6 ms·

> To avoid the Ombudsman being overused, you could give it a price of say $20, which is always refunded when the case is resolved. What if the cost was put ont

by nickjj 7y ago

> To avoid the Ombudsman being overused, you could give it a price of say $20, which is always refunded when the case is resolved. What if the cost was put onto the business instead of the consumer and the business just hired support people who are all Ombudsmans by default? Instead of focusing on copy / pasting boilerplate scripts and answering as many tickets as possible, they should focus on the problem the customer is having by default and do everything possible to reduce the number of incoming questions by fixing bugs, making a better product, improving their docs, etc.. I personally do around the clock email support for 35,000+ people who sign up to my programming courses and support isn't bogging me down. Relative to the number of minutes I'm awake, support is one of the least business related time consuming things I do per day, but I send individually personalized in-depth answers to everyone who asks me questions -- usually within an hour or less.

foota 7y ago
Because requiring the customer to pay a cost fixes the incentives problem. A customer may have an issue that is a minor inconvenience to them, that can either stay as not resolved, is due to error, or is simply not worth resolving to them. By having them pay for fixing the issue it could greatly reduce the number of inbound cases, allowing them to go straight to people that can act on them instead of sitting in triage and getting canned responses for O(days|forever). I agree that in theory you can accomplish the same thing by making the product foolproof, but I don't think you can accomplish that for consumer facing products, and that doing so may not be a worth while trade-off. Additionally focusing on issues that greatly impact people rather than small things that cause friction with the product may (or may not! if it causes lack of retention) be worth more.
- Joakal 7y ago
  In terms of games theory; if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer, then that's an incentive to ignore the consumer's complaint. Especially if that company has a monopoly. I can understand why GP suggested company pays $20.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    > if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer Simplifying, that's "if (false)", since ignoring the customers in the limit gets you a failed business and bankruptcy.
    - thayne 7y ago
      not if you have a monopoly. Which is why customer support for most ISPs in the US is so abysmal. And even if it is just a sufficiently large company, if the customer is not a large payer and the issue is non-trivial to solve, the the cost of losing that customer could very well be less than the cost of fixing the issue.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        What I was addressing was specifically the notion that companies pay zero cost for ignoring a customer, or the idea that they believe the same. That's false. Now there's no question there are some customers these large companies are better off without, and there are large and small examples of companies firing customers, or ignoring them til they go away. Nothing wrong with that. All the time on this site we talk about firing unprofitable customers. If you do this judiciously it's just good business. Doing that in particular cases is not the same as doing that generally.
    - setr 7y ago
      For the non-enterprise user, isn't this the scenario established today, with no failed business?
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        No, I don't think so. All the major internet companies listen to their non-enterprise users. They may not provide enterprise quality support to each individual user, but user voices in aggregate are considered critically important.
  - foota 7y ago
TylerE 7y ago
Because that isn't a useful allocation of resources. Support that powerful are going to basically be devs. With dev salary expectations.
- nickjj 7y ago
  I think it's useful and it's very much worth it to give support a salary where they are enthusiastic to be employed. If someone uses your product or service and has an issue, the first contact they have with your company is through support. A crappy support experience could easily be the difference between having a life time customer valued at thousands of dollars, or your customer feeling frustrated and going to another company, netting you $0. That has a butterfly effect too because having 100 happy customers who are praising your support could lead to many new sales from organic recommendations. Having a bunch of customers who felt neglected by your support could yield a situation where your company is now on the front page of HN for having bad support or worse. For whatever reasons, bigger companies focus more on measurable metrics like "tickets closed per hour", where the emphasis is on things that aren't important because measuring customer happiness is pretty subjective and doesn't translate well to employee evaluation scores. I know if I ever got the point where I would need to delegate support assistance to someone, you can be sure I would pay them amazingly well, at least equal to a developer's salary because I never want anyone to ever feel like they get ignored or have a low quality experience with my products.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    I think this happens because it's very very difficult for a manager's manager to know if the frontline employee is spending their time solving real problems or slacking off with no actual regard for the customer. "Metrics" are an unhappy middleground for everyone.
  - iratewizard 7y ago
    Airbnb is a great example of both. If you call tech support and get India, hang up. If you're lucky they're useless. If you're unlucky, they're going against your direct command and contacting the drug dealers in your house about a complaint. Contrast that to reaching one of the many on-shore agents who do their jobs well. One call, one or two people max and the issue is mostly resolved. I've got no idea what the cause is. It's probably a mix of poor management, ineffective metrics, low salaries and a work culture in India which isn't synonymous with quality. The bottom line is, even the same company can be doing support wonderfully and terribly at the same time.
phyzome 7y ago
NearlyFreeSpeech.net does something kind of like that. It costs money to raise any support ticket (you have to have a special support subscription) but you get refunded your "support points" if it turned out to be a problem on their end.

by nickjj 7y ago

foota 7y ago

Because requiring the customer to pay a cost fixes the incentives problem. A customer may have an issue that is a minor inconvenience to them, that can either stay as not resolved, is due to error, or is simply not worth resolving to them. By having them pay for fixing the issue it could greatly reduce the number of inbound cases, allowing them to go straight to people that can act on them instead of sitting in triage and getting canned responses for O(days|forever). I agree that in theory you can accomplish the same thing by making the product foolproof, but I don't think you can accomplish that for consumer facing products, and that doing so may not be a worth while trade-off. Additionally focusing on issues that greatly impact people rather than small things that cause friction with the product may (or may not! if it causes lack of retention) be worth more.

Joakal 7y ago
In terms of games theory; if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer, then that's an incentive to ignore the consumer's complaint. Especially if that company has a monopoly. I can understand why GP suggested company pays $20.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  > if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer Simplifying, that's "if (false)", since ignoring the customers in the limit gets you a failed business and bankruptcy.
  - thayne 7y ago
    not if you have a monopoly. Which is why customer support for most ISPs in the US is so abysmal. And even if it is just a sufficiently large company, if the customer is not a large payer and the issue is non-trivial to solve, the the cost of losing that customer could very well be less than the cost of fixing the issue.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      What I was addressing was specifically the notion that companies pay zero cost for ignoring a customer, or the idea that they believe the same. That's false. Now there's no question there are some customers these large companies are better off without, and there are large and small examples of companies firing customers, or ignoring them til they go away. Nothing wrong with that. All the time on this site we talk about firing unprofitable customers. If you do this judiciously it's just good business. Doing that in particular cases is not the same as doing that generally.
  - setr 7y ago
    For the non-enterprise user, isn't this the scenario established today, with no failed business?
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      No, I don't think so. All the major internet companies listen to their non-enterprise users. They may not provide enterprise quality support to each individual user, but user voices in aggregate are considered critically important.
- foota 7y ago

TylerE 7y ago

Because that isn't a useful allocation of resources. Support that powerful are going to basically be devs. With dev salary expectations.

nickjj 7y ago
I think it's useful and it's very much worth it to give support a salary where they are enthusiastic to be employed. If someone uses your product or service and has an issue, the first contact they have with your company is through support. A crappy support experience could easily be the difference between having a life time customer valued at thousands of dollars, or your customer feeling frustrated and going to another company, netting you $0. That has a butterfly effect too because having 100 happy customers who are praising your support could lead to many new sales from organic recommendations. Having a bunch of customers who felt neglected by your support could yield a situation where your company is now on the front page of HN for having bad support or worse. For whatever reasons, bigger companies focus more on measurable metrics like "tickets closed per hour", where the emphasis is on things that aren't important because measuring customer happiness is pretty subjective and doesn't translate well to employee evaluation scores. I know if I ever got the point where I would need to delegate support assistance to someone, you can be sure I would pay them amazingly well, at least equal to a developer's salary because I never want anyone to ever feel like they get ignored or have a low quality experience with my products.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  I think this happens because it's very very difficult for a manager's manager to know if the frontline employee is spending their time solving real problems or slacking off with no actual regard for the customer. "Metrics" are an unhappy middleground for everyone.
- iratewizard 7y ago
  Airbnb is a great example of both. If you call tech support and get India, hang up. If you're lucky they're useless. If you're unlucky, they're going against your direct command and contacting the drug dealers in your house about a complaint. Contrast that to reaching one of the many on-shore agents who do their jobs well. One call, one or two people max and the issue is mostly resolved. I've got no idea what the cause is. It's probably a mix of poor management, ineffective metrics, low salaries and a work culture in India which isn't synonymous with quality. The bottom line is, even the same company can be doing support wonderfully and terribly at the same time.

phyzome 7y ago

NearlyFreeSpeech.net does something kind of like that. It costs money to raise any support ticket (you have to have a special support subscription) but you get refunded your "support points" if it turned out to be a problem on their end.