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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 margina

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.

dustingetz 5y ago
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
- Msw242 5y ago
  At a higher price level! It's important to write out and acknowledge that people cost money.
  - chii 5y ago
    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.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Cool. What, about $5 a year? Totally worth it.
    - Msw242 5y ago
      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
  - dustingetz 5y ago
    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.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    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.
    - stevenhuang 5y ago
      > 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).
ironmagma 5y ago
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.
- pdonis 5y ago
  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.
  - rpdillon 5y ago
    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.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    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.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > 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.
granshaw 5y ago
Aka the Google model
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  Yeah, but, probably you're not Google's customer; you're their product.
  - majani 5y ago
    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
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  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.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    >Have you ever really tried to speak to someone at google? Thought such thing wasn't even possible.
phkahler 5y ago
>> 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.
emsy 5y ago
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.
coldtea 5y ago
>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.
- dmd 5y ago
  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?
  - rkangel 5y ago
    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.
    - dmd 5y ago
      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?
      - rkangel 5y ago
        You're not providing a service though are you? You're providing intellectual property for people to do things with.
        dmd 5y ago
        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?
rmbyrro 5y ago
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.
- beamatronic 5y ago
  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.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    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.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    It's pretty hard to avoid being the product regardless of whether you're the customer.
- scottLobster 5y ago
  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.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    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.
majani 5y ago
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
pempem 5y ago
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.
jjav 5y ago
> 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.
bcrl 5y ago
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.

dustingetz 5y ago

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

Msw242 5y ago
At a higher price level! It's important to write out and acknowledge that people cost money.
- chii 5y ago
  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.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Cool. What, about $5 a year? Totally worth it.
  - Msw242 5y ago
    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
- dustingetz 5y ago
  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.
- falcolas 5y ago
  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.
  - stevenhuang 5y ago
    > 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).

ironmagma 5y ago

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.

pdonis 5y ago
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.
- rpdillon 5y ago
  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.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  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.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > 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.

granshaw 5y ago

Aka the Google model

NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
Yeah, but, probably you're not Google's customer; you're their product.
- majani 5y ago
  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
cyberpunk 5y ago
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.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  >Have you ever really tried to speak to someone at google? Thought such thing wasn't even possible.

phkahler 5y ago

>> 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.

emsy 5y ago

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.

coldtea 5y ago

>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.

dmd 5y ago
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?
- rkangel 5y ago
  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.
  - dmd 5y ago
    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?
    - rkangel 5y ago
      You're not providing a service though are you? You're providing intellectual property for people to do things with.
      - dmd 5y ago
        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?

rmbyrro 5y ago

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.

beamatronic 5y ago
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.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  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.
- thfuran 5y ago
  It's pretty hard to avoid being the product regardless of whether you're the customer.
scottLobster 5y ago
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.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  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.

majani 5y ago

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

pempem 5y ago

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.

jjav 5y ago

> 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.

bcrl 5y ago

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.