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Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
- ghaff 3y agoThere's been a pretty steady trend towards automation, chatbots, self-service, etc. replacing getting an empowered human on the line. Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more. Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online.)
- atmosx 3y agoFYI, I am actively avoiding any service that makes it hard for me to talk to a human. I don’t think I am the only one.
- ghaff 3y agoUnless you're wealthy enough to delegate it to an assistant, I'm sure that's really hard for anything that doesn't involve going to a local store or service. (Or, again, personal advisors of various types but again we're talking lots of money involved.) ADDED: And the fact that going through online travel/hotel/airline sites is mostly easier (and cheaper) than dealing with most travel agents used to be. Until something goes wrong and you can't walk into your travel agent's office.
- carapace 3y ago> that's really hard for anything that doesn't involve going to a local store or service. Is that such a bad thing? FWIW it used to be that you could pick up the phone, dial '0', and talk to an operator, a real human being with significant power over the system they operated. When the phone companies got rid of human operators: that was the beginning of the end of ...something?
- vwcx 3y ago> significant power over the system they operated that's such a great observation. Nowadays, when emailing support for a company like Ryobi or Breville, the human's response (through a Salesforce queue, no doubt) is always so helpless. They literally have no ability (nor knowledge?) to deviate from the corporate prescribed path and actually solve the problem. Same goes for a large car dealer's service dept. There's just no incentive to take the most direct route to solve the problem, even if it ends up costing the dealership thousands more in the process. On the flip side, it's really satisfying engaging with the remaining few businesses and small makers who have the power to offer excellent, direct support.
- ghaff 3y agoIf they can give you the service you need and you can afford them, go for it.
- alluro2 3y agoThat's a good point - the current drive to replace human customer service is a second step, after cutting off their ability / power to do anything that's not on the prescribed path. Companies don't want to deal with customers. It's only the missing automation why the human CSRs are still a thing. If you can replace them with AI and automate handling of all customer support paths that company considers relevant, that's it, all other edge-cases, bizarre problems etc are just not considered. Which I understand to some extent, given the sheer idiocy you sometimes encounter from the customers. The problem is that companies are also grossly over-confident in their products/services and ability to recognize all the scenarios.
- michaelmrose 3y agoI think I've made substantial deviations from what was officially allowed at every job I've spent significant time at to the employers ultimate benefit and with employer support. If it is the right decision for everyone AND your employer wont fire you for doing it then you have the power to do it regardless of what guidelines say. The guidelines are written in the hopes of achieving ends not as an end in themselves.
- 3y ago
- mvncleaninst 3y ago> Unless you're wealthy enough to delegate it to an assistant Funny. I wouldn't call myself wealthy but considered doing this a couple days ago. This washing machine thing charged my card then didn't give me working credits I knew at that point I'd end up spending several hours dealing with customer support hell and possibly calling up the CC company to bounce the charge. At some point I'll probably get an assistant just because I really don't have time for this shit anymore
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fullshark 3y agoI recently got only FAQs and phone tree leading to automated messages for customer support for Legoland. For a large enough business angering a fraction of a percent of your customers is worth it compared to shelling out for actual customer support.
- gnufied 3y agoSame goes for almost all grocery shops here - Publix, Kroger, target etc replacing checkout with self-checkout kiosks completely. I absolute hate using self-checkout for non-packaged groceries items. Especially if I have lots of stuff. Freaking "unintended item in baggage area". Not to mention, I feel like Publix etc in particular employed lots of folks with disability. It warmed my heart to talk to them. I don't know what humanity plans is. Even if we pay folks free money, they still loose on social interactions.
- bdangubic 3y ago[flagged]
- finnh 3y agoso, you are a thief. congratulations
- bdangubic 3y agoand companies getting rid of workers and stealing their entire existence are good in your book…? too funny
- idiliv 3y agoThat's theft.
- hooverd 3y agoThey're discount hacking.
- hotpotamus 3y agoEngaging in regulatory arbitrage.
- bdangubic 3y agotoo funny…
- toomuchtodo 3y agoThere is a billboard on the 101 southbound from SF I drove past last night that said “An AI bot trained on the entirety of human knowledge wants a job on your support team.” Amusingly, this is the sort of filter you want to push management through to determine levels of both competency and empathy (“what is the true practicality of this?” and “should we do this?”). Edit: found someone’s photo of it: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/150vold/does_anyone_know_about_this_sign_in_san_francisco/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/150vold/does_anyon... | https://i.redd.it/kgu48tgk09cb1.jpg https://i.redd.it/kgu48tgk09cb1.jpg
- 650REDHAIR 3y agoIntercom is the company behind the billboards.
- throwaway14356 3y agoi think things will move towards rfid eventually, then you just roll though the checkout and everything gets detected. We have an increasing number of packages with statiegeld, you get some money when you return it to the store. The annoyance is increasing there too but if the tags can be reused it would be interesting.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online. It's so interesting to me how generational this is, and how it changed so quickly. I used to work in something tangentially related to real estate. The sellers/landlords tended to all be older (50+, this was about 10 years ago), while the renters/some buyers tended to be millennials and younger. The older folks went apoplectic when we tried to move more communication onto our online platform: "I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone - if they couldn't complete the whole transaction online they were much more likely to bail. Not making a judgment about either approach, really just thought it was interesting how stark the divide was and how it changed so quickly.
- ghaff 3y agoTrust me. Every few weeks I hear a complaint from my dad that he can't just go into an office or directly get someone on the phone to make some change. (And I'm certainly not a millennial.) At some level he just resents he needs to do this stuff on a computer. I'm annoyed when I can't reach someone in the event of a problem but I am totally cool with transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system. I do talk with certain advisors in person and we even share various personal info about what's going on--but most routine things are email.
- eastof 3y agoI guess I'm against the trend since I'm a gen z who also vastly prefers a phone call to online. Computer systems IME are riddled with dark patterns, bugs, ads, and terrible UIs that make it nearly impossible to figure out where to go to solve my problem. Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?
- ghaff 3y ago>Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"? Sure. A random travel booking. A stock purchase. Checking my account balance anywhere. These are all things that took visiting travel agents, brokers, and waiting for delayed monthly statements previously. We made a lot of phone calls and went into offices for multiple hours to handle things.
- theptip 3y agoI would not bet my brand on generative AI being ready to handle customer-facing conversations without supervision. Seems insane. But hey, maybe the ROI is there for replacing frontline support. It’s lower quality but way lower price, so you can afford to escalate to a human quicker? Just to steelman, if I could easily and instantly talk to a support chatbot that was somewhat knowledgeable about the product lineup, it might be useful. Better than the Intercom chat box where the human replies to you in 2-10 hours.
- xtracto 3y ago>Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more I cant accept this. Labour cost is as cheap as it has been, as it can be seen in those inflation vs salary increase historic charts. Similarly with labour shortage: population is just growing and growing, what labour shortage? I think reality is grimmer: companies are unwilling to pay humans a fair share for their labour, as it happened in the past. Nowadays companies prefer crappy cheap AI with 1/10th of the cost instead of humans. It's depressing. We need a) steep government taxes to companies that do this so that part of those savings go to society, b) UBI paid by those taxes so that people can keep living a dignified life. (Btw I'm not American and dont live there, so Socialist measures are OK to me) socialists not communist
- lakomen 3y agoIf you work with AI, it's on you to refuse those jobs.
- photonbeam 3y agoThe people labeling data for $15/h are supposed to take the stand?
- davb 3y agoNo, the people building the shite customer service chatbots that we all hate using should take a stand.
- fullshark 3y agoIt would be great if everyone made personal financial sacrifices for the things we thought were important right? The world would be a much better place in my estimation.
- ryandrake 3y agoRelying on individual developer's ethics is not going to work. "There's always someone willing to write the kill-bot software." I've in the past objected to (and refused to) develop ethically questionable software. It doesn't make a difference, because Bill, two desks down, is happy to write whatever software boss tells him to write.
- gremlinsinc 3y agono the govt should just pay ubi because we're at the point of needing it. it'll only get worse. Businesses should automate so people are needed for less menial stuff and can just enjoy life and shit. Not far from now even intellectual jobs will be a.i. post scarcity star Trek civilization is very possible if we stop letting greed control us. disclaimer : I run an ai automation agency, and support the fight against poverty and for universal healthcare and stuff, but the faster we automate the faster the govt is forced to roll out solutions to fix the problems automation creates.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoI'm just wondering when is OpenAI going to jack up their prices once vendor lock-in reaches some critical mass.
- josho 3y agoThey don’t have lock in yet. They have an advantage in their LLM. But competition is racing and are improving their LLMs fast.
- Legend2440 3y agoEvery other company with a GPU farm is getting into the LLM space. There will be plenty of competition keeping prices low.
- rvz 3y agoFor them to do that, they would need to release a free but extremely limited version of GPT-3, that is downloadable but much better than all the other free LLMs like Llama 2. Then they can justify increasing the price of either GPT-4 (with more features) or directly in GPT-4.5. Otherwise they cannot compete against Meta in the race to zero.
- dmvdoug 3y agoThe enshittification will continue until morale improves.
- stopshills 3y agoWhat the fuck is that supposed to mean? Morale is down because of the enshittification.
- marricks 3y agomaybe I'm missing a layer of sarcasm or two but that's the joke
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flanked-evergl 3y agohttps://english.stackexchange.com/q/371325 https://english.stackexchange.com/q/371325
- dragonmost 3y agoThat's exactly the point, and it won't get better anytime soon.
- btown 3y agoHOME # the user's position FD 100 ST # show turtle, whose name happens to be joke RT 90 PD # pen down FD 10000000
- lolinder 3y agoIt's a common joke in situations like this. The form I'm familiar with is "the beatings will continue until morale improves". The saying is used to call out self-defeating treatment of a company's employees: that beatings hurt rather than help morale is the point. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/c4tu06/origin_of_the_beatings_will_continue_until_morale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/c4tu06/origin_of...
- bigmattystyles 3y agoIt's nothing new - Outlook / Exchange and counterparts replaced secretaries. Intelligent IDES let me do the job of many. The list goes on. The rate of replacement may be great or greatly exaggerated. Taxing profits is the key. I'm not holding my breath.
- frereubu 3y agoDo you mean taxing revenues?
- Barrin92 3y ago>The employee’s Twitter thread also raised concerns about the well-being of Shopify’s workforce. Since the layoffs, remaining staff members have reportedly faced increased workloads without proportional compensation or benefits, leading to burnout, anxiety, and stress leave. Companies who outsource customer support to cheap subsidiaries or bots have no respect for either their customers or their workers, both low and high paid, who will inevitably have to fix and respond to the crap coming their way. For me it has become the most important factor in not choosing to buy anything from a business. It is the canary in the coal mine for future degrading quality.
- kwanbix 3y agoI wonder if all company owners just fire everyone and replace them with AI, who will pay for their products and services?
- littlestymaar 3y agoThey already tried by not raising inflation-adjusted wages for 50 years, and the solution to that problem was: lower the interest rate and push people to borrow to consume.
- cdot2 3y agoInflation adjusted income has risen pretty consistently. The stat people sometimes cite for that is household income which has more to do with changes in average household size rather than changes in wages
- twoodfin 3y agoReal disposable personal income per capita (which accounts for government transfers & subsidies, hence the big Covid spike) has also been on a steady incline. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0 Median household income has doubled since only 1994. https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...
- Joeri 3y agoDoes that also hold up for the bottom quintile?
- cm2012 3y agoThis is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.
- RugnirViking 3y agoin theory: customer support automation frees up support workers from focusing on repetetive customer issues to being able to devote more time to those difficult issues, providing better service at lower cost in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.
- cm2012 3y agoPhone tree support is awful. AI of GPT4 level works because it is 100x better than that. And it will only get better in the next 5 years.
- tempodox 3y agoPromises, promises. They remind me of how cryptocurrencies were going to make everything better. “Just wait another 5 years and you'll see.”
- avery17 3y agoWe've never had a gpt powered customer support though. It will be fine tuned on all of their recorded customer interactions ever. I could see this being way better than typical customer support where you have minimally trained, low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago[flagged]
- phpisthebest 3y ago
- pjmlp 3y agoThis is just the start, just wait until most LLM can outperform junior devs on the quality of generated code.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- moltar 3y agoI think they already can if you prompt well.
- reustle 3y agoWe are just about there, if not past. Check out "Copilot for Pull Requests", "GPT Engineer", and "StarCoder LLM". Friends and I have all been working to experiment with these sorts of things locally, to reduce the cost to basically zero. I am sure we can guess what 1-3 years from now starts to look like, as technical project managers and sr devs are able to harness many of these tools (see langchain) and just write english unit tests.
- jgilias 3y agoThe value of a junior dev is not the code they manage to produce. It’s their potential to become mid and senior later on. What I’m trying to say is that LLMs don’t change anything here. Juniors are not hired for the work they can produce when hired.
- pjmlp 3y agoTo become a mid and senior one has to start as a junior. The upcoming generation better learn how to start as junior architect.
- micheljansen 3y agoEspecially because every senior dev alive was once a junior dev.
- ronyfadel 3y agoI’d be more worried about mid-level devs that will be replaced by a junior++ armed with an LLM.
- BigBalli 3y agoI don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged".
- nvr219 3y agoAs a customer: because the quality of service I get from a robot is much worse than the quality of service I get from a human being, in general.
- loghi65 3y ago[dead]
- indy 3y agoExactly, almost everyone who reads Hacker News have built their careers on technological progress. Outrage now that it's coming after their jobs just rings hollow.
- krainboltgreene 3y agoI built careers on making labour easier, I want the result of that labour to benefit the workers, not the exceptionally short term vision of shareholders. Just because you can't understand why this affects your future doesn't mean it's hollow outrage.
- indy 3y ago
- tennisflyi 3y agoOh no. I thought tech only took jobs away from “low skill” people, e.g., cashiers or baristas and let the smart retire early… I guess the days of pushing a couple emails with cushy AF perks are over. This is sarcasm BTW (somewhat).
- rightbyte 3y agoThere has been automatic barista machines since ... a long time. Turns out a baristas job is not really to make coffee.
- malikNF 3y agoWonder if prompt injection is going to steal the crown from sql injection.
- dpflan 3y agoFor sure. Or become a new entry point for sql injection. As it is conversational, maybe the combined attack could be called a "speak-ql injection".
- brrtbrrt 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway737248 3y agoI would love to see some sort of directory that helps me chose companies where I can talk to humans, not phone trees and robots. Would gladly pay a premium.
- fifteen1506 3y agoI thought they were all like family? Seriously though, what are the mental implications of surprise layoffs? You stop trusting everyone's word, specially when you're just a number? How does a structured capitalist society hold with this? Or you just double-down on the false belief those fired deserved it?
- the_only_law 3y ago> I thought they were all like family? Heh to be fair, I’ve seen family screw each other over plenty of times.
- imafish 3y agoFrom my experience with Shopify customer service, I would say firing them all sounds like a great idea. Let’s free up some humans for other tasks. They weren’t performing the previous tasks that well anyway.
- rglover 3y agoThat's the fault of leadership, not the humans.
- rglover 3y agoHow I read all headlines like this now: "Shopify just opened themselves up to be less dominate (or non-existent) in the market." The destruction of brands on the horizon is creating a ton of opportunity for new businesses to develop. One's that can only succeed if they reject the religion of "automate all the things with AI" and take a quality/human-first approach to running their business.
- kromem 3y agoYep. It isn't going to be in the next 12 or maybe even 24 months, but in the not too distant future any company that made significant downsizing in the early days of AI is going to find out the hard way that they effectively threw away a lot of their lead against competition. The smart companies right now would be keeping headcount the same, provide their employees with access to AI and training on how to use it effectively to reduce their workload, and then set them towards further specialization with the new freed up workload. The cost for the productivity that 100 human employees can bring is much harder for a new competitor to match than the cost of 100 AI employees. So if cash flow supports keeping 100 humans on staff, and instead you switch over to AI to try and impress shareholders in the short term, rather than finding ways to maximize the output of the 100 humans for long term growth, you're going to wake up closer to being unseated by companies with less technical and bureaucratic debt (and probably often with some of those same ex employees on staff).
- 23B1 3y ago> then set them towards further specialization with the new freed up workload Or innovation. Imagine not hiring McKinsey or IDEO to 'innovent' new market opportunities but instead, y'know, listening to your frontline about what they think customers might want...
- jarjoura 3y agoIf the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work. If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it and it's going to be a very long recession where nobody will win. Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have made it to the top will continue to horde all the profits.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yreg 3y agoThe mean quality of life is sky high compared to 100 years ago and it is such thanks to the advancement made.
- digdugdirk 3y agoThe mean quality of life is irrelevant if the mode quality of life is only a tenth of that.
- didibus 3y agoAnd honestly the range matters a lot here as well. The mean just isn't a useful metric for human emancipation.
- jacquesm 3y ago> The mean just isn't a useful metric for human emancipation. For those at the top of the foodchain it is a very useful metric: it allows them to sleep at night.
- vikinghckr 3y agoThe median quality of life is MUCH higher today than 100 years ago. And bottom 1%-tile quality of life might be 1000 times better. All thanks to advance in technology and increased productivity.
- ChumpGPT 3y ago>These job cuts, according to the employee, were driven not merely by a CEO’s misguided “bet,” but rather a shift towards replacing full-time employees with cheaper contract labor Good Lord, how much cheaper can you get than Canadian labor? They already get paid poorly and earn about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts. I guess the lack of jobs is why they can pay so little, explains why so many Canadians flee to the US first chance they get.
- boringg 3y agoI think you need some numbers there. Pretty sure it isnt 50% ;)
- ChumpGPT 3y agoWell to be honest, our company hired a bright kid out of Waterloo who couldn't find work in Canada for over a year ( Nanotechnologies ). Or at least work that paid more than their minimum wage. Super sharp and is doing great in Material Sciences. If a kid like that can't find work in Toronto, Ontario, I have no idea what the hell is going on up there.
- Waterluvian 3y agoOr the best of both worlds: American employment while living in Canada. But yeah, I’ve worked for ridiculously cheap companies before here. Some who are well-known to conspire with local competitors not to poach each other’s employees to keep salaries down.
- mvncleaninst 3y ago> Or the best of both worlds: American employment while living in Canada. But then wouldn't you get double dipped on taxes?
- Waterluvian 3y agoNope. In my case I’m paid Canadian dollars and receive a T4 and am not on the radar at all for US taxes. I think there’s a lot of ways for it to be handled.
- topynate 3y agoWhat's the disclosure that breaks the NDA this tweeter is supposed to have had? I searched every quote in the thread and they're all already public. Tweet #11 shows as "unavailable", but the archived version at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1681673980682305541.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1681673980682305541.html refers to a "Code Yellow" that did leak, but in March: https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-issues-code-yellow-for-customer-service-improvements-2023-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-issues-code-yellow-f... I tried to find people complaining about being left on hold by shopify support and got nothing on twitter. All the complaints are about the account payments being on hold, i.e. shitty but par for the course risk/compliance issues. The remaining thread content is the sort of inference and speculation that anyone with the right political bent could have made, given a few hours to research the company.
- akira2501 3y agoI see these like Blake Lemoine. Obvious propaganda meant to push the corporate message harder. That message being: "Labor is being devalued. Expect to earn less." The very specific reach and targeting of these articles is a good hint here, I think. If these "chat bots" were actually capable of what is claimed, none of this would be necessary, and no NDAs would need to be "broken" for the world to know about it. It's like imagining a Ford factory worker in 1907 breaking an NDA to tell us all "cars are coming."
- mvdtnz 3y agoI went through the same exercise as you, I carefully read the thread for any information that could be under NDA or even evidence that the thread author even worked for Shopify and found nothing credible. The author does claim to be an employee but all of the supposed inside information is either publicly available or so vague and unsupported I can't take it seriously. This is not a credible piece.
- kaonashi 3y agoThere were a couple of deleted tweets in the original thread.
- 3y ago
- rvz 3y agoLike I said before, less employees and more with less. [0] The ones who are journalists, writers or artists are currently getting destroyed by AI. Engineers are next on the menu and will be affected. Henceforth, as LLMs get better at code, there would be less engineers and jobs created for both juniors and seniors. It does not matter. AI doesn't complain, get sick, care, protest or give a damn. It is coming and it's not going to stop at all. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878482
- asynchronous 3y agoI really, really wanna try laying off CEOs and replacing management with AI- let’s see how that goes.
- j45 3y agoNot referring to Shopify specifically, it's surprising to see startups who are able to increase their operational capacity with their existing workforce by using AI... and instead of instantly having freely trained and ready to go employees to grow the business, instead work to shrink their workforce, instead of putting them to work on the new problems their eventual disruptors will solve. Automation has always been a scary threat for losing jobs for the last 30-40 years. While LLM might be different, there's almost certainly even more in the next 5-10 years we haven't imagined yet.
- rightbyte 3y agoIt's probably enshitification. Short term higher profits. Fire support staff and it tales time for the effects to manifest. Could be either internal support like secretaries, technical writers or external support, like, customer support.
- sharts 3y agoAnyone that has ever interacted with a customer service chat bot knows this is pretty stupid. I’m not sure why people (esp. those in the tech community) think we have evolved the technology in any meaningful enough way to replace people yet. How do we know this? Those same people would be against AI chatbots replacing their children’s teachers.
- tempestn 3y agoI don't know if that's going to be the case for long. GPT-4 is far more useful than almost any customer support rep I've dealt with.
- mupuff1234 3y agoIt doesn't have to replace all people, just good enough to replace the more common cases.
- lucb1e 3y agoOr frustrate people enough so they go and figure out the solution by themselves, or not file that complaint, or whatever it was they wanted to do but did not actually necessarily need assistance with, while giving the semblance of trying to be helpful Not saying this is a good thing, but then I'm not an upper manager with dollar symbols in their eyes
- bobthepanda 3y agoIn practice, places will ignore that it doesn't work for everything, cut off any sort of physical call centers, and then people just end up fed up with their services. I absolutely hate places aggressively adopting chatbots and phone bots.
- mupuff1234 3y agoPerhaps, but that's also true with physical call centers, some of them are helpful and some are hell. Hopefully the costumers will rewards companies with better customer service. A good company will provide a good chat bot that will make it immediately clear when it can help and when it can't, with a clear and simple way to contact a human if needed.
- ChildOfChaos 3y ago"The drastic changes in Shopify’s approach have led both employees and customers to question the company’s integrity and commitment to its original mission of empowering small businesses. Many see the company as straying from its roots, becoming more akin to the corporate giants it once aimed to oppose." This seems to me like most start ups or companies as they grow and get big, they start out by disrupting and fighting the way things are done, mixing up the space and taking on 'the man', then they become that which they opposed and then pivot to act in the same way, until someone new comes along and the cycle repeats.
- tennisflyi 3y agoDark Knigt meme, yeah.
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoAt least their chatbots might be better than the ‘humans’ we spoke to a few years ago at Shopify. Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears. We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!). Long story short: these big e-shop hosters seem to share something in common - Twattery.
- echelon 3y agoThese are businesses at scale. They're not going to hold your hand. Be reasonable.
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoHold hand? Seems you are being quite presumptuous about what the contact was regarding!
- zht 3y agoI always wonder why people simp for large companies. It’s not as if Shopify is some poor, sad, 3-person operation that’s barely scraping by. Their last quarter net income was 83m on 1.6B revenue. They can afford less shitty customer support
- FridgeSeal 3y agoThat might be true, but is it what we want and should tolerate? We should be holding organisations up to high standards, they won’t always meet them, but better to get them to at least try rather then throwing our hands up and letting them get away with testing people like dirt.
- donmcronald 3y agoIt’s $300 USD / year for a business plan at wordpress.com. They shouldn’t have unstaffed chat an an email response time measured in days, which I’ve recently experienced. I would say the sites I’ve dealt with are using <$50 / year of compute. The $250 extra is considered ok because it’s viewed as paying to have something backed by, and supported by, a commercial organization. If there’s zero support, which seems to be a general trend lately, why not self host for a fraction of the cost? At least that way I’d have the access needed to fix my own problems.
- worik 3y agoThis is another case of "enshitification".
- CrazyCatDog 3y agoWho was calling customer service to begin with? I’m not a user, but I suspect there’s more margin with customers who are large enough to have a firm or internal team handle Shopify for them, and that’s not the type of person (one would hope) that would call customer service unless there was an account-level issue. If that’s the case, then they are simply evolving away from the mom-and-pop priority that made it so popular to begin with :(
- boringuser2 3y agoCSR is kinda done. AI is just better at this task to a shocking degree My company is talking about this as well, and they're right to do so. Now, massive layoffs during a period of stagflation, depressed wages and overpriced necessities like housing, transportation, and healthcare is really, really bad, so anyone comparing this to other technologies in a hopeful manner is way off the mark. That being said, you can't really predict the future, and ruminating on potential negatives is always bad.
- dorkwood 3y agoOne great thing that came from the NFT gold-rush was that it exposed a lot of well-known figures as grifters -- Tobi, the Shopify CEO, being one of them. After that ordeal, this kind of thing doesn't surprise me in the least.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoWhat kind of grifting did he do? The only crypto related information about him that’s readily available is that he joined the Coinbase board.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoTobi was part of the group which changed their name on twitter to name.eth. As soon as I saw his name as tobi.eth I added him to my block list of all the others who also changed their names as it was a very easy signal for me to know which people do not have original thinking and are grifters.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoAfter a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same web page that you are, with no more ability to change anything than you have. And it will take 30 minutes to get one of them on the phone because "we are experiencing unusually high call volume" which translates as "the new vice president fired 10 more customer service agents to make his numbers look good." If robots are involved it means "the new vice president wanted his numbers to look even better." Companies have apparently run the numbers and decided it is cheaper to effectively ignore and dissuade dissatisfied customers than to try to resolve their issues. And since most companies insist on binding arbitration now, they're not even worried about class-action lawsuits.
- moomoo11 3y agoThe goal is to sell. Just like how people go nuts over “insane” MRR/ARR while fueling unsustainable enterprises. I guess it’s one way to wash money.
- lynchdt 3y agoI mostly agree with this. If you observe the KPI set used to run support teams, especially with large inbound you will see NPS used as a proxy for quality of resolution but folks mostly don’t respond to those prompts. More interesting to support team managers are things like deflection rate (didn’t get to an agent) involvement rate (needed an agent) and eventually resolution rate (resolved issue). The last one in the absence of feedback is only a very weak proxy for a resolved issue. If you consider customer support a cost center, you can guess how managers would optimize these numbers. I don’t necessarily think there is much wrong with this - having a good product with excellent design, build and proactive support (docs, manuals, walkthroughs, proactive comms) - is likely very good for both customers and the business serving them.
- LoganDark 3y ago> After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.
- DangitBobby 3y agoCan't wait for their stock price to go up after this leak.
- thdespou 3y agoIf it's true I see that as a prime example of Ruthless Capitalism. It only serves to make businesses profit.