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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

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.

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.