3 ms·
I often see articles about a tech company delivering an egregiously bad customer experience on HN. I'm sure we all agree that the scenario as presented was a sc
by marshray 9y ago
I often see articles about a tech company delivering an egregiously bad customer experience on HN. I'm sure we all agree that the scenario as presented was a screwup, but I would like to question its relevance. We seem to be passing around such stories as a form of folklore. Why? As a warning to others?
Amazon's a huge company with surely millions of customer interactions a month. Let's assume by now they have adopted a mature supervision process for their CSR interactions. Is this mostly just a random event caused by an unexpected 'bad apple' CSR?
If so, it would suggest the 'error rate' in this type of interaction is really quite low. A customer service cosmic ray, if you will.
- freditup 9y agoYep. And although there are many bad things you can say about Amazon, they're known for having excellent customer service in general (at least relative to other popular tech companies). Some customer service stories might exemplify typical interactions (maybe it is really hard to get customer support from Google), but one-off stories such as this one seem more interesting simply as curious tales than as anything that would shape ones opinions of a corporation's service.
- totalZero 9y agoIt's a hedge against our own mistreatment. If companies see that their customer interactions are visible to the market as a whole, they have more of an incentive to make sure those interactions are good ones.
- marshray 9y agoWell, A) given that the article was from BBC I doubt the HN upvotes were much of a signal boost, and B) would this story have made it to the front page if it were, say, an auto insurance company rather than Amazon?