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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

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." 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 ago
The 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 ago
I 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.
- jq-r 3y ago
  Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support. TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it. The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having. Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload? Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
ravenstine 3y ago
Given how The Google seems to still set the standard for everything, should this be new information to us?
martin8412 3y ago
All you need to do is to speak the magic codeword, charge back.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  IME big companies have pretty solid procedures for battling these, and in some cases for punishing people who do this. IIRC, people have lost FB or Google accounts over valid chargebacks.
- generj 3y ago
  If they are in a consolidated market they will just tell you to go ahead and chargeback…they’ll deny list you and make you pay a big fee when yo I get tired of their (lack of) competitors and come crawling back.
- fragmede 3y ago
  And then you can't use Uber, or Doordash, or Instacart. It works for single transaction merchants, but for platforms that having become critical to functioning in today's modern society, it's unfortunately not the magic password.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    If you need to issue charge backs you shouldn't be using them. Painful lesson but call the restaurant. Call a cab. Go to the store yourself. Your modern society is a wasteland to be avoided.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      I'm not sure how you want a disabled person to go to the store themselves when they're physically unable to walk, but where services are convenient for the able-bodied and minded, they're literally lifeblood for the disabled. Modern society can be avoided by those with that privilege, but for the rest of us, it's the one we've got.
      - 3y ago
sometimes_all 3y ago
When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could. Good customer service inspires loyalty to a company in a way discounts/advertising cannot. Their topline might not be the best, but they'll never go out of business.
- mieubrisse 3y ago
  I've had this experience with Ally bank. Their SMS-only 2FA, lack of international wire transfers, and compete failure to work with Plaid drive me insane, but I'm still using them because I get a kind, helpful human every time I call.
  - dataexporter 3y ago
    Except when it is not. With Ally customer service - I was once on hold for more than hour before I could speak to an agent. Not the ideal scenario - and their backend systems were not even able to resolve my issue even after multiple calls.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
speleding 3y ago
As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace. For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose issues make them fall outside the golden path of standard procedures: an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question, if you add up all cost associated from the employees involved, obliterating any margin from that customer. I doubt that AI will change this much. So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. The best you can hope for is that someone will create a ticket that someone else will look at at some point if a lot of similar tickets accumulate.
- fatnoah 3y ago
  > "I've lost my password" IMHO, this is the main reason L1 support "sucks" so much. Having been a support guy in a previous life, nothing feels worse than skipping the annoying trivial question (e.g did you install the software after diwnloading it?) only to find out after 25 minutes of debugging that they, in fact, did not actually install the software. That particular call started with "all I see are codes" as the opening line. Had I asked if they'd installed the web application on their server instead of extracting random .js and .aspx files and double-clicking on them in Explorer, I could have saved everyone a lot of time.
- inertiatic 3y ago
  >an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be? > So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. How is it a question of intellect? Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action (untick a box somewhere, offer a refund, whatever). And how would that be profitable long term? Just by virtue of the fact that in a market with actual competition, leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable.
nonstopdev 3y ago
I’ve been in the contact center consulting space for years and unfortunately, some industries just know there aren’t many alternatives or the effort to move somewhere is so high they really don’t need to strive to make the customer feel special or welcome. Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them. Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan. The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.

moomoo11 3y ago

The 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 ago

I 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.

jq-r 3y ago
Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support. TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it. The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having. Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload? Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.

ravenstine 3y ago

Given how The Google seems to still set the standard for everything, should this be new information to us?

martin8412 3y ago

All you need to do is to speak the magic codeword, charge back.

gnicholas 3y ago
IME big companies have pretty solid procedures for battling these, and in some cases for punishing people who do this. IIRC, people have lost FB or Google accounts over valid chargebacks.
generj 3y ago
If they are in a consolidated market they will just tell you to go ahead and chargeback…they’ll deny list you and make you pay a big fee when yo I get tired of their (lack of) competitors and come crawling back.
fragmede 3y ago
And then you can't use Uber, or Doordash, or Instacart. It works for single transaction merchants, but for platforms that having become critical to functioning in today's modern society, it's unfortunately not the magic password.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  If you need to issue charge backs you shouldn't be using them. Painful lesson but call the restaurant. Call a cab. Go to the store yourself. Your modern society is a wasteland to be avoided.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I'm not sure how you want a disabled person to go to the store themselves when they're physically unable to walk, but where services are convenient for the able-bodied and minded, they're literally lifeblood for the disabled. Modern society can be avoided by those with that privilege, but for the rest of us, it's the one we've got.
    - 3y ago

sometimes_all 3y ago

When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could. Good customer service inspires loyalty to a company in a way discounts/advertising cannot. Their topline might not be the best, but they'll never go out of business.

mieubrisse 3y ago
I've had this experience with Ally bank. Their SMS-only 2FA, lack of international wire transfers, and compete failure to work with Plaid drive me insane, but I'm still using them because I get a kind, helpful human every time I call.
- dataexporter 3y ago
  Except when it is not. With Ally customer service - I was once on hold for more than hour before I could speak to an agent. Not the ideal scenario - and their backend systems were not even able to resolve my issue even after multiple calls.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

speleding 3y ago

As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace. For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose issues make them fall outside the golden path of standard procedures: an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question, if you add up all cost associated from the employees involved, obliterating any margin from that customer. I doubt that AI will change this much. So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. The best you can hope for is that someone will create a ticket that someone else will look at at some point if a lot of similar tickets accumulate.

fatnoah 3y ago
> "I've lost my password" IMHO, this is the main reason L1 support "sucks" so much. Having been a support guy in a previous life, nothing feels worse than skipping the annoying trivial question (e.g did you install the software after diwnloading it?) only to find out after 25 minutes of debugging that they, in fact, did not actually install the software. That particular call started with "all I see are codes" as the opening line. Had I asked if they'd installed the web application on their server instead of extracting random .js and .aspx files and double-clicking on them in Explorer, I could have saved everyone a lot of time.
inertiatic 3y ago
>an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be? > So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. How is it a question of intellect? Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action (untick a box somewhere, offer a refund, whatever). And how would that be profitable long term? Just by virtue of the fact that in a market with actual competition, leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable.

nonstopdev 3y ago

I’ve been in the contact center consulting space for years and unfortunately, some industries just know there aren’t many alternatives or the effort to move somewhere is so high they really don’t need to strive to make the customer feel special or welcome. Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them. Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan. The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.