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While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous. The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I

While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous. The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with these days. The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you get to talk to a human. The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race to the bottom situation, and it's a societal problem, companies do it to compete. But if your competition didn't do this hostile user gaslighting, then you wouldn't either. Or if instead of wasting 30 minutes average time before talking to someone with agency, the time was reduced to 5, or even 10 minutes. I think the answer is regulation, that the mean or median average for time to speak to a live human should be no more than x (I propose 10 minutes), combined with an ombusdman to report companies that hide behind automated systems instead of do support, and if the average response time goes over allowed limit, or more than y percent of users report a company for not having a way to address their actual problem, then that company should pay a financial penalty, to it's users pro-rata. If the penalty is balanced, this way companies would actually share the cost of the people's time they are wasting.

zippergz 5y ago
One problem I've observed first hand is that the head of customer service is measured on (among other things) the amount of money being spent on customer service (and other closely-related metrics like average contacts per order, agent time spent per customer, etc.). These executives have no direct control over the product, so they can't actually solve the problems that are causing people to contact customer service. For example, they aren't in charge of the warehouses, so if for example a ton of people are calling in because they are getting the wrong item in the orders, the CS leader is getting dinged in their metrics but can't address the root cause. This leads them to do things like those being discussed, where they take measures to reduce contacts without solving any real problems. Maybe if "customer satisfaction" were a more important metric than "CS budget," this would be better, but customer satisfaction is very hard to actually measure (how many of us even bother filling out surveys, and of those who do, how many are honest?). I guess a lot of this boils down to "big company syndrome" where the customer experience is controlled by a series of interlocking factors, but the humans who control those factors are siloed and disincentivized to work together to improve things. My experience is that in most of these situations, people actually do have good intentions overall. You wouldn't believe the ways I've heard CS executives twist themselves into knots to convince people that outsourced or automated customer service is actually better for the customer (and I think they truly did believe it, or at least had fooled themselves into believing it). But the end result is bad for everyone.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Which is why we need regulation tied to actual financial performance of the business. So that when they try to externalize the costs they end up paying for it instead, enough to influence the business to change, to fix the root cause of the problem.

zippergz 5y ago

One problem I've observed first hand is that the head of customer service is measured on (among other things) the amount of money being spent on customer service (and other closely-related metrics like average contacts per order, agent time spent per customer, etc.). These executives have no direct control over the product, so they can't actually solve the problems that are causing people to contact customer service. For example, they aren't in charge of the warehouses, so if for example a ton of people are calling in because they are getting the wrong item in the orders, the CS leader is getting dinged in their metrics but can't address the root cause. This leads them to do things like those being discussed, where they take measures to reduce contacts without solving any real problems. Maybe if "customer satisfaction" were a more important metric than "CS budget," this would be better, but customer satisfaction is very hard to actually measure (how many of us even bother filling out surveys, and of those who do, how many are honest?). I guess a lot of this boils down to "big company syndrome" where the customer experience is controlled by a series of interlocking factors, but the humans who control those factors are siloed and disincentivized to work together to improve things. My experience is that in most of these situations, people actually do have good intentions overall. You wouldn't believe the ways I've heard CS executives twist themselves into knots to convince people that outsourced or automated customer service is actually better for the customer (and I think they truly did believe it, or at least had fooled themselves into believing it). But the end result is bad for everyone.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Which is why we need regulation tied to actual financial performance of the business. So that when they try to externalize the costs they end up paying for it instead, enough to influence the business to change, to fix the root cause of the problem.