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Savings from scale usually comes from automation, and people are generally looking to talk to humans, not bots. This is the exact reason Google avoids human sup
by foobazgt 4y ago
Savings from scale usually comes from automation, and people are generally looking to talk to humans, not bots. This is the exact reason Google avoids human support in the first place - there are no massive cost savings, because it does not scale well.
- Retric 4y agoThere’s a lot to automate when doing phone support. The vast difference between the sub 20 cents per minute you need to pay people to answer phones and the 98 cents per minute each call costs are largely things that could be automated. And that’s ignoring trying to minimize call length or even the need for any calls in the first place.
- foobazgt 4y agoThere are definite cost reductions that can be made, but they pale in comparison to keeping humans out of the loop. For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?
- Retric 4y agoThat’s just the most obvious approach, adjusting the product and internal processes to avoid having people call is even more effective. Upselling people is another way to drop net costs even further, etc. I suspect they could get net costs below 800m/year.
- foobazgt 4y agoOk, I agree to disagree then! :)