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SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers

241 points by PuppyTailWags 4y ago

subradios 4y ago
But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  >Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. I have never seen customer service come up during a purchasing discussion outside of large corporate purchases. It's pretty firmly a "cost center" that MBAs try to optimize into being as cheap as possible. It is simply cheaper to outsource your support and make it obtuse/difficult to reach a person, basically only fulfilling the absolute bare minimum to not get sued.
- jackmott 4y ago
  Are you a real person?
- drewg123 4y ago
  How do you know the problem is solved, and the customer didn't just hang up in frustration?
- WantonQuantum 4y ago
  I’ve never encountered an automated phone system that can direct me to the manual for a product. Do you have an example of this? I have, however, encountered phone systems that make it literally impossible to talk to a person.
  - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    A number of years ago, Tracfone realised it _would_ be a good thing for customers to be able to automatic'ly extend their end-of-service date rather than having to remember to buying airtime minutes they don't need (due to already having lots of unused minutes) just to prevent getting their number suspended. Tracfone also decided it should be possible to activate this feature using just your phone number and a credit card, without having to sign into the website. There wasn't even a way for customers to sign into anything! Years later, they added a possibility of customers signing into an online account. But doing so did not give access to payment information enter in the old no-sign-in system. The call-in help number's menu system also got changed sometime, such that it was no longer possible to talk to a person — all permutations of the menu tree, as well as fallbacks like "just press zero a few times" resulted in loops.The mandated contact number for the vendor on credit card bills also went to this menu system. The end result was that the only way to modify or cancel a recurring payment created under the old no-sign-in system seemed to be telling the credit card company to either refuse charges from Tracfone or to close the revolving account. Doing so would cause Tracfone to cancel your service (which might not be what either you or Tracfone wanted). And after they cancelled? The remnants of Tracfone automation would do two things: send your now-disabled phone occasional messages trying to entice you back, and keep submitting charges to the credit card company to be rejected. When the credit card's refuse-charges instruction expired after five years, Tracfone would resume taking payment, for a now unrecoverable (already reassigned) phone number, for an IMEI that had not appeared any network for years. On the upside, I know somebody who has no problems with current Tracfone.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  Solving a customer's problem does not directly make a company money. It may arguably avoid them losing potential future money but it doesn't make them money.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    It builds/preserves your brand. A proper customer centric strategy relies on support to empower the sales/product teams (and vice-versa).
- version_five 4y ago
  Automated call centers save money by disincentivizing calling in, and by making people give up. Most people don't think about customer service or support when they are buying stuff. Actually solving the customers problem is way down the list of objectives for most phone systems. It's easy to see this by comparing the quality of phone support with the kind of market power a company has.
  - fcarraldo 4y ago
    That is an interesting thought. Google, for most consumer products (and a good number of business ones) notoriously has next to no phone support at all. Is this an indication of being a market leader or of being a digital monopoly?
    - adriancr 4y ago
      Google for paid products has phone support. From a quick check, 2-3 min answer time for calls or chat from google one on cheapest plan. If you use the free option, the no support is given which is fair, you're not a customer
      - jen20 4y ago
        My experience of Google is that you can be the smallest (paying) customer or the largest enterprise, and the support is still trash.
    - version_five 4y ago
      Google is a leader in the tech playbook concept of cornering off your monopoly then treating your customers like shit. It's actually essential to any internet scale business model, because of the challenges of profitable serving so many people if you actually provide some kind of support. FWIW, google is better positioned to give shitty support because their users are the product anyway, and they grew organically into this. Support was never really part of the bargain (incidentally why I would never take google seriously for "business" services like gsuite or gcp because it's just not their culture). The more egregious examples are companies like uber (probably the worst) that actually have customers but think they can treat them as badly as google treats its users because it's a "tech" business. And you end up with supposedly "disruptive" businesses that just amount to "we're cheaper because we're self serve and don't offer support (and ignore laws)". But returning to your point and mine, the first step is "blitz-scaling" yourself a de-facto monopoly so you can get away with treating people badly.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Why? And how would they know? Customer service is a thing that maybe 10% of customers will interact with, and usually long after the product is purchased. It's very hard to evaluate up-front except through "brand" reputation.
- adriancr 4y ago
  I would argue automated call centers are a problem. If you end up needing to call someone since you've exhausted all other avenues you do want to talk to someone. At that point you will either: - waste a lot of time navigating prompts until you give up or reach a human. - automated call center will decide that prompt it gave you is the correct one and close your call... (had this happen a lot...) - automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close... And all metrics will show great for the company while you've given up or you start looking for other companies. Sure, lots of problems are solved by pointing to correct manual... although that would be an argument if product is user friendly enough. Now... on southwest airlines case... what manual could you look up to fix your cancelled flight?, how do you deal with that? Personally, I have had a cancelled flight on vacation. I could not find someone to talk to, automated prompts and calls closed. I booked another airline flight home and asked for a refund and compensation after the fact... This might not be an option in a lot of cases.
  - teeray 4y ago
    > automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close I usually just talk complete nonsense to these prompts (but valid English sentences). That way the automation gives up when it can parse the sentences but can’t intuit meaning from them.
    - adriancr 4y ago
      last time i tried that i got a 'please repeat' a couple times and call closed. On the other hand, calling a bank and saying you'd like to report fraud to the prompt directs you really fast to customer support.
      - SnowHill9902 4y ago
        If you don’t really have a fraud case to report, you are actually reporting fraud on yourself. Think about it.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Not all products/services offer customers (or end users) a choice. Government, wired ISP, and health insurance are usually not a choice. A lot of times, mobile network and airline are effectively without choice too.
- mattashii 4y ago
  > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! If a company's phone tree can make the consumer drop the call, it saves the company support worker time, regardless of whether the customer request was adequately served. For a company, the tradeoff where customer may be on the line for 10 hours in a call tree to get an answer a their question, or 10 minutes with a support agent, is fairly easy if you do not care about support. Phone trees do not automagically save anyones time, and especially not that of the customer.
- acdha 4y ago
  > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Do you have any evidence for that claim? It seems unlikely that could be true since people need to call for things like repairs which a manual couldn’t help with and the intersection of people who don’t read manuals but will read them when prompted seems to leave out a lot of other people. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. This is leaving out a lot of obvious alternatives: products don’t fail often enough that people buy anything but the cheapest one (or the one that is featured more prominently in the store they have a promotional agreement with), companies have all cut their support staff so the ability to shop around is limited, the cost is shifted to the retailers or installers, some fraction of people give up and ask a friend or neighbor to help, etc.
- realworldperson 4y ago
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- joshstrange 4y ago
  This comment is so wrong it hurts. > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. It's a strategy to try to get you to go online, use an automated system, or annoy you until you give up. Trust me, if I'm calling into a business something has already gone horribly wrong. The automated line lying about "higher than normal call volume" (bullshit, hire more people) or "You can find the answers you need on our website" (nope, that's why I'm calling in) only pisses me off. It has never in my life provided information that I found useful. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! What does this even mean? Of course understaffing saves the company money. > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Yes, because I have a real choice on what electric, gas, water, internet company I use /s. For non-monopoly companies (growing increasingly rare) I often can't help that I currently have their product, I might buy an alternative (if one exists) next time around but "vote with your dollars" doesn't really work here well. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". No, it's not. It might be a metric for human workers but they literally don't care if it takes you 10x longer to find the answer as long as they don't have to pay a human it's a win. I've worked for companies with call centers and I assure you the only thing they care about is reducing that headcount, the outcome for the customer doesn't even rank.
  - subradios 4y ago
    I agree with your story about the answers not being on the website. However, the users that represent the vast majority of support calls are very clearly not you. This is ok.
- taneq 4y ago
  Depends on the call centre. Some are great and answer your question straight away. Others are newspeak-laden smokescreens designed entirely to either funnel customers into doing what the company wants, or to waste their time until they give up. “Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”
- maxbond 4y ago
  My experience is that customer service is often trying to convince me that there is no problem or that my problem is my fault and there's nothing they can do about it. I bet many people here can sympathize with me when I say I know from experience that when customer service asks what operating system I use, the correct answer is "Windows," even though I run Linux, because I will never get help with any issue of I admit I'm using Linux (even for issues not at all related to my OS, like issues with my router - I don't call for Linux issues, because I can diagnose and fix those!). They will tell me Linux isn't supported... By their browser app or broadband service or what have you. The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you. (I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. That assumes that there is a choice. Often enough there isn't. Just like there often enough isnt really competition. We have seen how "compeditors" have colluded to keep wages low before (the "gentlemens agreements between apple, Google etc execs). Funnily enough these agreements are never done to keep exec salaries down, might have something to do with the fact that they all sit on the same boards. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". Evidence required. I suspect the systems are actually designed for customers to just give up. This is especially obvious in services which customers only use rarely and thus price becomes the main purchase factor. Take airlines, which probably are the worst in terms of call wait times, people do not buy tickets enough to make purchase decisions based on service when something goes wrong, so service is atrocious, except for business customers and frequent flyers, who typically get significantly better service.
monero-xmr 4y ago
[flagged]
- b112 4y ago
  What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible. You ridicule it, but I don't see why.
  - marcus0x62 4y ago
    For starters, what does this have to do with the Southwest meltdown, which seems to have been caused in large part by a lack of automation?
    - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
      It would be a mistake to suppose that more automation would have resulted in a different outcome. For example, an update to a critical system can also result in operator/interface breakdowns, leading to failures. In fact, according to some accounts, this is exactly what happened and it exacerbated things (some spreadsheet software was updated). I recommend this paper to everyone: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
      - marcus0x62 4y ago
        The automation in this case would be a means other than live telephone calls to confirm/update crew locations and, no, it would not be a mistake to assume other methods would scale better.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    At restaurants with menus that don't require explanation, manually taking an order is more error-prone and distracts wait staff from providing higher value services.
toss1 4y ago
>>the deliberate, built-in ways corporate “customer service” is set up to not only shield those on the top of the ladder—executives, vice presidents, large shareholders—but pit low-wage workers against each other in an inherently antagonistic relationship marked by powerlessness and frustration. Yup. Just like the classic experiment on rats where they start introducing stresses into the environment (increased crowding, reduced food, noise, etc.) and the rats start fighting each other. Here's it is letting the customers fight the customer service reps, who are themselves deliberately understaffed. Maybe time to using LinkedIn and other sources to find the higher level managers executives and start letting them hear the complaints directly in their inbox.
rqtwteye 4y ago
It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  As a customer, I support workers unionizing to improve their wage bargaining power. Besides tipping, I can’t do much to help them do that. They’ve gotta organize to do it, and call on the NLRB when there’s (always inevitably) Corporate Fuckery [1]. Luckily, the NLRB received a $25M funding bump in the latest Omnibus spending bill signed into law. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrative-law-judge-decisions https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrativ...
  - ghiculescu 4y ago
    How does tipping improve their bargaining power? Seems to me like it would weaken it (“why do you need a higher base wage? You get so many tips!”)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      It doesn't. The tipping is the only thing I can do in the short term to help, because those tips go to workers immediately (versus the lengthy sales cycle of labor improvements). My apologies that wasn't more clear.
      - maxbond 4y ago
        If course, it only goes to workers, when it isn't stolen by the company. https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-06-instacart-revises-pay-policy-after-tipping-uproar.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-06-instacart-revises-pay-po... As far as I know Instacart has stopped doing this, and many other apps were busted for this, but it's utterly, utterly shameful.
phreack 4y ago
This is why my #1 metric to choose a service provider is support capability. Things will always go wrong and if the point of contact with the customer does not have any agency to fix things effectively, I will not deal at all. The exception is the norm, and front facing employees must be able to act instead of just reading a script and hoping the problem will solve itself. That phrase about recorded apologies is just dystopian.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  How do you evaluate this metric?
  - phreack 4y ago
    It's easier to discard companies by looking up their points of support. If there's not even a phone number where I can get a real person to talk to, that's an immediate out. Typically, then I just ask users about their experience. If I hear stuff like them wasting hours on the phone or not getting any meaningful replies that's also an out. In the end sometimes I end up choosing the less worse version, not going through with any service at all, but there's been rare cases where support was so good that I wouldn't even mind having trouble at all since I know there's always ways to work around them.
- r00fus 4y ago
  One company that (somewhat recently) improved their support is T-Mobile. They used to do call centers in the cheapest places but now have agents that are a) local to your time zone and b) are not governed solely by basic metrics but are actual careers with an actual progression ladder. You’d not think these are intrinsic but it’s turned out to be fantastic in aggregate as a customer. I have always had a great experience with their support since they updated their process circa 2018.
JamisonM 4y ago
There is a tension in the article between "the capitalists are pitting the consumers against the front line workers" premise and the "the capitalists are eliminating the front line workers" point made in the article. Southwest's meltdown was about computer systems that coordinate "offline" based on assumptions instead of online based on passing information back and forth on a regular basis. Southwest was a very reliable airline, it didn't have some sort of day-to-day understaffing problem, they executed an unorthodox business strategy [0] in the last year or so that has degraded their performance, and bad weather exacerbated the problem. 0: https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-americas-least-reliable-airlines-due-to-canceled-flights-after-one-bright-idea-backfired.html https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-amer...
- jmbwell 4y ago
  Inc. makes it sound like point to point (rather than hub and spoke) is the problem, but that seems like a distraction. Airlines operated PtP for decades; hub and spoke is a relatively new approach that has its own issues. What got Southwest could get any airline: being stretched too thin, running schedules too tight, having everything just in time, all to cram as many fares into the sky as possible. American also had huge delays and cancellations, United kind of always has huge delays and cancellations. There but for the grace goes any other airline in this situation. The lesson from all this, it seems to me, is that if a meltdown can happen to a company like Southwest, which has ample resources and talent, then it could happen to anyone.
  - EMM_386 4y ago
    > Airlines operated PtP for decades This is only really true prior to deregulation in 1978. After that, Delta began hub-and-spoke out of Atlanta, and the majority of airlines followed them. These days, as far as I can tell, Southwest is the only major carrier that doesn't follow this approach. It has its downsides. You don't have pilots sitting "on reserve" at bases ready to fly at a moments notice if there are gaps in the system. There isn't a need to shut down and esentially "reboot" the airline when there is a major disruption, which is what Southwest just had to do. Delta had the second highest cancellation rate due to this winter storm, and that was at 10%. Southwest had to cancel 70% of their schedule.
jmyeet 4y ago
I agree with the general idea that the insatiable hunger for greater profits comes at the expense of labor. Southwest is just another example of this. Additionally, everything ts treated as a cost center, such as IT systems. And everything is short-term thinking. But pointing to automation as a problem is misguided. Automation is great. I look forward to a future when we don't subject humans to "time off task" in an Amazon warehouse. We automate a bunch of things now that were horrible for the people who originally did them. The problem is systemic: how do we distribute the fruits of that labor? The current capitalist organization of the economy exploits labor and concentrates all the wealth in the hands of a small handful of people. The US has and produces enough wealth such that every citizen could have enough to eat, a house to live in, access to healthcare and otherwise have all their basic needs met. We, as a society, have decided we'd rather have people die in the streets, starve and use state violence in the form of withholding basic healthcare like insulin. Automation should mean that we only need to work 10-20 hours of work a week. But no. Instead we just cut the amount of workers (to the point of having no redundancy like the railroad companies) and suppress real wage increases in the name of increased profits. It really doesn't have to be this way.
realworldperson 4y ago
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8bitsrule 4y ago
>The waiter hasn’t been replaced by an iPad, they’ve been replaced by you. I've noticed as well that in grocery-store lines. Where customers are being conditioned to patiently wait in long lines to be next at the checkout machines. To wave their purchases over lasers, then pack them into each and every bag they'll pay for. Be careful what you put in the bagging area! the machines' metallic voices shriek at the customers. They must do exactly as they're told. Or else the single human attendant will walk over to ask them what they did wrong. While others still waiting trade impatient glances. Oh the shame. Meanwhile the silent rows of unmanned registers wait in the gloom, just in case. Are they waiting for an EMP?
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  >>I've noticed as well that in grocery-store lines. Where customers are being conditioned to patiently wait in long lines to be next at the checkout machines Man I just realized I have not been inside of a grocery store in over 3 years... Thank god for curb side pickup
  - rx_bandit 4y ago
    You should go in! I enjoy picking the fruits, veggies and cuts of meat instead of whatever the market grabs. (not to say curbside is bad but it was one of the few things I miss when the lockdown in 2020 happened.)
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      I dont.... If I want to pick my meat I go to a real local butcher that only does meat. Which i only do for steaks or something like that. For my everyday meals One pack of chicken is no different than the next pack of chicken... One 5lb bag of potatoes is no different than the other 5lb bag of potatoes, 1 bag of onions is no different than the other bag of onions..,.. etc
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I recall reading that when they introduced self-service checkouts theft went up significantly; people were much less reluctant to still if they were only being served by a machine. However the solution was not to simply go back to use manned registers again, but instead make the systems for theft detection more sophisticated. I wouldn't even be surprised if the final systems that we have now are not even cheaper than manned registers, but the way the transition worked was that it was always sold on "potential savings" on idealised conditions.
Eisenstein 4y ago
> Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters This is why it is a good idea to be nice to the people you deal with on the front lines, and write a very politely worded letter to the head of the department at the company you are dealing with, and potentially letters to their boss, and their boss, etc. Mail it, if possible, as a follow-up to the email. I am sure people here need no instruction on how to find the appropriate person in the corporate structure to contact with their concern. These are the people who can get things done -- not just for you, but for everyone. Oh, don't forget that if you have a 401k you may legitimately be a stockholder in the company, so you can mention that if true.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  How do I find the mailing addresses of the bosses? Actually how do I find the names of the bosses? Maybe from LinkedIn?
  - teej 4y ago
    This is a real benefit of public corporations: anyone with significant ownership is public. The names of the owners and executives are trivial to find.
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      And at that level you get people who absolutely don't care if some Joe Shmoe was unhappy with their service or something.
      - falcolas 4y ago
        They also generally have another layer of protection from being contacted by plebs, err, customers.
  - shagie 4y ago
    You don't need to. You address it to the corporate HQ and let the mail room deal with the proper routing within the organization. For example, Southwest. https://www.southwest.com/html/contact-us/index.html?clk=GFOOTER-CUSTOMER-CONTACT-US https://www.southwest.com/html/contact-us/index.html?clk=GFO... Write us Have extra stamps? Send us a letter. P.O. Box 36647-1CR Dallas, Texas 75235 And so: Manager - XYZ airport customer support c/o Southwest Airlines P.O. Box ...
fatjokes 4y ago
Omg yes, and workers against consumers. "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." No, they will eat each other.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
This is what you get when you have an economy dominated by financial paperclip maximizers. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
mbg721 4y ago
The main thing Southwest's issues show is how quickly you can burn through consumer goodwill. For years their bread and butter was being the "We're not like the other airlines" airline, and now here we are. It's almost as though all that sophisticated brand theory was a load of hogwash the whole time.
- gruez 4y ago
  > It's almost as though all that sophisticated brand theory was a load of hogwash the whole time. I don't get it, how does them "burning through consumer goodwill" through their issues show that "sophisticated brand theory" (ie. "We're not like the other airlines") is bullshit? If anything it shows that it's working exactly as advertised. When they were "not like the other airlines" they were liked, and now they're hated.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    The idea was, other airlines were soulless automata that didn't care about you, but SW could be personable because they were small and perky. That's all gone now.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Do people seriously prefer the agent to the app or the waitress to the app? You would rather wait in line or wait to be checked on than do something right away?
- jen20 4y ago
  It’s contextual. At the airport (Houston, specifically), I prefer to use the self-service tablet as it’s more convenient. At restaurants I will not order via toast (or similar), since it requires an account. If that is the only option, I will leave.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  The weather affected my holiday travels (not for Southwest.) I sat at the gate behind 20 other people in line, waiting. I called the support number and tried to use the app while on hold. The person on the phone managed to snipe a flight that put me home four hours later than my original plans, with a free, unsolicited upgrade to first class. The best the app showed me was a 48 hours delay. Nobody had showed up to help the line of people by the time I was off to find a comfortable seat. I usually dislike talking to people. When it comes to stressful situations or customizations that aren't cheap (think cars or dining out,) a living, breathing professional is going to be much more useful than an inherently limited screen.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  I prefer the agent because I already deal with crappy user interfaces all day long, and the cognitive load of one more app to contend with is just not worth it. Waiting, on the other hand, is an opportunity to meditate, which I always appreciate, and usually improves my state.
A_Duck 4y ago
The most passive aggressive solution here — instead of getting annoyed at the customer services person, look up a union they can join and explain the benefits. They literally aren't allowed to hang up on you!
- shagie 4y ago
  They are already part of a union. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest-airlines-customer-service-employees-approve-new-labor-deal-2022-12-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest... > WASHINGTON, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) customer service employees overwhelmingly ratified a new five-year collective bargaining agreement that includes an immediate 13.1% wage increase, the IAM union said on Thursday. > The agreement covers 8,300 customer representatives and service agents and includes a 25.1% general wage increase over four years, which IAM said will put its members at the top of the airline industry’s pay scale for customer service employees. > The labor deal also includes other benefits such as higher bonuses and improved mandatory overtime protections for all employees.
xrd 4y ago
Anyone here reading this, did it change your opinion on the increase in theft at retail stores during the pandemic? Are there people that now realize no one cares who works for Walmart so why not just steal stuff freely? And, they do it because they think that Walmart has destroyed their local economy? I'm not asserting that all is true, just saying it would be an interesting story behind the theft.
- fargle 4y ago
  no. people steal stuff so freely because they don't get prosecuted or punished. and they do it in the first place because they can sell the stuff and buy meth. they 100% aren't worried about gentrification issues or the local economy, etc.
  - richbell 4y ago
    > people steal stuff so freely because they don't get prosecuted or punished. > and they do it in the first place because they can sell the stuff and buy meth. they 100% aren't worried about gentrification issues or the local economy, etc. People also steal stuff increasingly because they need it and cannot afford it. In the past few years thefts of things like groceries and diapers have shot up. It's depressing, really.
    - fargle 4y ago
      only because people who are stealing groceries and diapers have spent, squandered, wasted, or sold, the goodwill and benefits designed to cure their hunger or cloth their children. you will not starve (or kids have no diapers) in this country simply because you refuse to steal. it's a really bad choice, and yes I do understand that people make bad choices. it's redeemable and understandable, but it's not excusable. and yes! it's completely depressing!
    - shagie 4y ago
      Theft of diapers (and laundry detergent) is because these are items that are consumed, fairly high value, needed somewhere in the area, and able to be sold for cash. People don't often steal diapers because they need them. https://consumerist.com/2012/10/26/diapers-are-apparently-the-hot-new-thing-in-retail-theft/ https://consumerist.com/2012/10/26/diapers-are-apparently-th... https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/retail-crime-ring-stealing-laundry-detergent-diapers-in-puyallup/281-330702406 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/retail-crime-ring-s... https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/two-arrested-in-diaper-theft-from-fox-crossing-diaper-bank/ https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/two-arrested-i...
refurb 4y ago
This is kind of a bizarre article that tries to view the world through some sort of class struggle. Airlines make choices about how to run their business. Consumers make choices about which business to give their money to. If businesses screw up, then consumers leave. It’s really that simple.
- richbell 4y ago
  > This is kind of a bizarre article that tries to view the world through some sort of class struggle. What exactly is bizarre about it? The world is a class struggle.
  - refurb 4y ago
    Only if you view the world as a first year poly sci major with a penchant for Marx. The world is way more complex than just "class".
    - richbell 4y ago
      > Only if you view the world as a first year poly sci major with a penchant for Marx > The world is way more complex than just "class". You don't have to be a Marxist to recognize that class is one of the most important characteristics of our society. A black woman living in poverty has far more in common with a white man living in poverty than an upper-class Ivy-league educated black man. People are systemically exploited and robbed of the value they create and deserve. Some of the hardest working people, who provide essential services, struggle to stay afloat. I am by no means a Marxist or Communist, I just grew up under the poverty line and recognize how fortunate I have been in my life compared to many other people. I'd encourage you to reflect on your own fortune and have more empathy for those who are less fortunate.
      - refurb 4y ago
        Like I said, class doesn't define everything, it's one of many factors. I'd encourage you to broaden your world view to more than just economic status.
StillBored 4y ago
I got stuck in this, and saw a new low while waiting in DCA with respect to QR code based menus. All the service bars in the first terminal have ipad style devices in front of the seats displaying a QR code. The expectation is that you scan the QR code off the ipad, and order using your phone/etc! Then pay with the ipad, which actually pissed me off more than sitting in the terminal for 8 hours while my flight was delayed in 10 min chunks. Initially I was unaware what was going on, and just sauntered up to a free spot on the bar, and tried to order a drink. Bartender explains that I have to use one of the ipads, which I shrugged and was like, ok, but then largely stared blankly at because it had a couple buttons (pay, order water, play games, etc) none of which were "order food/drinks/etc". Gave up when told that the bartender couldn't just serve me, and that the ipad thinngy couldn't take my order. WTF, kind of crazy nonsense is it to populate POS style terminals at every table, then fail to be able to order from them? Not only that apparently every single restaurant/etc is owned/using the same crap system so there isn't a choice to just go to the bar without. Anyway, I got lucky because the SW captain grabbed a crew that still had hours and were suppose to be spending the night at my destination and told them they were working his plane... Which itself was crazy, I'm pretty shocked that SW still doesn't have an automated system that "heals" the route network/etc when something like this goes wrong, and then sends updates to the flight crews/etc in question. You would think that after 2016 (when the exact same thing happened) they would have hired a couple "hackers" to just make it work...
- shipman05 4y ago
  Newark is full of those horrific ipad stations. If they were only used for orders, that would be one thing (still a bad experience), but the fact that every seat at every bar and table has these things flashing bright and distracting ads throughout your meal is just dystopian. The cherry on top was when I walked to one of the self-checkout stores, grabbed a bag of chips, scanned it myself, and was then prompted for a tip....at a self-service kiosk.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    > and was then prompted for a tip....at a self-service kiosk That is called 'cash back', isn't it?
WalterBright 4y ago
The article complains about automation replacing workers. This complaint goes back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but automation has enabled us to sit in warm houses and watch Netflix all day rather than spending every day picking bugs off of our crops. The other thing it complains about is cutting costs. Well, Southwest has the cheapest air fares. You don't get top flight customer service when you buy the cheap seats. Customers have shown that they prefer lower prices to better service. They voted with their dollars. McDonald's has replaced their cashiers with a kiosk. There's still a cashier there, but most of the customers (including me) prefer the kiosk because (at least in my case) it's faster. The other day I went to a full service restaurant with a friend. Two burgers and a couple drinks went for $130. The restaurant was mostly empty, with more staff than customers. I don't think they're going to last.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  On the other hand I went to a nice restaurant the other night that wanted me to use an automated app to order, I found it somewhat offensive. There are times I actually enjoy not looking at any type of screen and having a nice meal is one of those times.
  - hartator 4y ago
    I hate it too. And in the same sentence, they will talk about “human connection”, “local”, “organic”.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  >>McDonald's has replaced their cashiers with a kiosk I cant wait until they open one of their fully automated places near me. I will be the first one through that line
- jkmcf 4y ago
  My family has been flying SW almost exclusively for 10 years and this Christmas was the first problem we’ve encountered. Something definitely changed with the new CEO because the usually happy workers were much less so. For instance, they used to have somewhat unique and entertaining scripts for the flight education before takeoff, but for the past few years they stick to the boring version the other airlines deliver. Maybe there’s something else going on, and my observation is wrong, and it’s all a combination of shitty managers and outdated software
Invictus0 4y ago
1) What good would it do to subject the execs and shareholders to vitriol? 2) Is this even a new thing? Did John D. Rockefeller ever have to endure an angry tirade from someone pissed about the gas prices? 3) Have you seen Southwest's stock price? The workers are getting their pay no matter what. The shareholders have just lost $3 billion in value. 4) Are we just going to pretend that the airlines didn't nearly just collapse 2 years ago? SouthWest took on a peak of $11 billion in debt as of 2021 Q3, now down to $8 billion. Do you blame them for cutting customer support staff? 5) Southwest does have a variety of consumer friendly policies: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/reasons-southwest-is-still-a-top-airline https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/reasons-southwest-... I could go on
- EMM_386 4y ago
  Southwest Airlines received over $7B in federal pandemic aid and used it as soon as they legally could to start paying dividends and doing stock buybacks. Not investing in IT or the fragile infrastructure that was recently on display.
mattwilsoninc2 4y ago
Another similar notion is with credit card payments for convenience items at bakeries, deli, and pizza restaurants. A company called "4shifts" is notorious for telling owners to place a sign on the register "a convenience charge of 3.5% will be added to the sale if you use a credit card". Add the 3.5% plus sales tax which increases the sale by 8% - 12% depending on the state you live in. 4shifts is also used in major stadium venues.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Why should they bear the cost of credit card payment processing? Cash buyers shouldn't have to subsidize credit card users.
  - askvictor 4y ago
    Cash isn't free either (you need a float, security/insurance for the risk of theft, employee mistakes/theft, accounting costs to reconcile the days earnings). It's just that these costs are often internalised by the company (I have no idea what the actual cost is compared to a credit card surcharge, but it's non-zero). Then (depending on your political views) there's the broader cost to society of tax-evasion that sometimes comes with cash payments (I'm not saying that cash is bad, but it's pretty clear that some businesses that are cash-only are avoiding tax and paying workers under-the-table, which has impacts both for government and the workers involved)
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    Premium card users are also subsidized by basic card users.
- fallous 4y ago
  That sounds like a violation of the Visa/Mastercard agreement. Those networks do, in fact, charge the merchant for the use of the network but their licensing agreement specifically prohibits mentioning that surcharge or passing it on to the customer. Instead the allowable method is to provide a "cash discount." That surcharge is also why most credit card terminals default to debit card when presented Visa/MC debit card is used. Debit cards incur a lower fee from the network than the credit card fee. Of course the customer also has less recourse using debit vs credit when it comes to chargebacks, extended warranties, etc.
deleted 4y ago
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2253539242 4y ago
OM
mattm 4y ago
> Deliberate understaffing I previously lived in Japan and this was such a big difference compared to the US. In US stores it can take minutes to find someone if you have a question and when you do find someone they'll usually be dealing with something else. In Japan stores had so much staff that a store employee was always within a stone's throw away. The same thing at restaurants.
- mbg721 4y ago
  The US has a cultural allergy to personal servants, and for good reason.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    If I had a personal servant I wouldn’t be in the store in the first place.
Animats 4y ago
The article is a bit too general. Not wrong, but not Southwest related. What apparently happened to Southwest is that their flight crew scheduling created schedules in which a delay at one point resulted in no crew being available at a second point, which allowed cascading failures. As a cost-saving measure, they don't have enough reserve crews to cope with disruptions.
yummypaint 4y ago
Someone should make app whose purpose is to route complaints directly to the highest echelons of a company through crowdsourced phone numbers etc. Why not share information to empower ourselves to speak directly with those who have authority to change the situation? If even 1% of these furious people were able to get through to a C-suite executive's phone, they might begin to see it as their problem. Perhaps those executives could benefit from the experience of being unable to escape all consequences of their decisions.
backtoyoujim 4y ago
Amazon does the same thing by using third party delivery companies and geographic dislocation with their support staff. The proletariat can be taught to take their class problems out on the customers. I assume that the third party delivery companies' leadership even encourage their drivers to take out their class frustrations on customers that complain about problems.
- richbell 4y ago
  Many companies even use third-party support staff, per ProPublica. It's outsourcing and penny-pinching all the way down, and the people getting screwed are the customers and the employees. https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service-reps-for-disney-and-airbnb-who-have-to-pay-to-talk-to-you https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...
Nevermark 4y ago
If you provide a unique service or talent to a corporation, it is incentivized to use technology to empower you. This lifts your worth, and your financial situation. If you provide a replicable service or talent to a corporation, it is incentivized to use technology to make you generic. This makes you easily replaceable, lowers your economic value i.e. your wages, and reduces management complexity. In both cases, the corporation is incentivized to use technology to reduce the number of people it needs. It is like a vertically oriented barbell, but with the bar getting longer, the balls at the end getting smaller. The people at the top are fewer but wealthier. Those at the bottom are more in number, but also often getting fewer, and definitely getting poorer (relatively). The bar is automation. The implicit goal is for the two balls to shrink to the point that there is only the bar, only automation. -- This isn't due to politics, or morals, or even greed. It is just an extension of natural selection. Social solutions need to take into account more than just capitalism - which after all, is only part of the ecosystem of life - while still keeping the benefits of capitalism. -- For instance, if untapped natural resources were considered a joint inheritance of all humans, then everyone would inherit at least a minimal base level income, providing a base line level of financial security and leverage. Resource extractors would bid to use resources, with the result of their bidding shared by all. Charity is an alternative, but it doesn't present a clear structure for operating, and is notoriously difficult to rationalize consistently with capitalism. Charity is hard to scale and maintain without conflict, corruption and gaps in coverage where it is needed. Whereas, equal shares of the inheritance of the resources, that the universe bequeathed to all of us, is a stronger, more orderly, non-coercive, structure for sharing wealth. -- Taxing real estate based on the land, not the structure, recognizes that land is a limited availability common resource and treats land ownership more like renting, with the proceeds shared by all. Since structures are not taxed, development of land is not disincentived with greater taxes, making it cheaper to increase land's productivity (i.e. adding and improving structures for businesses, more homes, etc.). And since unused land is taxed as heavily as used land, it becomes unattractive as a financial hedge (no longer useful like gold, or perhaps bitcoin), lowering non-productive financial-instrument demand for land. Thus making land both more productive AND affordable. The road ahead is going to be rocky, but there are ways it can be made smoother.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> Under the auspices of “empowering” the consumer, we are told to spy on our low-wage servants and gauge the quality of their servitude with stars, tips, and reviews. I hadn't thought of it this way before, but I totally agree. We're told to judge the person rather than the system.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> Under the thin pretense of Covid, increased labor power has exploded the use of automated technology that creates a frustrating maze to get a simple problem solved or task accomplished Has anyone else noticed how every single service call you make now has a (I suspect permanent) voice message saying "we are experiencing higher call volume than normal". If volumes are continuously higher than normal, then they're are the "new normal" and companies must adjust accordingly. (Edit: I see this is in fact mentioned later in the article; hadn't gotten that far yet). > More and more consumers are being pushed away from humans onto automated systems we are told will “save us time,” but instead exist solely to save the corporation labor costs. ... The waiter hasn’t been replaced by an iPad, they’ve been replaced by you. When faced with an automated system I always just press 0 continuously in the hope that it will break the cycle and get me through to a human rather than wade through their garbage system and answer a bunch of prompts only to have to repeat it all again when I finally get to an actual human (since I have yet to find one of those automated systems actually able to solve my query).
- JamisonM 4y ago
  > If volumes are continuously higher than normal, then they're are the "new normal" and companies must adjust accordingly. You know I think in the current business environment there is zero confidence in what the new normal is actually going to be. I don't think businesses like credit card issuers want to make people hold for a long time but I do think they are terrified of spending big bucks onboarding a lot of call centre staff and then having volumes drop off. And they honestly may not think they can afford the level of staffing required to bring wait times down in the long run and are grasping for technological solutions (that either don't work or are not mature enough to be effective). As a farmer I certainly feel a bit paralyzed by the "new normal" - are these high commodity prices here to stay? High input costs? Am I facing decade or so of high-cost/high-margin production that would mean the securing land now is the optimal strategy? Or am I facing a decade or so of high-cost/low-margin operations if grain commodities fall back to earth but energy stays high in which case land prices will start to fall? The steady state of 2008-2019 was pretty easy to manage - this is a different world.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> A November 2022 study published in the journal Econometrica looked at the significantly widening income gap between lesser and more educated workers over the past 40 years. It found that “automation accounts for more than half of that increase” There's a lot of talk about "look at the low employment numbers, automation hasn't made humans redundant after all, so stop being such a luddite". But what is usually overlooked is the downward pressure that it's put on wages (when adjusted for inflation), and the yawning income gap referred to above.
rmrf100 4y ago
so true

241 points by PuppyTailWags 4y ago

But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
>Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. I have never seen customer service come up during a purchasing discussion outside of large corporate purchases. It's pretty firmly a "cost center" that MBAs try to optimize into being as cheap as possible. It is simply cheaper to outsource your support and make it obtuse/difficult to reach a person, basically only fulfilling the absolute bare minimum to not get sued.
jackmott 4y ago
Are you a real person?
drewg123 4y ago
How do you know the problem is solved, and the customer didn't just hang up in frustration?
WantonQuantum 4y ago
I’ve never encountered an automated phone system that can direct me to the manual for a product. Do you have an example of this? I have, however, encountered phone systems that make it literally impossible to talk to a person.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  A number of years ago, Tracfone realised it _would_ be a good thing for customers to be able to automatic'ly extend their end-of-service date rather than having to remember to buying airtime minutes they don't need (due to already having lots of unused minutes) just to prevent getting their number suspended. Tracfone also decided it should be possible to activate this feature using just your phone number and a credit card, without having to sign into the website. There wasn't even a way for customers to sign into anything! Years later, they added a possibility of customers signing into an online account. But doing so did not give access to payment information enter in the old no-sign-in system. The call-in help number's menu system also got changed sometime, such that it was no longer possible to talk to a person — all permutations of the menu tree, as well as fallbacks like "just press zero a few times" resulted in loops.The mandated contact number for the vendor on credit card bills also went to this menu system. The end result was that the only way to modify or cancel a recurring payment created under the old no-sign-in system seemed to be telling the credit card company to either refuse charges from Tracfone or to close the revolving account. Doing so would cause Tracfone to cancel your service (which might not be what either you or Tracfone wanted). And after they cancelled? The remnants of Tracfone automation would do two things: send your now-disabled phone occasional messages trying to entice you back, and keep submitting charges to the credit card company to be rejected. When the credit card's refuse-charges instruction expired after five years, Tracfone would resume taking payment, for a now unrecoverable (already reassigned) phone number, for an IMEI that had not appeared any network for years. On the upside, I know somebody who has no problems with current Tracfone.
marcinzm 4y ago
Solving a customer's problem does not directly make a company money. It may arguably avoid them losing potential future money but it doesn't make them money.
- r00fus 4y ago
  It builds/preserves your brand. A proper customer centric strategy relies on support to empower the sales/product teams (and vice-versa).
version_five 4y ago
Automated call centers save money by disincentivizing calling in, and by making people give up. Most people don't think about customer service or support when they are buying stuff. Actually solving the customers problem is way down the list of objectives for most phone systems. It's easy to see this by comparing the quality of phone support with the kind of market power a company has.
- fcarraldo 4y ago
  That is an interesting thought. Google, for most consumer products (and a good number of business ones) notoriously has next to no phone support at all. Is this an indication of being a market leader or of being a digital monopoly?
  - adriancr 4y ago
    Google for paid products has phone support. From a quick check, 2-3 min answer time for calls or chat from google one on cheapest plan. If you use the free option, the no support is given which is fair, you're not a customer
    - jen20 4y ago
      My experience of Google is that you can be the smallest (paying) customer or the largest enterprise, and the support is still trash.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Google is a leader in the tech playbook concept of cornering off your monopoly then treating your customers like shit. It's actually essential to any internet scale business model, because of the challenges of profitable serving so many people if you actually provide some kind of support. FWIW, google is better positioned to give shitty support because their users are the product anyway, and they grew organically into this. Support was never really part of the bargain (incidentally why I would never take google seriously for "business" services like gsuite or gcp because it's just not their culture). The more egregious examples are companies like uber (probably the worst) that actually have customers but think they can treat them as badly as google treats its users because it's a "tech" business. And you end up with supposedly "disruptive" businesses that just amount to "we're cheaper because we're self serve and don't offer support (and ignore laws)". But returning to your point and mine, the first step is "blitz-scaling" yourself a de-facto monopoly so you can get away with treating people badly.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Why? And how would they know? Customer service is a thing that maybe 10% of customers will interact with, and usually long after the product is purchased. It's very hard to evaluate up-front except through "brand" reputation.
adriancr 4y ago
I would argue automated call centers are a problem. If you end up needing to call someone since you've exhausted all other avenues you do want to talk to someone. At that point you will either: - waste a lot of time navigating prompts until you give up or reach a human. - automated call center will decide that prompt it gave you is the correct one and close your call... (had this happen a lot...) - automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close... And all metrics will show great for the company while you've given up or you start looking for other companies. Sure, lots of problems are solved by pointing to correct manual... although that would be an argument if product is user friendly enough. Now... on southwest airlines case... what manual could you look up to fix your cancelled flight?, how do you deal with that? Personally, I have had a cancelled flight on vacation. I could not find someone to talk to, automated prompts and calls closed. I booked another airline flight home and asked for a refund and compensation after the fact... This might not be an option in a lot of cases.
- teeray 4y ago
  > automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close I usually just talk complete nonsense to these prompts (but valid English sentences). That way the automation gives up when it can parse the sentences but can’t intuit meaning from them.
  - adriancr 4y ago
    last time i tried that i got a 'please repeat' a couple times and call closed. On the other hand, calling a bank and saying you'd like to report fraud to the prompt directs you really fast to customer support.
    - SnowHill9902 4y ago
      If you don’t really have a fraud case to report, you are actually reporting fraud on yourself. Think about it.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Not all products/services offer customers (or end users) a choice. Government, wired ISP, and health insurance are usually not a choice. A lot of times, mobile network and airline are effectively without choice too.
mattashii 4y ago
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! If a company's phone tree can make the consumer drop the call, it saves the company support worker time, regardless of whether the customer request was adequately served. For a company, the tradeoff where customer may be on the line for 10 hours in a call tree to get an answer a their question, or 10 minutes with a support agent, is fairly easy if you do not care about support. Phone trees do not automagically save anyones time, and especially not that of the customer.
acdha 4y ago
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Do you have any evidence for that claim? It seems unlikely that could be true since people need to call for things like repairs which a manual couldn’t help with and the intersection of people who don’t read manuals but will read them when prompted seems to leave out a lot of other people. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. This is leaving out a lot of obvious alternatives: products don’t fail often enough that people buy anything but the cheapest one (or the one that is featured more prominently in the store they have a promotional agreement with), companies have all cut their support staff so the ability to shop around is limited, the cost is shifted to the retailers or installers, some fraction of people give up and ask a friend or neighbor to help, etc.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
joshstrange 4y ago
This comment is so wrong it hurts. > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. It's a strategy to try to get you to go online, use an automated system, or annoy you until you give up. Trust me, if I'm calling into a business something has already gone horribly wrong. The automated line lying about "higher than normal call volume" (bullshit, hire more people) or "You can find the answers you need on our website" (nope, that's why I'm calling in) only pisses me off. It has never in my life provided information that I found useful. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! What does this even mean? Of course understaffing saves the company money. > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Yes, because I have a real choice on what electric, gas, water, internet company I use /s. For non-monopoly companies (growing increasingly rare) I often can't help that I currently have their product, I might buy an alternative (if one exists) next time around but "vote with your dollars" doesn't really work here well. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". No, it's not. It might be a metric for human workers but they literally don't care if it takes you 10x longer to find the answer as long as they don't have to pay a human it's a win. I've worked for companies with call centers and I assure you the only thing they care about is reducing that headcount, the outcome for the customer doesn't even rank.
- subradios 4y ago
  I agree with your story about the answers not being on the website. However, the users that represent the vast majority of support calls are very clearly not you. This is ok.
taneq 4y ago
Depends on the call centre. Some are great and answer your question straight away. Others are newspeak-laden smokescreens designed entirely to either funnel customers into doing what the company wants, or to waste their time until they give up. “Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”
maxbond 4y ago
My experience is that customer service is often trying to convince me that there is no problem or that my problem is my fault and there's nothing they can do about it. I bet many people here can sympathize with me when I say I know from experience that when customer service asks what operating system I use, the correct answer is "Windows," even though I run Linux, because I will never get help with any issue of I admit I'm using Linux (even for issues not at all related to my OS, like issues with my router - I don't call for Linux issues, because I can diagnose and fix those!). They will tell me Linux isn't supported... By their browser app or broadband service or what have you. The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you. (I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)
cycomanic 4y ago
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. That assumes that there is a choice. Often enough there isn't. Just like there often enough isnt really competition. We have seen how "compeditors" have colluded to keep wages low before (the "gentlemens agreements between apple, Google etc execs). Funnily enough these agreements are never done to keep exec salaries down, might have something to do with the fact that they all sit on the same boards. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". Evidence required. I suspect the systems are actually designed for customers to just give up. This is especially obvious in services which customers only use rarely and thus price becomes the main purchase factor. Take airlines, which probably are the worst in terms of call wait times, people do not buy tickets enough to make purchase decisions based on service when something goes wrong, so service is atrocious, except for business customers and frequent flyers, who typically get significantly better service.

monero-xmr 4y ago

[flagged]

b112 4y ago
What a ridiculous article. Why is this on HN Not sure why you find it ridiculous. The part you quote, taken on its own, seems valid, reasonable, sensible. You ridicule it, but I don't see why.
- marcus0x62 4y ago
  For starters, what does this have to do with the Southwest meltdown, which seems to have been caused in large part by a lack of automation?
  - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
    It would be a mistake to suppose that more automation would have resulted in a different outcome. For example, an update to a critical system can also result in operator/interface breakdowns, leading to failures. In fact, according to some accounts, this is exactly what happened and it exacerbated things (some spreadsheet software was updated). I recommend this paper to everyone: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
    - marcus0x62 4y ago
      The automation in this case would be a means other than live telephone calls to confirm/update crew locations and, no, it would not be a mistake to assume other methods would scale better.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  At restaurants with menus that don't require explanation, manually taking an order is more error-prone and distracts wait staff from providing higher value services.

toss1 4y ago

>>the deliberate, built-in ways corporate “customer service” is set up to not only shield those on the top of the ladder—executives, vice presidents, large shareholders—but pit low-wage workers against each other in an inherently antagonistic relationship marked by powerlessness and frustration. Yup. Just like the classic experiment on rats where they start introducing stresses into the environment (increased crowding, reduced food, noise, etc.) and the rats start fighting each other. Here's it is letting the customers fight the customer service reps, who are themselves deliberately understaffed. Maybe time to using LinkedIn and other sources to find the higher level managers executives and start letting them hear the complaints directly in their inbox.

rqtwteye 4y ago

It’s the same with the tipping that seems almost everywhere these days. Instead of the workers being paid properly by the company the customer gets guilt tripped to tip and when you don’t tip the worker is angry at the customer, not the company.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
As a customer, I support workers unionizing to improve their wage bargaining power. Besides tipping, I can’t do much to help them do that. They’ve gotta organize to do it, and call on the NLRB when there’s (always inevitably) Corporate Fuckery [1]. Luckily, the NLRB received a $25M funding bump in the latest Omnibus spending bill signed into law. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrative-law-judge-decisions https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/decisions/administrativ...
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  How does tipping improve their bargaining power? Seems to me like it would weaken it (“why do you need a higher base wage? You get so many tips!”)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    It doesn't. The tipping is the only thing I can do in the short term to help, because those tips go to workers immediately (versus the lengthy sales cycle of labor improvements). My apologies that wasn't more clear.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      If course, it only goes to workers, when it isn't stolen by the company. https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-06-instacart-revises-pay-policy-after-tipping-uproar.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-06-instacart-revises-pay-po... As far as I know Instacart has stopped doing this, and many other apps were busted for this, but it's utterly, utterly shameful.

phreack 4y ago

This is why my #1 metric to choose a service provider is support capability. Things will always go wrong and if the point of contact with the customer does not have any agency to fix things effectively, I will not deal at all. The exception is the norm, and front facing employees must be able to act instead of just reading a script and hoping the problem will solve itself. That phrase about recorded apologies is just dystopian.

Eisenstein 4y ago
How do you evaluate this metric?
- phreack 4y ago
  It's easier to discard companies by looking up their points of support. If there's not even a phone number where I can get a real person to talk to, that's an immediate out. Typically, then I just ask users about their experience. If I hear stuff like them wasting hours on the phone or not getting any meaningful replies that's also an out. In the end sometimes I end up choosing the less worse version, not going through with any service at all, but there's been rare cases where support was so good that I wouldn't even mind having trouble at all since I know there's always ways to work around them.
r00fus 4y ago
One company that (somewhat recently) improved their support is T-Mobile. They used to do call centers in the cheapest places but now have agents that are a) local to your time zone and b) are not governed solely by basic metrics but are actual careers with an actual progression ladder. You’d not think these are intrinsic but it’s turned out to be fantastic in aggregate as a customer. I have always had a great experience with their support since they updated their process circa 2018.

JamisonM 4y ago

There is a tension in the article between "the capitalists are pitting the consumers against the front line workers" premise and the "the capitalists are eliminating the front line workers" point made in the article. Southwest's meltdown was about computer systems that coordinate "offline" based on assumptions instead of online based on passing information back and forth on a regular basis. Southwest was a very reliable airline, it didn't have some sort of day-to-day understaffing problem, they executed an unorthodox business strategy [0] in the last year or so that has degraded their performance, and bad weather exacerbated the problem. 0: https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-americas-least-reliable-airlines-due-to-canceled-flights-after-one-bright-idea-backfired.html https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/southwest-becomes-one-of-amer...

jmbwell 4y ago
Inc. makes it sound like point to point (rather than hub and spoke) is the problem, but that seems like a distraction. Airlines operated PtP for decades; hub and spoke is a relatively new approach that has its own issues. What got Southwest could get any airline: being stretched too thin, running schedules too tight, having everything just in time, all to cram as many fares into the sky as possible. American also had huge delays and cancellations, United kind of always has huge delays and cancellations. There but for the grace goes any other airline in this situation. The lesson from all this, it seems to me, is that if a meltdown can happen to a company like Southwest, which has ample resources and talent, then it could happen to anyone.
- EMM_386 4y ago
  > Airlines operated PtP for decades This is only really true prior to deregulation in 1978. After that, Delta began hub-and-spoke out of Atlanta, and the majority of airlines followed them. These days, as far as I can tell, Southwest is the only major carrier that doesn't follow this approach. It has its downsides. You don't have pilots sitting "on reserve" at bases ready to fly at a moments notice if there are gaps in the system. There isn't a need to shut down and esentially "reboot" the airline when there is a major disruption, which is what Southwest just had to do. Delta had the second highest cancellation rate due to this winter storm, and that was at 10%. Southwest had to cancel 70% of their schedule.

jmyeet 4y ago

I agree with the general idea that the insatiable hunger for greater profits comes at the expense of labor. Southwest is just another example of this. Additionally, everything ts treated as a cost center, such as IT systems. And everything is short-term thinking. But pointing to automation as a problem is misguided. Automation is great. I look forward to a future when we don't subject humans to "time off task" in an Amazon warehouse. We automate a bunch of things now that were horrible for the people who originally did them. The problem is systemic: how do we distribute the fruits of that labor? The current capitalist organization of the economy exploits labor and concentrates all the wealth in the hands of a small handful of people. The US has and produces enough wealth such that every citizen could have enough to eat, a house to live in, access to healthcare and otherwise have all their basic needs met. We, as a society, have decided we'd rather have people die in the streets, starve and use state violence in the form of withholding basic healthcare like insulin. Automation should mean that we only need to work 10-20 hours of work a week. But no. Instead we just cut the amount of workers (to the point of having no redundancy like the railroad companies) and suppress real wage increases in the name of increased profits. It really doesn't have to be this way.

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

8bitsrule 4y ago

>The waiter hasn’t been replaced by an iPad, they’ve been replaced by you. I've noticed as well that in grocery-store lines. Where customers are being conditioned to patiently wait in long lines to be next at the checkout machines. To wave their purchases over lasers, then pack them into each and every bag they'll pay for. Be careful what you put in the bagging area! the machines' metallic voices shriek at the customers. They must do exactly as they're told. Or else the single human attendant will walk over to ask them what they did wrong. While others still waiting trade impatient glances. Oh the shame. Meanwhile the silent rows of unmanned registers wait in the gloom, just in case. Are they waiting for an EMP?

phpisthebest 4y ago
>>I've noticed as well that in grocery-store lines. Where customers are being conditioned to patiently wait in long lines to be next at the checkout machines Man I just realized I have not been inside of a grocery store in over 3 years... Thank god for curb side pickup
- rx_bandit 4y ago
  You should go in! I enjoy picking the fruits, veggies and cuts of meat instead of whatever the market grabs. (not to say curbside is bad but it was one of the few things I miss when the lockdown in 2020 happened.)
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    I dont.... If I want to pick my meat I go to a real local butcher that only does meat. Which i only do for steaks or something like that. For my everyday meals One pack of chicken is no different than the next pack of chicken... One 5lb bag of potatoes is no different than the other 5lb bag of potatoes, 1 bag of onions is no different than the other bag of onions..,.. etc
cycomanic 4y ago
I recall reading that when they introduced self-service checkouts theft went up significantly; people were much less reluctant to still if they were only being served by a machine. However the solution was not to simply go back to use manned registers again, but instead make the systems for theft detection more sophisticated. I wouldn't even be surprised if the final systems that we have now are not even cheaper than manned registers, but the way the transition worked was that it was always sold on "potential savings" on idealised conditions.

Eisenstein 4y ago

> Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters This is why it is a good idea to be nice to the people you deal with on the front lines, and write a very politely worded letter to the head of the department at the company you are dealing with, and potentially letters to their boss, and their boss, etc. Mail it, if possible, as a follow-up to the email. I am sure people here need no instruction on how to find the appropriate person in the corporate structure to contact with their concern. These are the people who can get things done -- not just for you, but for everyone. Oh, don't forget that if you have a 401k you may legitimately be a stockholder in the company, so you can mention that if true.

markus_zhang 4y ago
How do I find the mailing addresses of the bosses? Actually how do I find the names of the bosses? Maybe from LinkedIn?
- teej 4y ago
  This is a real benefit of public corporations: anyone with significant ownership is public. The names of the owners and executives are trivial to find.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    And at that level you get people who absolutely don't care if some Joe Shmoe was unhappy with their service or something.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      They also generally have another layer of protection from being contacted by plebs, err, customers.
- shagie 4y ago
  You don't need to. You address it to the corporate HQ and let the mail room deal with the proper routing within the organization. For example, Southwest. https://www.southwest.com/html/contact-us/index.html?clk=GFOOTER-CUSTOMER-CONTACT-US https://www.southwest.com/html/contact-us/index.html?clk=GFO... Write us Have extra stamps? Send us a letter. P.O. Box 36647-1CR Dallas, Texas 75235 And so: Manager - XYZ airport customer support c/o Southwest Airlines P.O. Box ...

fatjokes 4y ago

Omg yes, and workers against consumers. "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." No, they will eat each other.

actually_a_dog 4y ago

This is what you get when you have an economy dominated by financial paperclip maximizers. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer

mbg721 4y ago

The main thing Southwest's issues show is how quickly you can burn through consumer goodwill. For years their bread and butter was being the "We're not like the other airlines" airline, and now here we are. It's almost as though all that sophisticated brand theory was a load of hogwash the whole time.

gruez 4y ago
> It's almost as though all that sophisticated brand theory was a load of hogwash the whole time. I don't get it, how does them "burning through consumer goodwill" through their issues show that "sophisticated brand theory" (ie. "We're not like the other airlines") is bullshit? If anything it shows that it's working exactly as advertised. When they were "not like the other airlines" they were liked, and now they're hated.
- mbg721 4y ago
  The idea was, other airlines were soulless automata that didn't care about you, but SW could be personable because they were small and perky. That's all gone now.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Do people seriously prefer the agent to the app or the waitress to the app? You would rather wait in line or wait to be checked on than do something right away?

jen20 4y ago
It’s contextual. At the airport (Houston, specifically), I prefer to use the self-service tablet as it’s more convenient. At restaurants I will not order via toast (or similar), since it requires an account. If that is the only option, I will leave.
NegativeK 4y ago
The weather affected my holiday travels (not for Southwest.) I sat at the gate behind 20 other people in line, waiting. I called the support number and tried to use the app while on hold. The person on the phone managed to snipe a flight that put me home four hours later than my original plans, with a free, unsolicited upgrade to first class. The best the app showed me was a 48 hours delay. Nobody had showed up to help the line of people by the time I was off to find a comfortable seat. I usually dislike talking to people. When it comes to stressful situations or customizations that aren't cheap (think cars or dining out,) a living, breathing professional is going to be much more useful than an inherently limited screen.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
I prefer the agent because I already deal with crappy user interfaces all day long, and the cognitive load of one more app to contend with is just not worth it. Waiting, on the other hand, is an opportunity to meditate, which I always appreciate, and usually improves my state.

A_Duck 4y ago

The most passive aggressive solution here — instead of getting annoyed at the customer services person, look up a union they can join and explain the benefits. They literally aren't allowed to hang up on you!

shagie 4y ago
They are already part of a union. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest-airlines-customer-service-employees-approve-new-labor-deal-2022-12-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest... > WASHINGTON, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) customer service employees overwhelmingly ratified a new five-year collective bargaining agreement that includes an immediate 13.1% wage increase, the IAM union said on Thursday. > The agreement covers 8,300 customer representatives and service agents and includes a 25.1% general wage increase over four years, which IAM said will put its members at the top of the airline industry’s pay scale for customer service employees. > The labor deal also includes other benefits such as higher bonuses and improved mandatory overtime protections for all employees.

xrd 4y ago

Anyone here reading this, did it change your opinion on the increase in theft at retail stores during the pandemic? Are there people that now realize no one cares who works for Walmart so why not just steal stuff freely? And, they do it because they think that Walmart has destroyed their local economy? I'm not asserting that all is true, just saying it would be an interesting story behind the theft.

fargle 4y ago
no. people steal stuff so freely because they don't get prosecuted or punished. and they do it in the first place because they can sell the stuff and buy meth. they 100% aren't worried about gentrification issues or the local economy, etc.
- richbell 4y ago
  > people steal stuff so freely because they don't get prosecuted or punished. > and they do it in the first place because they can sell the stuff and buy meth. they 100% aren't worried about gentrification issues or the local economy, etc. People also steal stuff increasingly because they need it and cannot afford it. In the past few years thefts of things like groceries and diapers have shot up. It's depressing, really.
  - fargle 4y ago
    only because people who are stealing groceries and diapers have spent, squandered, wasted, or sold, the goodwill and benefits designed to cure their hunger or cloth their children. you will not starve (or kids have no diapers) in this country simply because you refuse to steal. it's a really bad choice, and yes I do understand that people make bad choices. it's redeemable and understandable, but it's not excusable. and yes! it's completely depressing!
  - shagie 4y ago
    Theft of diapers (and laundry detergent) is because these are items that are consumed, fairly high value, needed somewhere in the area, and able to be sold for cash. People don't often steal diapers because they need them. https://consumerist.com/2012/10/26/diapers-are-apparently-the-hot-new-thing-in-retail-theft/ https://consumerist.com/2012/10/26/diapers-are-apparently-th... https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/retail-crime-ring-stealing-laundry-detergent-diapers-in-puyallup/281-330702406 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/retail-crime-ring-s... https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/two-arrested-in-diaper-theft-from-fox-crossing-diaper-bank/ https://www.wearegreenbay.com/news/local-news/two-arrested-i...

refurb 4y ago

This is kind of a bizarre article that tries to view the world through some sort of class struggle. Airlines make choices about how to run their business. Consumers make choices about which business to give their money to. If businesses screw up, then consumers leave. It’s really that simple.

richbell 4y ago
> This is kind of a bizarre article that tries to view the world through some sort of class struggle. What exactly is bizarre about it? The world is a class struggle.
- refurb 4y ago
  Only if you view the world as a first year poly sci major with a penchant for Marx. The world is way more complex than just "class".
  - richbell 4y ago
    > Only if you view the world as a first year poly sci major with a penchant for Marx > The world is way more complex than just "class". You don't have to be a Marxist to recognize that class is one of the most important characteristics of our society. A black woman living in poverty has far more in common with a white man living in poverty than an upper-class Ivy-league educated black man. People are systemically exploited and robbed of the value they create and deserve. Some of the hardest working people, who provide essential services, struggle to stay afloat. I am by no means a Marxist or Communist, I just grew up under the poverty line and recognize how fortunate I have been in my life compared to many other people. I'd encourage you to reflect on your own fortune and have more empathy for those who are less fortunate.
    - refurb 4y ago
      Like I said, class doesn't define everything, it's one of many factors. I'd encourage you to broaden your world view to more than just economic status.

StillBored 4y ago

I got stuck in this, and saw a new low while waiting in DCA with respect to QR code based menus. All the service bars in the first terminal have ipad style devices in front of the seats displaying a QR code. The expectation is that you scan the QR code off the ipad, and order using your phone/etc! Then pay with the ipad, which actually pissed me off more than sitting in the terminal for 8 hours while my flight was delayed in 10 min chunks. Initially I was unaware what was going on, and just sauntered up to a free spot on the bar, and tried to order a drink. Bartender explains that I have to use one of the ipads, which I shrugged and was like, ok, but then largely stared blankly at because it had a couple buttons (pay, order water, play games, etc) none of which were "order food/drinks/etc". Gave up when told that the bartender couldn't just serve me, and that the ipad thinngy couldn't take my order. WTF, kind of crazy nonsense is it to populate POS style terminals at every table, then fail to be able to order from them? Not only that apparently every single restaurant/etc is owned/using the same crap system so there isn't a choice to just go to the bar without. Anyway, I got lucky because the SW captain grabbed a crew that still had hours and were suppose to be spending the night at my destination and told them they were working his plane... Which itself was crazy, I'm pretty shocked that SW still doesn't have an automated system that "heals" the route network/etc when something like this goes wrong, and then sends updates to the flight crews/etc in question. You would think that after 2016 (when the exact same thing happened) they would have hired a couple "hackers" to just make it work...

shipman05 4y ago
Newark is full of those horrific ipad stations. If they were only used for orders, that would be one thing (still a bad experience), but the fact that every seat at every bar and table has these things flashing bright and distracting ads throughout your meal is just dystopian. The cherry on top was when I walked to one of the self-checkout stores, grabbed a bag of chips, scanned it myself, and was then prompted for a tip....at a self-service kiosk.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  > and was then prompted for a tip....at a self-service kiosk That is called 'cash back', isn't it?

WalterBright 4y ago

The article complains about automation replacing workers. This complaint goes back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but automation has enabled us to sit in warm houses and watch Netflix all day rather than spending every day picking bugs off of our crops. The other thing it complains about is cutting costs. Well, Southwest has the cheapest air fares. You don't get top flight customer service when you buy the cheap seats. Customers have shown that they prefer lower prices to better service. They voted with their dollars. McDonald's has replaced their cashiers with a kiosk. There's still a cashier there, but most of the customers (including me) prefer the kiosk because (at least in my case) it's faster. The other day I went to a full service restaurant with a friend. Two burgers and a couple drinks went for $130. The restaurant was mostly empty, with more staff than customers. I don't think they're going to last.

bamboozled 4y ago
On the other hand I went to a nice restaurant the other night that wanted me to use an automated app to order, I found it somewhat offensive. There are times I actually enjoy not looking at any type of screen and having a nice meal is one of those times.
- hartator 4y ago
  I hate it too. And in the same sentence, they will talk about “human connection”, “local”, “organic”.
phpisthebest 4y ago
>>McDonald's has replaced their cashiers with a kiosk I cant wait until they open one of their fully automated places near me. I will be the first one through that line
jkmcf 4y ago
My family has been flying SW almost exclusively for 10 years and this Christmas was the first problem we’ve encountered. Something definitely changed with the new CEO because the usually happy workers were much less so. For instance, they used to have somewhat unique and entertaining scripts for the flight education before takeoff, but for the past few years they stick to the boring version the other airlines deliver. Maybe there’s something else going on, and my observation is wrong, and it’s all a combination of shitty managers and outdated software

Invictus0 4y ago

1) What good would it do to subject the execs and shareholders to vitriol? 2) Is this even a new thing? Did John D. Rockefeller ever have to endure an angry tirade from someone pissed about the gas prices? 3) Have you seen Southwest's stock price? The workers are getting their pay no matter what. The shareholders have just lost $3 billion in value. 4) Are we just going to pretend that the airlines didn't nearly just collapse 2 years ago? SouthWest took on a peak of $11 billion in debt as of 2021 Q3, now down to $8 billion. Do you blame them for cutting customer support staff? 5) Southwest does have a variety of consumer friendly policies: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/reasons-southwest-is-still-a-top-airline https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/reasons-southwest-... I could go on

EMM_386 4y ago
Southwest Airlines received over $7B in federal pandemic aid and used it as soon as they legally could to start paying dividends and doing stock buybacks. Not investing in IT or the fragile infrastructure that was recently on display.

mattwilsoninc2 4y ago

Another similar notion is with credit card payments for convenience items at bakeries, deli, and pizza restaurants. A company called "4shifts" is notorious for telling owners to place a sign on the register "a convenience charge of 3.5% will be added to the sale if you use a credit card". Add the 3.5% plus sales tax which increases the sale by 8% - 12% depending on the state you live in. 4shifts is also used in major stadium venues.

alwayslikethis 4y ago
Why should they bear the cost of credit card payment processing? Cash buyers shouldn't have to subsidize credit card users.
- askvictor 4y ago
  Cash isn't free either (you need a float, security/insurance for the risk of theft, employee mistakes/theft, accounting costs to reconcile the days earnings). It's just that these costs are often internalised by the company (I have no idea what the actual cost is compared to a credit card surcharge, but it's non-zero). Then (depending on your political views) there's the broader cost to society of tax-evasion that sometimes comes with cash payments (I'm not saying that cash is bad, but it's pretty clear that some businesses that are cash-only are avoiding tax and paying workers under-the-table, which has impacts both for government and the workers involved)
- janalsncm 4y ago
  Premium card users are also subsidized by basic card users.
fallous 4y ago
That sounds like a violation of the Visa/Mastercard agreement. Those networks do, in fact, charge the merchant for the use of the network but their licensing agreement specifically prohibits mentioning that surcharge or passing it on to the customer. Instead the allowable method is to provide a "cash discount." That surcharge is also why most credit card terminals default to debit card when presented Visa/MC debit card is used. Debit cards incur a lower fee from the network than the credit card fee. Of course the customer also has less recourse using debit vs credit when it comes to chargebacks, extended warranties, etc.

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mattm 4y ago

> Deliberate understaffing I previously lived in Japan and this was such a big difference compared to the US. In US stores it can take minutes to find someone if you have a question and when you do find someone they'll usually be dealing with something else. In Japan stores had so much staff that a store employee was always within a stone's throw away. The same thing at restaurants.

mbg721 4y ago
The US has a cultural allergy to personal servants, and for good reason.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  If I had a personal servant I wouldn’t be in the store in the first place.

Animats 4y ago

The article is a bit too general. Not wrong, but not Southwest related. What apparently happened to Southwest is that their flight crew scheduling created schedules in which a delay at one point resulted in no crew being available at a second point, which allowed cascading failures. As a cost-saving measure, they don't have enough reserve crews to cope with disruptions.

yummypaint 4y ago

Someone should make app whose purpose is to route complaints directly to the highest echelons of a company through crowdsourced phone numbers etc. Why not share information to empower ourselves to speak directly with those who have authority to change the situation? If even 1% of these furious people were able to get through to a C-suite executive's phone, they might begin to see it as their problem. Perhaps those executives could benefit from the experience of being unable to escape all consequences of their decisions.

backtoyoujim 4y ago

Amazon does the same thing by using third party delivery companies and geographic dislocation with their support staff. The proletariat can be taught to take their class problems out on the customers. I assume that the third party delivery companies' leadership even encourage their drivers to take out their class frustrations on customers that complain about problems.

richbell 4y ago
Many companies even use third-party support staff, per ProPublica. It's outsourcing and penny-pinching all the way down, and the people getting screwed are the customers and the employees. https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service-reps-for-disney-and-airbnb-who-have-to-pay-to-talk-to-you https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...

Nevermark 4y ago

If you provide a unique service or talent to a corporation, it is incentivized to use technology to empower you. This lifts your worth, and your financial situation. If you provide a replicable service or talent to a corporation, it is incentivized to use technology to make you generic. This makes you easily replaceable, lowers your economic value i.e. your wages, and reduces management complexity. In both cases, the corporation is incentivized to use technology to reduce the number of people it needs. It is like a vertically oriented barbell, but with the bar getting longer, the balls at the end getting smaller. The people at the top are fewer but wealthier. Those at the bottom are more in number, but also often getting fewer, and definitely getting poorer (relatively). The bar is automation. The implicit goal is for the two balls to shrink to the point that there is only the bar, only automation. -- This isn't due to politics, or morals, or even greed. It is just an extension of natural selection. Social solutions need to take into account more than just capitalism - which after all, is only part of the ecosystem of life - while still keeping the benefits of capitalism. -- For instance, if untapped natural resources were considered a joint inheritance of all humans, then everyone would inherit at least a minimal base level income, providing a base line level of financial security and leverage. Resource extractors would bid to use resources, with the result of their bidding shared by all. Charity is an alternative, but it doesn't present a clear structure for operating, and is notoriously difficult to rationalize consistently with capitalism. Charity is hard to scale and maintain without conflict, corruption and gaps in coverage where it is needed. Whereas, equal shares of the inheritance of the resources, that the universe bequeathed to all of us, is a stronger, more orderly, non-coercive, structure for sharing wealth. -- Taxing real estate based on the land, not the structure, recognizes that land is a limited availability common resource and treats land ownership more like renting, with the proceeds shared by all. Since structures are not taxed, development of land is not disincentived with greater taxes, making it cheaper to increase land's productivity (i.e. adding and improving structures for businesses, more homes, etc.). And since unused land is taxed as heavily as used land, it becomes unattractive as a financial hedge (no longer useful like gold, or perhaps bitcoin), lowering non-productive financial-instrument demand for land. Thus making land both more productive AND affordable. The road ahead is going to be rocky, but there are ways it can be made smoother.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> Under the auspices of “empowering” the consumer, we are told to spy on our low-wage servants and gauge the quality of their servitude with stars, tips, and reviews. I hadn't thought of it this way before, but I totally agree. We're told to judge the person rather than the system.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> Under the thin pretense of Covid, increased labor power has exploded the use of automated technology that creates a frustrating maze to get a simple problem solved or task accomplished Has anyone else noticed how every single service call you make now has a (I suspect permanent) voice message saying "we are experiencing higher call volume than normal". If volumes are continuously higher than normal, then they're are the "new normal" and companies must adjust accordingly. (Edit: I see this is in fact mentioned later in the article; hadn't gotten that far yet). > More and more consumers are being pushed away from humans onto automated systems we are told will “save us time,” but instead exist solely to save the corporation labor costs. ... The waiter hasn’t been replaced by an iPad, they’ve been replaced by you. When faced with an automated system I always just press 0 continuously in the hope that it will break the cycle and get me through to a human rather than wade through their garbage system and answer a bunch of prompts only to have to repeat it all again when I finally get to an actual human (since I have yet to find one of those automated systems actually able to solve my query).

JamisonM 4y ago
> If volumes are continuously higher than normal, then they're are the "new normal" and companies must adjust accordingly. You know I think in the current business environment there is zero confidence in what the new normal is actually going to be. I don't think businesses like credit card issuers want to make people hold for a long time but I do think they are terrified of spending big bucks onboarding a lot of call centre staff and then having volumes drop off. And they honestly may not think they can afford the level of staffing required to bring wait times down in the long run and are grasping for technological solutions (that either don't work or are not mature enough to be effective). As a farmer I certainly feel a bit paralyzed by the "new normal" - are these high commodity prices here to stay? High input costs? Am I facing decade or so of high-cost/high-margin production that would mean the securing land now is the optimal strategy? Or am I facing a decade or so of high-cost/low-margin operations if grain commodities fall back to earth but energy stays high in which case land prices will start to fall? The steady state of 2008-2019 was pretty easy to manage - this is a different world.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> A November 2022 study published in the journal Econometrica looked at the significantly widening income gap between lesser and more educated workers over the past 40 years. It found that “automation accounts for more than half of that increase” There's a lot of talk about "look at the low employment numbers, automation hasn't made humans redundant after all, so stop being such a luddite". But what is usually overlooked is the downward pressure that it's put on wages (when adjusted for inflation), and the yawning income gap referred to above.

rmrf100 4y ago

so true