about law, we are talking about spirit.
ah damn, one of the the philosophical free speech people that made up a standard the spot, I wrote in a related comment:
> its hard to tell which people just completely misunderstand the first amendment, and which people are talking about a "philosophical" free speech that they made up on the spot to bolster their point
so, what does that have to do with any particular country? what countries is it different? what is particular about the country you speak of?
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 pervasive that many people think they can rely on it out of context, except for people that choose to operate within reality when convenient
is that closer to the point you are trying to make?
No, the first amendment is totally disconnected from what I said. What I said instead is that our culture is about free expression. This is an important lead-in to the whole Hacker News saying, "information wants to be free." It's interesting that instead of answering the question I asked (effectively revealing the answer), you've chosen to go down this unrelated tangent.
which question? I don't know if the reviewer's criticisms are accurate, thats the question you asked multiple times but its not a question for me so its better I ignore it. I just assumed the other questions where rhetorical and it looks like I addressed them.
also I get stuff booted off the internet all the time, in the US, which is a pretty strong "cultural free speech/expression" place. so my reality is pretty different than yours.
My mistake, I thought you were the top-level commenter. I agree the tech platforms tend to buck the cultural expectation of free speech... in my opinion this is a big reason that "Big Tech" has a negative reputation. When entities go against cultural norms, there is backlash.
If it's so important to you, why not just sue the former employee? That's how libel is handled in the real world.
I posted a few legit (longish reviews) 1-3 star reviews, but they all disappeared from Google Maps.
I don't see it as a solution because they will all just outsource it to humans from a country that cost less per hour, so your experience will be about the same.
The only solution IMO is to spend more money on support, but that should be a public ranking and not a "right"/law.
As an example, in my country, one of the big banks have ads with literally 2 sentences: "Talk to human, and we have a human branch in every city." No financial advantage what so ever so it looks like this is common enough issue that can move customers in some sectors.
The outsourced humans are still better than robots at customer service.
Often times, yes, but it still depends on the human.
I've been in a situation before where an outsourced human decided the right course of action was to insult me and scream at me for an open-ended question along the lines of "I need X, (how) can your company help me with that?", which they apparently perceived to be extremely stupid. Needless to say, I decided not to continue doing business with that company.
I feel like even a robot could've handled that situation better (especially from the perspective of the company, me not getting an answer at all would've probably been the more favorable outcome).
I was in an airport terminal where all of the restaurants and cafes had tables with iPads. I went to one of the restaurants and ordered a burger using one of them. From what I remember I was the only patron there.
About 40 minutes later, I'm looking at the waiter walking around and it didn't seem like he was waiting on any food from the kitchen. He also didn't come over once, and probably assumed that I was just hanging out and watching the US Open on the TVs.
I flagged him over and it turned out that my order did not go through at all. I then spent another 15 minutes waiting on my food to actually arrive.
If I'd spoken to a human from the beginning, this probably wouldn't have happened.
The burger wasn't that good, anyway.
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.
Not to mention, this also makes me think of (paraphrasing)
you have a right to free speech, but that doesn't mean others are obligated to provide you an audience
In my case there wasn't. I had a fraudulent account opened in my name at Bank of America and it took over 5 hours of talking to different people, going into a local branch, and waiting on hold to get to someone that could actually do something about it.
I'm not sure I understand this comment.
We do have the right to tell others how to run their businesses.
Get food poisoning at a restaurant (btw, also a low margin business) there's protocol.
Get in a taxi and it goes somewhere it shouldn't? protocol.
Hotel spying on you? or maybe not having fire safety rules? or not having running water?
We regulate where businesses go, how they operate, how big they can get and plenty more. Nearly every single limitation was paid for in misery, lost funds, or in blood.
Exactly, this is why we need Comcast to have a monopoly in municipal broadband or a limited number of taxi medallions in cities. To prevent bloodshed.
Sure, I heard the sarcasm and agree. We have rules, they aren't well implemented.
My response was to a comment that indicated there should be none.
Additionally, here are the cases where taxis, unregulated, led to bloodshed. The policy is old but the fact that it was in response to violence is a repeating pattern: 1. Medallions introduced: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/11/nyregion/medallion-limits...
That's exactly what regulation is - society telling people how they have to run their business.
what happens when the free market decides to do something in nobody's best interest except themselves?
I agree. My biggest gripe is these new pop-up financial institutions that provide insight into your credit history or loans. It's impossible to find the contact info of a real human being and in many cases the only obvious way to even open a ticket is by creating an account first. If I have evidence someone is trying to commit fraud by pretending to be me and signing up for your services do not force me to sign up for another just to contact you about it. You're trying to use identity theft as an enrollment tool.
I am not a lawyer, so I am posting this as a question in the hope that someone who knows the law will reply.
In the situation described here, if you "sign up for another [service] just to contact you about it", are you potentially putting yourself in a worse situation than before, by accepting terms, such as arbitration clauses, that limit your options for redress through small-claims court or other legal action?
If this is so, then there is an obviously exploitable dark pattern here.
This is something I see as a middle ground. I don't really think having the 'right' to a human fixes the problem. I just think the right to actually being able to get a conversation without becoming a member of the service to obvious bad behaviour from another actor or if the service decides to arbitrarily terminate service, and that to actually mean something. Right now it's clearly 'just sue' if you want things actually done. So many people are invested in social media or services in a way that a random misplaced ban can leave them stranded from actually getting help. On the other side the people in most orgs that deal with those category of issues are the janitors doing unwanted work, or that work is not prioritized. There's no fun catchall term like UX to even get people excited about fixing this class of problem.
Example of weird semi-positive was from reporting a particular serial scammer using a YouTube+Cloudflare combo where I would get always a submission receipt but then seemingly arbitrarily feedback that the situation was dealt with.
This would not help, since humans are trained to respond like robots. They vaguely understand your support request and then copy-paste a knowledge base support blog post at you.
Even by phone, they do this exact same thing. At least my bank does, until you get escalated to a supervisor, who is permitted to go off-script for a minute.
You explain you've read the support info and it doesn't apply to your case, at which time they're trained to say "I am so sorry, but that is all the support I am able to provide at this time".
I had this exact experience with Tinder, when I tried to renew my grandfathered Platinum subscription (and ensure it auto-renews) a few days before it expired and got lost forever.
They wouldn't let me "add a card" or "manage my payments", so I contacted support, who told me I should go to "manage my payments" to "add a card".
After tons of back and forth, Tinder went from having an eager Platinum (re)subscriber to somebody who angrily deleted their account.
All because their support staff are essentially robots pretending to be humans (they eat, poop and go home to their families, but they're still robots while they're working for Tinder).
I actually wrote a blog post with screenshots.
https://papyrus.so/@support/how-tinder-support-turned-me-fro...
The worst here is that there is no single person on this Earth - except you - that cares about this outcome and would do something to fix it. Support does not care - their job is to copy-paste answers from script. Finance does not care - they have millions of clients, it's much easier to let one go than to start making exceptions. Software devs don't care - they have hundreds of bugs, what's one more? They are paid the same anyway. It's big enough that the value of single subscriber - even with the most expensive plan - is indistinguishable from zero. So you get your worth of service - zero.
The only time it matters is if you get enough traction on social media. That's when the cost of losing you ($100, i.e. a number approaching $0) gets multiplied by the millions in revenue they might lose from bad publicity.
The root problem here is getting an efficient solution to your problem.
Even if the company provides a human to talk to there is no guarantee there will be an efficient solution (satellite ISP support come to mind here.)
I think lack of competition is probably the crux, lately many companies are virtual monopolies in their markets or territory. Without adequate alternatives they don't see increased value in a happy customer or attracting customers (because there is no choice).
I agree with this. There are websites that list all the undocumented ways to reach a human for many companies and government organizations but even that can become exhausting and daunting. Those sites may have trouble staying current. Even if one gets past the phone trees there are the issues of under-staffing. The current wait time for the CA FTB is 4 hours. My cell coverage is not good enough to stay on hold for that long.
My personal solution while a bit heavy handed was to move from one of the most populated states to one of the least populated states. There are drawbacks but most of the time when I call a number I reach a real person and no phone tree. Of the two phone trees I came across I was able to reach a real person within seconds. Oh and not just a real person but a real friendly, polite and respectful person. I still occasionally run into an org that is understaffed but they are always willing to go out of their way for someone that is polite to them. This solution is probably not for everyone.
In the US you have this right. It’s called small claims court. You need to write the corporation a demand letter. If they don’t respond to your demands within the deadline you can begin legal proceedings. You don’t even need a lawyer. You just need to research the relevant laws in your jurisdiction and the procedures of your local small claims court.
> Part of me thinks (perhaps naively) if I had the ability to speak with a real person over the phone, we could sort this out instead of constant emails or creating tickets that go into a black hole.
Honestly, yes, I do think you’re being naive.
Ask me about the time I tried to switch from a rented modem to one we own on COX phone support. They bounced me around through separate departments which gave contradicting information about how their own stuff worked, and when I finally gave up and just dumped them for a different ISP, tried to talk us into keeping them by offering a limited time offer for a cheaper price at half the speed (as if).
Or about trying to get payment stuff worked out with my bank. The most pleasant experience I’ve ever had with them on the phone is debit card activation and the occasional fraud prevention notice. Neither of which involve humans.
In short, if they need forced to offer phone support, it will suck. It’ll just be a poor sap sending the email for you anyway.
"Right to speak to a human" seems tangental to the right you're actually asking for. It is just as possible to have a that human bound by a rigid set of policies that makes them as frustrating or useless as getting automated or slow emails or interacting with a chatbot. Any business that has a call center of any scale already does this, especially if they are at all adversarial to their customers. (think cable companies)
What it sounds like you're asking for is that you can talk to a human, explain your edge case, and get an exception to their general policy on the spot. That is much harder to regulate. If the government says there must be a "talk to a human" button, if the company doesn't want to have it, they will train these humans to just say no to everything. Nobody benefits from this arrangement.
Clearly companies are en masse externalizing the costs of support onto users, and plainly not supporting users in fixing real problems with systems that are now required to live in society. It's at the stage where it's breaking our well functioning civil society and turning the first world into a third world kafkaesque dystopia.
I believe this is an economic race to the bottom and regulation is the answer to fixing it.
Here's the basis of an idea for how to fix the power dynamics so the market works properly
1) an ombusdman that can fine companies for user abuse of wasting user time, and redistribute the fine to the users
2) regulations of how long a company can on average keep users on hold, such as no more than 10 minutes to speak to a human, otherwise the speak to a human option is useless as the company makes it take longer than the median user can afford
3) regulations of threshold of acceptable customer complaints against a company, otherwise the company will make the service operators unable to actually fix anything as you note
4) a process with the ombusdman where when the number of complaints exceeds a threshold the company is fined and the fine distributed amongst the complaining users
5) some sanity check here to prevent user abuse, such as checking the average wait times, and confirming the customer service actually never fixes issues from a number of tests. The tests could be made in collaboration with a subset complaining customers.
It shouldn't have to be this way but you can get pretty far using consumer advocacy hacks. Find out the CEO/board member/VP of customer service's name through the company page/linkedin and from there it's usually easy to guess an email address. I've been able to get an actual human to call me from companies that you wouldn't associate with this like Ebay, Google, and Mint.com/inuit. I've used it also with my insurance company and that awful shipping company that NewEgg uses when a laptop was stolen. I was able to talk to humans there but it didn't come to anything. I've also used it with bank issues, you can Google executive customer service plus your bank. The service was like night and day after this method.
There can be discomfort in doing this because it feels intrusive but companies do deserve it if they don't offer consumers rights like this. Once you get past the discomfort it's so empowering. If you're with someone unhelpful on the phone you can ALWAYS hang up. That includes 911. You can set a limit for yourself, that you'll try the "normal" customer service route 1-2 times before escalating it but if you reach that wall with what the company is giving you do not feel bad for using the consumer advocacy strategies.
If the same person answering those tickets answers the phone, do you think it would be any better?
The medium doesn’t really make a difference. The issues is that some companies front line support is just an FAQ document regurgitated by a human, with no ability to deviate from those canned set of responses.
If you have a problem that the front-line can’t handle, you have to escalate. If they can’t escalate for you, send a letter. If the letter doesn’t get a response, have a lawyer send it on their letterhead.
I appreciate that this may be a curmudgeonly view but do we really need the inalienable right to not be mildly frustrated? Is this what we want our political representatives to legislate on? Can't say it does it for me.
Now, if I have a paid relationship with some entity that includes a support agreement in the contract then, sure, I expect to receive that support. And some of the comments here appear to be for that sort of relationship. But in general? Nah.
How much would you pay for that right?
+1. People cost a LOT.
You can hire a lot of people for a small portion of a CEO's salary
Maybe, but the CEO can probably get good support already.
?!?
Really? How many people can I hire for 10% of Google's CEO salary (= $200,000)? Will that satisfy you for Google's support needs?
The company profit, the executives, and the shareholders will take a share of paying for it as well.
> will
They won't. But they should.
How are you going to enforce that? Are you going to force them to pay from their own salaries and dividends, by law?
Well, they'll just bump up the salaries/dividends to offset the cost. The money is coming from customers. Either way, customers are the ones paying for support.
Many companies let customers directly pay for support, if they want. No one's forcing you to buy from companies that don't offer this.
Get rid of the monopoly.
The reason they can have such bad CR is because their marketshare is leaps and bounds beyond the competition so they CAN.
They provided an amazing product until they hit monopoly status then started cutting quality..
Oldest trick in the book.
Some solutions are to remove whatever government policies are giving them an advantage, or break up the monopoly via government, or provide government help to the competition.
There's tons of ways.
>Get rid of the monopoly.
Which monopoly?
>The reason they can have such bad CR is because their marketshare is leaps and bounds beyond the competition so they CAN.
Defining monopolies by "has bad customer service" is certainly a unique and interesting take. Almost borders on the "no true scotsman" fallacy.
Of course, the real irony that you don't understand is that this would entrench monopolies: they're the ones with the resources to hire peons in third world countries to provide bare minimum support. Forcing startups to do the same kills them right out the gate.
Agree, and to add to that:
> provide government help to the competition
This is just paying for CR with extra steps.
> remove whatever government policies are giving them an advantage
At least we can agree on something :)
> At least we can agree on something :)
Woo hoo! So happy!
> Defining monopolies by "has bad customer service" is certainly a unique and interesting take.
That's the dumbest possible interpretation of what I said.
Not all monopolies have bad CR: see Amazon.
But every single company I've had bad CR experiences with with, I would venture many people would agree, is a monopoly. Google, Utilities, Cell phones, Internet, etc.
Any upstart company typically HAS to have good CR because keeping customers is valuable to them.
Now this is anecdotal, and I'm not going to provide papers or scientific studies because I don't care enough about this conversation to do that, but where there's smoke there's fire, and I've seen this pattern repeated over and over in the past decade or so, and some one who cares more than me should look further into this.
The whole thing about rights is that you do not have to pay for them. If I have a right to vote, you cannot justify doing something that denies me the option to vote by claiming it is worth something to me.
I am principally concerned here with the actions of organizations that create problems for third parties, such as when their actions, or failure to act, facilitate fraud against people who are not their customers.
What makes you think there is no financial cost to the right to vote?
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/electi...
It’s a cost we can all agree on, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I didn't say it does not exist, I said it does not work as a justification for actions that infringe on rights.
Sure, especially when we’re talking about rights that are almost universally agreed upon. But it could be a good justification for something like “the right to talk to customer support for Candy Crush”. The OP didn’t specify which companies he was trying to contact.
It was the originator of this thread (endsleigh) who framed the issue in terms of rights and their value. I am pointing out that this is not a useful way to look at it.
Here, you are asking, in effect, whether a Candy Crush player has any such right in the first place, and I think it is completely reasonable to say they do not in such trivial matters. As I mentioned in my original post, I am mainly concerned with third parties, several of whom have shown up in the broader discussion, but customers and ex-customers could have reasonable issues with retroactive policy changes to issues such as privacy.
As ss108 said you mentioned email but for me the real challenge has always been calling customer support numbers (eg ISP) and dealing with unhelpful automated menus.
What I found really useful is to ignore all the stuff they say and just say irrelevant English. Not gibberish necessarily - you can read the script of a play, or every comment in twitch chat, or whatever. The point is their system listens to you and goes ok they're saying something but I don't understand it, guess I have to connect them to a human person.
I do agree with you though I would like a right to speak with a human or at least mandated transparency around what percent of callers speak to a human/how long it takes for them to get there.
In the EU & UK at least, for many cases this already exists: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr.
> the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
In any case where that applies, the organization must include safeguards, including (as a minimum) the right to obtain human intervention, to express their point of view, and to contest the automated decision.
This applies only to legal or significant decisions (more details & examples here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...) which means anything that could substantially affect your financial circumstances, health, reputation, employment opportunities, etc, or anything that affects your legal status or legal rights.
There's really no need for this.
The solution is simple, separate the cost of the product from the cost of support. You need help with a product? ok, pay for it. Charge users for the cost of the employee they want to talk to.
There are an unbelievable amount of users that have zero problem solving ability and refuse to attempt anything without a human telling them what to do. I have zero desire to have the price I'm paying increase to pay for the support for these idiots. I also don't like having to go through a byzantine path of phone options to get someone when I have a legitimate problem. Solve this easily by aligning incentives, users want support -- pay for it.
And when the support needed is because the vendor has broken their product? E.g. they've charged you multiple times for the same event, or they're constantly sending incoherent contradictory letters to your door?
this is not a support issue, but a warranty issue.
users being locked out of their accounts is not a lack of problem solving ability of that user.
the product is broken, and the company needs to fix that.
customers need the ability to reach a person that is able to assess whether the issue is a warranty issue or a support issue. if it is a support issue then by all means send them to paid support. but if the issue is the company's fault they better fix it without charge.
I understand that companies get a lot of call volume around incredibly basic stuff, you can hear it in their menu design, but in the last ~10 calls I've made for support 1) I had to because the online ticket/chat option went nowhere and 2) the phone support was a several hour ordeal that usually went nowhere but in a few instances I got what I needed.
I don't know what the solution is but it's unfortunate that the 95% who can't read their monthly statement have ruined the first 3 menu pages on phone systems and now no one wants to pay humans for the very real edge cases.
I'd like to see something similar but for email. I see too many companies that only provide phone and/or text chat for support. I want to be able to email a detailed description of my issue, with more detail than can reasonably be done by phone, and then proceed from there.
Also, I'd like to see a requirement that if the company is over some certain size and have multiple units or departments with separate support systems they have a support email address that you can mail to where someone will read your mail and determine which unit or department's support to forward it to.
* Right to speak with a human who has the authority to actually make changes in whatever system you're pinched in.
An elderly relative keeps calling the mobile company about her line not working. We explained to her it was the charger. She keeps calling them. Same for her ISP. Same for the bank. Same for anything tech related. She won't budge. This costs a lot of money to companies and government offices.
I think there should be different set of companies with support catered to this growing age group who struggle with new technology. Maybe a service middle-man support.
Also, they are prime targets for things like "Windows Support" scams and all kinds of sleazy sales campaigns.
I used to work support desk. I hate to have to tell you this but it's not just old people who can't handle tech. Stupidity is an epidemic!
>be told conflicting things by different people via email
What makes you think phone support would be any different? I have been told different things by different people on the phone, do we demand in person support? What makes you think even in person support wouldn't lie to your face to get you out the door?
The problem is quality not formfactor. As long as people buy the cheapest they can support will always be cut to reduce costs. I just wish there was more pay per incident support that actually got you world class support and was cheap enough to be worth it.
I support a more broad approach: a public body whose inside will be jailed for life if discovered taking payments from third parties, with enough tech to appear generic Citizens to the corporate surveillance, with funds to buy things regularly, and get donated to poor thereafter.
If they found anti-user practice they have sanctioning power in the order of % of revenues, little the first time, hard the second, claiming personal executives responsibility a third breach. They not only check products but also services, software and hybrid stuff.
Selling crap is subject to little sanctions, like if you sell thing that are clearly designed to break in very little time, you sell things to elicit more money forcing mandatory services etc you'll pay so much that's simply illogical trying to.
Imposing just a phone number and a reachable human on the company side I fear is far from sufficient: these days is common arrive to a humans, but a powerless one, who can just open or "bump" a ticket. Again simple laws who take into account only one side fail for easy corruption, that's why a public and transparent, forced to be independent and only able to operate to a certain extent actor is needed. Most people is honest in a society because that's the best evolution behavior but most if far from all, so rules must be crafted on humans defects making bad behaviors disadvantageous from all side possible. It's hard, of course, but not impossible, and a real Democracy can control and block dangerous derives quick enough.
Reminds me of one of the Oscar nominated live action short films this year, "Please Hold". It takes this dystopian concept to the extreme, where a man is subjected to an automated justice system and has very little rights to speak with humans in the process. Not my favorite of the nominations, but an interesting watch: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11383280/
My two cents. Why does this have to be a regulated force-fit? Companies can choose to offer a basic support tier (eg: kb forums, email) and a higher paid support tier or could bundle this as part of their pricing tiers. I don't see why this needs to be a customer right to be able to speak to a human when a customer has explicitly exercised the choice of a low touch support option at the point of purchase. Forcing this just makes it more expensive for everyone.
There is one advantage of no customer support for you as a customer that I haven't seen mentioned. If there is no customer support, there is no one for a fraudster to call and socially engineer, and less people with access to the databases who can easily be bribed. I've seen people cite this as an advantage of using Gmail, for example.
I don't think this outweighs the fact that you can't contact anyone in most cases, though.
> Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.
Do you actually think that forming a political bloc and pressuring these companies with (more) regulation is easier than just disentangling them from your life? It seems like so much more work to me. Especially since there are plenty of companies that are eager to take your money and give you great service, e.g.:I pay for sr.ht for dev support and ddevault is literally an IRC comment away. I pay for Podia for a web store and when I wanted a different font on my (sub-)site they implemented it an hour. I pay for Tarsnap for encrypted backups and cperciva's customer support is stellar. I can't say enough about how good my experience with Tarsnap has been.
I'm not against (or for) regulation on principle, but it seems to me that you're proposing to work hard, unpaid, to improve these companies, "against their will" as it were, through an indirect and unreliable method, rather than switching to a company that's already great.
> Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.
I don't think I agree with this. I don't know what product you're referring to, but thinking back to other times I've heard people say this, it's been for things like a streaming service, or a credit card, or a phone. These things are conveniences that can be replaced, and a better way to describe our relationships to them is "it would be a small to moderate inconvenience to find an alternative or do without them, and I don't want to do that".
But I do feel strongly that, if we can't make good, informed decisions as consumers in a more or less free market, we're headed in a bad direction. Either we'll just keep buying things from whatever malevolent company has the market cornered, or we'll regulate so strongly that we have the choice made for us by a committee somewhere. The best alternative is that we do research before buying things, support good products, and starve the companies who make bad ones.
The issues with customer service have been terrible for a very long time. The introduction of phone IVR menus that have labyrinths to prevent the caller from reaching a real person is also somewhat common with many companies. Then come chatbots, which are universally stupid, totally useless, and a big waste of time (anytime I see a company with a chatbot I think that a CTO doesn't exist or is clueless or just got a nice commission from buying it from a vendor).
There are sites that list phone numbers of companies and provide information on if or how one can reach a human. I'm not associated with this company in any way, but I've heard of it a long time ago and it's still around: https://gethuman.com . I'm sure there are other services that help with shortcuts on reaching a person who can help. In the worst case, do a "Tell HN" here with the name of the company and you'd more likely get a real human helping you out! :|
Blackholes are terrible, and they become even worse based on the value being provided by the service. It's terrible when you have thousands or even millions in income from an app and it is removed from the app sotre and you are blackholed. It's terrible when someone loses their photos, documents and emails, with no recourse. For personal data (like emails, photos and documents), it should be required that a service has to let you get your data back. That should be a right, even if the service is free. Likewise, there should always be a mechanical identity process for personal accounts that would allow someone to retrieve control of their account regardless (even if there is a small fee here, that is ok) of control of things like phone numbers and email boxes? Why? Because emails and phone numbers are not really valid id's, they are just something with a reasonable expectation that the user is connected to at the time they register.
That seems to preclude or seriously hamper someone trying to start a side hustle or anything small.
Write an iOS app? Before you can ship it, you need to be able to take phone calls.
Make a low-volume product in the evening and sell it to your fellow hobbyists, relying on your day job to pay the bills? Too bad; hope your boss understands that you'll need to take phone calls.
There are ways to handle that too. Specify a minimum customer size, revenue size, employee count, etc. Index it to GDP also so it's not an entirely different mandate in 100 years.
It's not trivially easy but it's also not impossible.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that you need to have a call centre for your wordle clone.
This won't help. Companies will just make you wait 3 hours on the line before talking to a human, and then the human you get won't speak your language. I suggest the often-underestimated art of "voting with your wallet"* and using a different service.
* - Or in today's online ad-funded world, "voting with your eyeballs"
Spaniard here. What the banks here are doing with the elderly people it's outrageous, they are suggesting technologically handicapped people to manage their savings either over a smartphone or via internet while making in-person schedules very unsupportive.
Spaniard HN users can relate, for sure. The pandemics made that much worse for oldies.
On the flip side, put common operations on your website and let customers do it themselves.
I don’t know how many times I’ve had to call a company and the employee easily clicks a button to do what I needed. Why not have that button on your website?
(You could even set up a queue to have employees approve the action in the background if it’s a risky action.)
Yes. We should push companies to have better customer service, including the ability to have a human look into things when needed.
But don't think of it as a "right." So many humans are stupid, uncaring or incompetent that it's equally possible to demand the right to speak (interact) with a computer.
I agree and I've faced this situation as well and often wonder how do these companies accept operating in this manner. I personally run my business[1] with direct contact with my customers because I don't want them to feel the frustration I felt in these situations. If they have a need, they can always reach me, directly.
I do agree that there should be some form of easily searchable/browsable FAQ/Knowledgebase for the common issues, but the speak to a human should always be an option, an option that should not require endless steps to reach.
If a company cannot provide a good service to the customers, that includes being reachable for concerns related to the business, they should just not be in the said business altogether.
[1] https://www.ypson.com
As someone what worked in the Customer service/care industry, my two cent:
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
What about butler/concierge services that you pay to act as an intermediary to handle the small problems ? Or maybe even some personal assistant if you have more money (or Siri if you are poor).
Companies often have solutions in search for problems, wouldn't it be a great way for them to get high-quality input to provide new services while filtering the miscommunications.
Adding this intermediary could help reduce the friction to switch from an actor that refuses to do customer support or refuse to play the game, and would help shift the balance of power back to the consumer.
Otherwise there is also the open-source/diy solution and reducing your dependencies on other, but until they have enough funding to be able to provide any services, there will always be some missing services.
Definitely naive.
Would a good customer service department get your problem solved quickly? Certainly!
Is requiring a customer service department at a company that doesn't want one going to result in them implementing a good customer service department? Not on your life.
At least with email you have a paper trail...
Scaling a customer support organisation is difficult. You need to find people to do a low-status job with unpredictable hours, in a tight labour market.
Also, you probably don't just want to speak to any human. You probably want to speak to an intelligent, skilled human who can fix your problems. That pushes cost up further.
If great support is a priority to you, I recommend being an early adopter of startup products. These companies get their edge from being customer-focused and will be happy to speak to you for whatever reason.
Of course, there are tradeoffs to that approach too. As customers, we want it all: we want cheap products that add tons of value to our lives and never break. In reality it's necessary to make some tradeoffs
I'm in exactly this situation. Someone signed up for a credit bureau service (Experian) with my information (e-mail address at least, though who knows?) and I can't reset the password. Attempts to reset the password are directed to call the customer service number but there's no way to reset the password through the automated system, and apparently no way to reach a person. I've spent hours trying to gain access to this account which is potentially leaking my personal information to a malicious third party, but to no avail.
As AI and human-like synthetic voice tech improve, the whole "speak with a human" thing becomes more nuanced. In ten years or so, we might be saying "I'd like to speak with an irritable, marginally competent call center employee in South America or south Asia" in order to get an actual, identifiable human. The rest of the time, you'll get this pleasant, cheerful generated voice that pretty much understands your questions and answers competently and patiently. For some reason, this scares the daylights out of me.
“Scaling” a problem = Cutting down customer service and avoiding reputational damage through monopolies. A small corner shop could never get a away with the things the big players get away with.
Your desire to speak with a human is nothing that should be right. You should always be able to send certified mail for these conversations. If you’re not happy with the service you are getting you should be able to take your business elsewhere. You can and should be able to write this into a contract if they want agree to it take your business elsewhere.
It is immoral to suggest that the company is obligated to have a human on standby to talk to you whenever you define a desirable need.
As an introvert I’d like the opposite. The right to not have to deal with a person.
I usually know exactly what I want, eg: update my address, but most places force you to have to call, wait on the line, and then engage in a ridiculous game of sounding out numbers and names and hearing back if they heard it right, then having to do it all again when you check the next day and they got it wrong.
Dealing with real people is the least efficient way of getting anything done.
There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case.
Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank.
I literally just spent an hour trying to cancel my internet service, 90% of this time was spent interacting with an automated whatsapp bot (Virgin Media for anyone wondering). Answering the same question, slightly rephrased, multiple times each in some insane dark patterns to get me to not cancel. This is basically what happens when consumer rights have completely eroded.
I had an issue yesterday where Comcast forced me to go through their chatbot before I could speak to a human. That drove me crazy, because what I wanted to do I couldn't do on their website at all.
There needs to be some kind of escape hatch where you can get through to a real person. Companies that do stuff like this just make me want to stop dealing with them altogether.
I'm not sure what the right answer is here. I've had multiple experiences where the customer service human I could talk to had only the same ability I had myself on the web site. "We've opened a ticket and someone will respond when your ticket pops out of the queue."
You also want the humans you talk with to be empowered to actually help you.
The bar for "rights" isn't "I wish this was more common". Should there be a right to avocado on your burger, or a fifteen-second response time from waiters, or boiling-water taps in every home?
Does it sound ridiculous to push those costs into prices for things that are unnecessary? What makes phone support so different?
Agreed. Rephrase this “rights are never anything someone should be forced to provide”.
Rights are naturally given and cannot be taken away.
You have the right to life and education and defense. no one can take those things from, but no one else to provide them either. because that would be infringing on their rights.
Do I think it would be nice for companies to provide human assistance? Yes of course. But I could never support any policy that forced the company to do that. much less would I ever call it a “right”.
I'm making a much narrower point, which is compatible with those who believe in positive rights. But "human support" is closer to "a right to a free taco a day" than it is to "a right to healthcare".
This doesn't seem to be a very popular solution, but it's proven useful: limit contractual freedom for adhesion contracts.
That would mean forbidding some kinds of clauses that are often abused, but also forcing the inclusion of some other clauses and automatic procedures for certain actions like cancelations, or in this case, support.
Have people here used Chewy? I’m kind of amazed at their customer service. It’s SO good. You can reach a person via phone or chat, they are all technically savvy and extremely helpful. And fast. I’ve never spent more than a few minutes on the phone with them and have always been thoroughly satisfied.
I have to agree. When I got dead-ended on a ticket with my bank (Square/Block) I looked up numbers for their directors and called them. One seemed very empathetic and helpful. Then I got an email saying my bank account was terminated for contacting their staff outside the support system. LOL.
"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."
My personal worst hit list in this space:
- Companies that will not even listen to your (serious) bug reports if you don't have an account with them. Looking at you suddenlink.net. Failed big time, gave up.
- Voice robots that do not understand users, despite being native speakers
- Voice robots that do not understand non-native speakers
Do your business with companies who offer human support. There exists one of these for everything you need.
One of the reasons I love WPEngine so very much is that everytime I use their chat support there's a person at the end with someone knowledgeable and who has the tools to help fix my problem.
I wonder if focusing via chat support but with live, smart humans is more scalable and productive.
They would just find a way to outsource that to the cheapest possible source. And ensure that the human is not empowered to do anything for you that's useful. Platitudes as a service..."We're sorry this happened to you. Have your tried rebooting?".
This is by design, corporations have learned how to make anything that costs them into a lifetime of hassle for the customer so the customer is forced to give up. Reaching people doesn't help, they just forward you to other people and/or bureocratic procedures.
Humans won’t guarantee better results. It’s easy to get a human at Verizon, but due to mismanagement, you’ll get transferred from dept to dept. I spent about 20 hours with Verizon humans to get a bug costing me money sorted out (and I still need to follow up with them).
For those in the know, do platforms like Twilio make it any easier to select some standard template that should make this more common? Like, assuming they have reps to begin with, does something like Twilio make doing the right thing easier or harder?
I disagree. As far as possible new rights go, this would be pretty low on my scale.
Right to (somewhat) clean water - sure.
Right to be safe in a prison - probably, maybe.
You're asking for a universal requirement for all corporations to provide human call centers. That's pretty radical.
Putting out some simple numbers:
Let’s say you have a million users and once a month, 1% of them need to speak with a human for 15 minutes. That’s 30k hours of support per year, so like 15 full time employees just to be on the phone.
If a company has a million active users, they can afford 15 full time employees just to do customer support.
Same here! I was a paying customer as well. My account was killed suddenly. I reached out to ask what was going on. Never heard back. Never got a refund. They didn't stop the subscription, of course.
It's just unreal.
There is so much anti-business rhetoric on this site lately. A regulation like this would severely hamper peoples ability to start and profitably run a business. My guess is that OP has never run a startup.
Did you not know that the said companies didn't have dedicated support staff? Was this a surprise to you? Did they make you believe they had people you could call and talk to?
If you knew and still chose to do business with them, that's on you. If they misled you, then sorry to hear that and you should take your business elsewhere and leave them thumbs down in as many places as you can.
There are countless businesses without dedicated phone support that provide immense value, but can only do so in an environment where linearly scaling costs aren't forced on them. Phone support is such a cost. If such a requirement is mandated, a large portion of legitimately useful businesses will vanish and it'll be a net negative for everybody.
I own a small SaaS. If such legislation passed, I'd instantly close it to small customers and set a much higher minimum subscription. Dealing with small clients is almost charity anyways.
how would you define this so to get what you actually want? Companies would just react by employing humans who are not allowed to do anything but read from the machine-generated script?
You need an education on how to bring these companies to court. You DO have a right to speak with a human on court, or else there will be a default judgment in your favor.
This doesn't need to be a right (of which there are necessarily vanishingly few). It just needs to be a choice. If you pay more, you will get better service.
Yes this would also help solve some of the tech displacement problem. But in clown world if this ever happened it would just be the subject of corporate capture.
Forcing all businesses to maintain a human for the potential of interaction would be extremely expensive for them and the costs for almost every service would increase. A lot of companies would probably just hire one person and make a labyrinthine phone tree to get to that one person. Other companies would outsource it to ruby, take your info, and simply not respond.
If you want to talk to a human, file a claim in small claims court. If your problem is not big enough to file, stop using the service and look for a company that will support your needs. Don't make me pay for your poor choice.
ISPs are a nightmare. I dread calling Comcast for any reason
Bad automated system and often less than helpful employees, all while I’m already frustrated over my internet.
I don't think ability to speak to a person over the phone is enough.
You need ability to speak to a person who is knowledgeable and can do something about inquiry.
You'll need to get legislation passed, then.
When a market decides something isn't worth providing, but the public good needs it, legislation is the answer.
It doesn't help much when the human on the other line is very much silo'd regarding what information they can discuss with you.
You should direct your custom towards companies with high-touch human customer service. And you should expect to pay substantially more.
Maybe this should be the fourth law of robotics?
I agree that speaking with a human should be required to be supported.
On the other hand, I can't get a straight answer from my medical/prescription insurances or HR, and I deal with them largely by phone. Massive incompetence and poorly defined business processes can still be an issue if you get a human on the phone. Just pointing out that getting a human isn't a replacement for poor business processes that is usually the root cause of the call.
Vote with your feet and your review. Leave the service, and leave a consumer review on a consumer review site.
This post reminds me of an interesting short film on HBO now called "Please Hold".
Just watched this the other day, it was interesting, I agree. It's a dystopian tale of automatons used for the criminal justice system.
I think that paying customers should have a right to speak with a human.
Lets start with the federal government! I recently had the experience of the IRS sending me progressively angrier letters via an obviously automated process claiming I didn't pay taxes last year. As it turns out, they had record of receiving the payment in the exact dollar amount, and had record of us filing in the exact dollar amount, but they did not apply the payment to the debt in question. We wrote several letters (which we know they received) and tried calling, but its not possible for citizens to actually talk to a human, via any channel, even when the IRS is imminently threatening to put a lien on your house! Of course, the IRS actually staffs a number specifically for attorneys! It cost us $980 to pay an attorney to call the number, conspicuously ~$20 shy of the retainer to convince the IRS to move the bits from one row to another. Naturally, we did not find that out until we had paid the retainer!
TLDR: send payments to the IRS under the primary's SSN (first listed) when filing jointly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
I had to call the Washington State Department of Revenue (government office) yesterday. I DID speak to a human, but the human had no power to actually help. In my opinion, it is far worse when government has bad service than when a private business has bad service because I have no choice to switch. If I don't pay the Department of Revenue, they have the power to imprison me and steal my belongings. If I don't pay Google, then I just have my service cancelled.
Tldr; we need to solve the problem of bad service in government more urgently than bad service in big tech.
They are way, way ahead of you. Just in the recent months I've encountered the following models:
1. You can speak to a real person, but you'd need to navigate a phone tree in an exactly right way, many levels deep, and any wrong step would lead you to an automatic answer and disconnect. The exact options you need to press change frequently and are only partially supported by the voice prompts.
2. There's an option to speak to a person, but the call mysteriously drops each time you try to use it. Of course, to report the problem, you'd need to speak to some person there... you see how it works?
3. There's an option to speak to a person, but every time you try, they are on a meeting, or speaking to somebody else, or temporarily left their office, so you can leave the message. If you guessed you'd never get a followup, you're a smart person.
4. You can speak to a real person, but unfortunately not today, because we have exceptionally high call volume today. Try maybe tomorrow. Got this one from the IRS, for example. Guess what happens tomorrow.
5. You can speak to a real person. No, really. No kidding. Unfortunately, this person has no access to anything but filling up a request form that is filed into the internal tracking system. You do not have access to this system, and neither does the real person you're speaking to, except for filing requests. You don't know who, if ever, will be handling the problem, when it happens - the real person helpfully assures you it'll happen as soon as possible - and there would be no status update or feedback whatsoever.
6. You can speak to a real person, but this person is given a script - having things akin to "are you sure you computer is turned on?", "please restart your computer and see if it happens again", etc. - and will not deviate from it, and beyond that you're confidently told the problem is surely elsewhere and there's no way they can help you. There's no non-scripted persons to talk to.
7. You can speak to a real person, but your issue appears to be a bit complicated, so the real person will have to consult with the other people in the office and give you a call back tomorrow with the resolution. The call never happens. Next time you call you speak to a different person, which has no idea what happened before, so you have to repeat everything from scratch. There's no way to speak to a person you spoke before. Guess the outcome.
If you want to be cruel, add to it poor line quality (I don't know how they achieve it, but I've never had worse call quality than on support calls), random call drops and support personnel with marginal command of spoken English. But that's just an icing on top.
I hope we'll see a return of libertarian values in tech culture in the future. There's been a ton of push to force every rule into law in the past few years. Not everything should be backed by force of violence. I hope this authoritarian trend reverses sooner rather than later.
Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. The tech industry’s fascination with libertarian values have brought about the disastrous consequences of putting free speech on a pedestal, with utter disregard for the harms it has caused. And libertarianism has always required choice. Choice requires a free and vibrant marketplace. But that market place requires regulation to keep it free and vibrant. The circle cannot be squared.
We certainly disagree but I respect your opinion and appreciate describing an alternative point of view like this.
Well, can you point to any big tech company or otherwise tech industry segment that actually practices “libertarian“ principles?
Because to me it seems they have been authoritarian left for at least the past ten years.
The model seems to be come up in an unregulated market, take advantage of it to build a monopoly, desire regulation or actively influence politics to keep small competitors out.
Well some of the people who started these companies may have originally talked about libertarian themes, I’m not seeing it.
THERE IS !
See the GDPR rule on automated decision making and your right to speak to a human. The GDPR is your friend.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
This is an interesting aspect of the GDPR that I didn’t know. But I don’t see anything at all in the article you linked about the right to speak to a human. It only talks about automated decision making, internal “processing” decisions of a business, and not customer support as far as I can tell. Did I miss it somewhere?
With written communication you have proof and don't have to repeat over and over. If tickets can't solve then speaking definitely won't.
I would rather just scorch the business on social media then take my business to a competitor. Even talking to a human, you will find poor customer experience that amounts to the same outcome. But survival of the fittest will eventually kill off such companies