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The CEO should have just set up a "Suggestions Box" or "Comment Hotline" and very real issues would have been collected, probably along with junk. Hire a firm t

The CEO should have just set up a "Suggestions Box" or "Comment Hotline" and very real issues would have been collected, probably along with junk. Hire a firm to sift thru it, possibly match it against accounts for verification of issues, and you'd have an awesome list for a Product Manager to prioritize. I'll tell you some real issues. When living overseas, I didnt drive for 3 full years, just Uber'ed everywhere. These were work-paid and I tipped generously. I took thousands of trips. Then boom mysteriously they wouldnt let me add credit cards one day. I tried a bunch of credit cards, no luck. No recourse, no help from customer service, nothing. No error code, no next step. Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem. Then, when I returned to the US years later, still out of luck. Still no resolution from Uber. I switched here to Lyft. How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system?

bmitc 3y ago
I think these companies are just fundamentally not profitable, and they have zero incentives to care, even less than the systems they tried to replace. My DoorDash account is now flagged because a driver delivered to a completely different house, and I had the gall to report it as not delivered. I even texted the driver after they sent a picture (which verifies it as not my house), but they didn't respond. Now, my DoorDash account has all sorts of weird things happen to it, as if my account is a fraud account, even though their own systems verify my report. The GPS coordinates associated with the delivery email also show it was at a completely different address. The DoorDash support just ended tha chat when I chatted in about the subsequent issues. These modern day, purely software-based companies don't care about customers because they don't have to. They abstract away the customer and the customer experience to pure statistics. The best (i.e., worst) example of this is Amazon. It takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get to an actual human after you are barraged and belittled by their Alexa chat assistant. The chat assistant will condescendingly tell you to give it accurate information, otherwise it will give poor resolutions. Oh, I'm sorry Amazon "forgot" to refund me $700+ for an item that was successfully returned and they "forgot" to encode this into their system. And there are some instances where it will refuse to connect you to an agent.
- ck2 3y ago
  That happened to me with Amazon. Driver decided for some weird random reason to deliver my entire monthly order to a strange address two blocks away. Amazon insisted that was impossible because their deliveries are GPS fenced within a small distance of the address. However the delivery photo didn't match the apartment of any of my previous 100+ deliveries or any apartment in my complex for that matter. They made me fill out by hand an incident report for every single item in the box (like a dozen) before they would give me a refund and now my account seems silently flagged for fraud where every CSR interaction is difficult and tedious. I finally found a matching photo of the random apartment by browsing google street maps and sent it to them but they could care less. The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing). Oh also, all my Amazon deliveries since then now come via USPS and not their own drivers/contracted
  - bmitc 3y ago
    I'm sure that is beyond frustrating. These companies just truly do not care, in an actually agressive way. > The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing). Yep, I edited my comment with additional Amazon elaboration, probably while you were responding, because they're the worst. Haha. They didn't refund me properly for an expensive returned item and ended up giving me a "one-time exception" for money they owed me. It's not only just frustrating and mindnumbing, it's like getting slapped in the face. Sort of like those robot patrol cops in Elysium. And the silent flagging you described is what happened with my DoorDash account. We are heading more and more into a "computer says no" dystopia. How many times per day are we already told things like "the system won't let me do that", "I'm not sure why the system says that", "that's weird", "just wait and it'll sort itself out", etc. We have however many lines of code running that has little proper encoding of domains and required knowledge, but the systems are treated as the single source of action and truth.
    - 4star3star 3y ago
hedora 3y ago
There aren’t many three sigma customers, and it’s cheaper to drop you then fix the bug. You might like the short film “Please Hold” for a more nuanced take.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  By three sigma customer, I meant that I've taken thousands of Uber rides in three years, and tipped very well. They have completely ignored what a positive outlier the account was when deciding to abandon it. In triage, my customer segment is one you'd want to save. At least thinking rationally as a business owner.
nine_zeros 3y ago
> How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system? If you have ever worked in one of these move fast companies, you know that nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense. Fundamentally, these companies are not set up with the right mission and the right incentives. Doing good by customers and employees is not a thing.
- cxr 3y ago
  The suggestion that this has something to do with "these move fast companies" is off the mark. I can tell you about tiny local businesses with about dozen employees, maybe less, whose owners' don't-care attitude has the same effect.
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    My point was that among public companies, there is a class of companies that move fast and quick, as opposed to businesses that are slower and cautious. The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone. Slower companies go through ups and downs in their stock prices all the time and don't blink much because they want to be around for a long time.
    - cxr 3y ago
      > The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone. This is something that is at odds with my firsthand experience here, too. Your previous characterization: > nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense ... also applies to them—i.e., large, inefficient orgs that have nothing in common with the move-fast approach. Slow companies are slow because their size and approach to hiring/retention means they're stupidly inefficient. They end up with ossified corporate and social structures that the defenders don't even understand. (Ones that aren't a form of redundancy or the result of other wisdom, but because tons of people in the org, including leadership, can't see beyond the end of the shift, let alone to the same quarter the next year, and can't be bothered to care, either).
physicles 3y ago
For the people building the product, suggestion boxes don’t hit the same way as actually using it. I think the employee driver badge is super corporate but also a good move if you want to improve the product. At Microsoft this was called dogfooding, and for pre-release software it was painful, but an important part of the culture. I notice this all the time with software. I tend to keep hardware for 5-8 years, and by the end of that window, apps and websites start feeling sluggish. Of course they do: all the devs have modern hardware and don’t notice how crappy the experience is on old hardware. You can tell them, but they don’t feel the pain and their empathy is limited by how much it actually impacts the bottom line.
- smugma 3y ago
  Several people have told me that Bertrand Serlet used to have Core OS engineers run with very low ram and slow computers so they’d feel the pain. Any 90’s-early 2000s MacOS engineers around to confirm?
exhilaration 3y ago
Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening, which would also explain why nobody's telling you what happened. (Not trying to excuse Uber or "the system" here.)
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  This is a very interesting take, thank you. Is there "denied party screening" for things such as Uber passenger rides or food delivery? I have the same exact experience (almost identical) with Grubhub+ when ordering food, though just with these vendors (Uber, Grubhub) and no others. What vendor does this, is it possible to correct one's profile? Also, is there any general redress mechanism? The whole thing is strange since Uber and Grubhub dont have any real identification on you except phone/email/creditcard name -- is that even enough to do denied party screening and blacklist someone? Also, anyone know the rationale to conduct denied party screening on food orders?
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening Can you fill in what that means? Why is the Middle East relevant and what is 'denied party screening'?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    It means their name matches someone else's name on a US government watch list, or that they are considered a terrorist or are sanctioned. The Middle East has a large number of these individuals, as does Russia, and North Korea.
bitsandboots 3y ago
For me, I have 2 phones: the one with all the google software removed, in which uber and lyft wont work. The phone which has all the google software: lyft works, uber wont. Same experience with uber error reporting as you said. They dont exist. Message received loud and clear though, I'll just use taxis first and lyft second and uber never.

bmitc 3y ago

I think these companies are just fundamentally not profitable, and they have zero incentives to care, even less than the systems they tried to replace. My DoorDash account is now flagged because a driver delivered to a completely different house, and I had the gall to report it as not delivered. I even texted the driver after they sent a picture (which verifies it as not my house), but they didn't respond. Now, my DoorDash account has all sorts of weird things happen to it, as if my account is a fraud account, even though their own systems verify my report. The GPS coordinates associated with the delivery email also show it was at a completely different address. The DoorDash support just ended tha chat when I chatted in about the subsequent issues. These modern day, purely software-based companies don't care about customers because they don't have to. They abstract away the customer and the customer experience to pure statistics. The best (i.e., worst) example of this is Amazon. It takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get to an actual human after you are barraged and belittled by their Alexa chat assistant. The chat assistant will condescendingly tell you to give it accurate information, otherwise it will give poor resolutions. Oh, I'm sorry Amazon "forgot" to refund me $700+ for an item that was successfully returned and they "forgot" to encode this into their system. And there are some instances where it will refuse to connect you to an agent.

ck2 3y ago
That happened to me with Amazon. Driver decided for some weird random reason to deliver my entire monthly order to a strange address two blocks away. Amazon insisted that was impossible because their deliveries are GPS fenced within a small distance of the address. However the delivery photo didn't match the apartment of any of my previous 100+ deliveries or any apartment in my complex for that matter. They made me fill out by hand an incident report for every single item in the box (like a dozen) before they would give me a refund and now my account seems silently flagged for fraud where every CSR interaction is difficult and tedious. I finally found a matching photo of the random apartment by browsing google street maps and sent it to them but they could care less. The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing). Oh also, all my Amazon deliveries since then now come via USPS and not their own drivers/contracted
- bmitc 3y ago
  I'm sure that is beyond frustrating. These companies just truly do not care, in an actually agressive way. > The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing). Yep, I edited my comment with additional Amazon elaboration, probably while you were responding, because they're the worst. Haha. They didn't refund me properly for an expensive returned item and ended up giving me a "one-time exception" for money they owed me. It's not only just frustrating and mindnumbing, it's like getting slapped in the face. Sort of like those robot patrol cops in Elysium. And the silent flagging you described is what happened with my DoorDash account. We are heading more and more into a "computer says no" dystopia. How many times per day are we already told things like "the system won't let me do that", "I'm not sure why the system says that", "that's weird", "just wait and it'll sort itself out", etc. We have however many lines of code running that has little proper encoding of domains and required knowledge, but the systems are treated as the single source of action and truth.
  - 4star3star 3y ago

hedora 3y ago

There aren’t many three sigma customers, and it’s cheaper to drop you then fix the bug. You might like the short film “Please Hold” for a more nuanced take.

TuringNYC 3y ago
By three sigma customer, I meant that I've taken thousands of Uber rides in three years, and tipped very well. They have completely ignored what a positive outlier the account was when deciding to abandon it. In triage, my customer segment is one you'd want to save. At least thinking rationally as a business owner.

nine_zeros 3y ago

> How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system? If you have ever worked in one of these move fast companies, you know that nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense. Fundamentally, these companies are not set up with the right mission and the right incentives. Doing good by customers and employees is not a thing.

cxr 3y ago
The suggestion that this has something to do with "these move fast companies" is off the mark. I can tell you about tiny local businesses with about dozen employees, maybe less, whose owners' don't-care attitude has the same effect.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  My point was that among public companies, there is a class of companies that move fast and quick, as opposed to businesses that are slower and cautious. The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone. Slower companies go through ups and downs in their stock prices all the time and don't blink much because they want to be around for a long time.
  - cxr 3y ago
    > The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone. This is something that is at odds with my firsthand experience here, too. Your previous characterization: > nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense ... also applies to them—i.e., large, inefficient orgs that have nothing in common with the move-fast approach. Slow companies are slow because their size and approach to hiring/retention means they're stupidly inefficient. They end up with ossified corporate and social structures that the defenders don't even understand. (Ones that aren't a form of redundancy or the result of other wisdom, but because tons of people in the org, including leadership, can't see beyond the end of the shift, let alone to the same quarter the next year, and can't be bothered to care, either).

physicles 3y ago

For the people building the product, suggestion boxes don’t hit the same way as actually using it. I think the employee driver badge is super corporate but also a good move if you want to improve the product. At Microsoft this was called dogfooding, and for pre-release software it was painful, but an important part of the culture. I notice this all the time with software. I tend to keep hardware for 5-8 years, and by the end of that window, apps and websites start feeling sluggish. Of course they do: all the devs have modern hardware and don’t notice how crappy the experience is on old hardware. You can tell them, but they don’t feel the pain and their empathy is limited by how much it actually impacts the bottom line.

smugma 3y ago
Several people have told me that Bertrand Serlet used to have Core OS engineers run with very low ram and slow computers so they’d feel the pain. Any 90’s-early 2000s MacOS engineers around to confirm?

exhilaration 3y ago

Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening, which would also explain why nobody's telling you what happened. (Not trying to excuse Uber or "the system" here.)

TuringNYC 3y ago
This is a very interesting take, thank you. Is there "denied party screening" for things such as Uber passenger rides or food delivery? I have the same exact experience (almost identical) with Grubhub+ when ordering food, though just with these vendors (Uber, Grubhub) and no others. What vendor does this, is it possible to correct one's profile? Also, is there any general redress mechanism? The whole thing is strange since Uber and Grubhub dont have any real identification on you except phone/email/creditcard name -- is that even enough to do denied party screening and blacklist someone? Also, anyone know the rationale to conduct denied party screening on food orders?
Eisenstein 3y ago
> It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening Can you fill in what that means? Why is the Middle East relevant and what is 'denied party screening'?
- fragmede 3y ago
  It means their name matches someone else's name on a US government watch list, or that they are considered a terrorist or are sanctioned. The Middle East has a large number of these individuals, as does Russia, and North Korea.

bitsandboots 3y ago

For me, I have 2 phones: the one with all the google software removed, in which uber and lyft wont work. The phone which has all the google software: lyft works, uber wont. Same experience with uber error reporting as you said. They dont exist. Message received loud and clear though, I'll just use taxis first and lyft second and uber never.