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People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for he

by com2kid 7mo ago

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are. Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training. Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap. In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share. The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)

wvenable 7mo ago
My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.
- crabmusket 7mo ago
  "smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.
  - LorenPechtel 7mo ago
    Yeah. I recently had to deal with Amazon's robot. Definitely bird-brained but close enough that the right objective was accomplished even though I don't think it ever understood what happened (but woe to the non-native speaker!) The problem is not chatbot customer support, the problem is bird-brained managers that think a system that solves 99% of issues doesn't need a fallback for that 1%.
  - lurk2 7mo ago
    This is the thing that drives me crazy. Most of these phone calls should just be emails; I can usually stand to wait a week or two for the company to get back to me. General support funnels like support@example.com have been dead for most consumer-facing technologies for close to a decade at this point. I’m not installing an app for every company I’m forced to interact with when there are already existing, universal technologies available that they could implement if they just priced their products appropriately.
    - kanzure 7mo ago
      It would be nice if more businesses embraced email instead of requiring phone calls for basic tasks. Imagine how much more productive we could be if we could just send off a quick email with the information and questions. Instead, what we're likely going to get are "voice agents" calling each other when we could have just used email instead...
      - shimman 7mo ago
        Businesses likely don't know a better way because the person selling them software doesn't want them to use an open and federated technology. They want the business to use Slack, with a SalesForce CRM, and then add a JIRA workflow to top it off. Most of the time it's simply not being aware of what's out there or just showing them a different work flow.
- muyuu 7mo ago
  my only experiences with chatbots so far have been as instruments for companies to avoid their contractual obligations and just not provide the options that I would have asked a person directly for obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss
  - tempest_ 7mo ago
    I mean that is also the job of existing call handlers. "We are experiencing an greater than usual call volume, please wait while an agent becomes available" only to be randomly disconnected has been a thing for most of my life. Everyone seems to be hyping open claw at the moment soon its just going to be LLMs talking to LLMs.... I wonder if they will develop a short hand and start talking in wingdings.
- lurk2 7mo ago
  Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.
- esafak 7mo ago
  Do you remember what product they used?
pants2 7mo ago
Curious, why was it $20? I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?
- com2kid 7mo ago
  I edited my comment above and explained, that $20 is an amortized cost representing everything that goes into picking up that phone call.
  - BalinKing 7mo ago
    In that case, wouldn't you be happy to get more calls, so that the up-front "training" cost is worth it? Naïvely I'd expect that every additional call would _decrease_ the amortized price per call.
- IanCal 7mo ago
  They need a place to be, they need to get hired, trained, managed and all the associated general costs of employment (hr, payroll, etc). They need equipment, there's monitoring, evaluations etc. Then you also have to pay them regardless of whether someone calls.
- mrandish 7mo ago
  While I agree with TFA's point that forcing a chatbot isn't a substitute for just having the info available, organized and searchable, the answer to your specific question is that the fully burdened cost of a trained support center human includes a lot more than their gross hourly wage. There's recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training plus space, desk, computer, phone, IT, HR, health care, vacation, sick days, insurance, employer's share of employment taxes. A rough rule of thumb is the full burdened cost of an hourly office knowledge worker is two to three times the gross hourly wage.
Quothling 7mo ago
Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different companies working in different directions. Maybe Microsoft customer support is a bad place to measure these things because of the size, but around here quite a few banks have tried outsourcing their phone support to everything available and have come back because it cost them customers. Even customers who never phoned them. That being said. Your example of customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. Once (if?) AI voice chat is good enough to replace chatbots we may not even realize we're talking with an AI unless it tells us.
- leptons 7mo ago
  >customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI companies are far from profitable, burning billions to insert themselves into customer support pipelines and everywhere else they can, and then the other foot will drop. Uber and Lyft are far more expensive today than when they started, and the price to run "AI" will also inflate when these companies have to pay off all the billions they've spent but didn't earn. I doubt it will end up costing much less if less at all than human support, with worse results.
  - com2kid 7mo ago
    AI voice chat can be done for cheap. Lots of it is RAG and knowledge base lookups, you don't need large fancy models. Indeed you want fast responses, so low parameter models are better. TTS and ASR models are tiny now days, like a handful of GB tiny. Last time I priced this all out the VOIP fees cost more than self hosting all the models.
jongjong 7mo ago
The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them. All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business. Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
- com2kid 7mo ago
  > Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs. As I mentioned, due to high support costs we worked to improve the UX and we ended up dropping our support costs dramatically. Doesn't change the fact that everyone who did call cost us more than our profit on the sale. Customer support is expensive. Microsoft used to charge for customer support back in the day (90s). The way it worked was that if it was your fault, you paid, if it was a product bug, there was no cost for support. While not a perfect system, it at least aligned everyone's incentives in the right direction. (The huge glaring flaw being it was MS that decided if they were going to charge you for the support call or not...)
- victorbjorklund 7mo ago
  Which examples? Lots of times it’s not a forced monopoly but just that customers want the monopoly because they are best/cheapest. Take Google Cloud that people complain about its lack of support. Yet people sign up even if there are thousands of competitors.
autoexec 7mo ago
Microsoft is a company that has very little right to complain about support costs. They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software and updates that required support in the first place. Nobody wants to call Microsoft for support. They do it because they've been forced to, usually by Microsoft. This kind of support can hardly be called "free" because even when Microsoft isn't charging customers to speak with the person on the other end of the line the customer has already paid in time and suffering (and sometimes lost data)
- bsder 7mo ago
  > They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software I doubt it. I suspect the number one tech support call is "I forgot my password" and everything else is a long way below that. I'll slag on Microslop all day, but users are dumber than dumb.
  - dsjoerg 7mo ago
    Users are "dumb", and it's a dumb _system_ and dumb business that doesn't plan for that in terms of FTUE, business model, support model, and product flows. We product makers get to think about our one little product all day, and it's our job to make our product work for the "dumb" users. It's not their job to adapt to us.
  - Blackthorn 7mo ago
    Very easy solution to users forgetting their passwords. It's to not need a password for your software. Something that once upon a time, Microsoft did not require with their operating systems.
    - andrew_lettuce 7mo ago
      Exactly, if 1/2 their support calls are PW resets, and that costs them a fortune solve the problem, don't slap AI lipstick on the chat pig.
    - autoexec 7mo ago
kazinator 7mo ago
People prefer a pricing model in which support appears free. Free support (that is good) creates the sense that the company stands behind the product and service, and leads to good reviews, so it is a win/win.
lifis 7mo ago
Why not charge for support? And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.
- com2kid 7mo ago
  Companies used to charge for support. But if one company stops doing it, eventually everyone has to stop doing it. Then the race to the bottom begins...
- Jiro 7mo ago
  Because if you charge for support but refund it if it's the company's fault, the company now has a big financial incentive to never admit it's their fault.
drusepth 7mo ago
> When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. This doesn't seem like a bad thing when it comes to aligning incentives (assuming customers actually want a product they don't need help to use).
Sohcahtoa82 7mo ago
> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button. And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password. And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link". I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible. I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.
- wtallis 7mo ago
  > Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that. Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better. By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.
  - Terr_ 7mo ago
    > their own purpose-built modem/routers Which, last I knew, were leased-out with their line-item on the monthly bill. So it's not as if they aren't choosing (and charging-for) the situation. My own modem and router paid for themselves very quickly.
- redox99 7mo ago
jibal 7mo ago
Why are you talking about support? The article has nothing to do with that.
- chillfox 7mo ago
  I can't believe how far down I had to scroll before someone called the OP out for not having actually read the article and just decided to make up their own topic.
protocolture 7mo ago
>Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are. Same in the ISP space. ISP's with low margins often lose multiple months of revenue on a single support call.
dmd 7mo ago
You wrote all of that in response to the title, without reading even one paragraph of the article? Wild. The article is not about support chatbots.
- radiorental 7mo ago
  You might be talking to a chatbot!!
- wtallis 7mo ago
  Support chatbots are pretty much the only scenario where "don't make me talk to your chatbot" is a problem in practice. If someone tries to use a chatbot to engage with me in a personal or professional discussion, I don't lose anything of value by simply ignoring them permanently. It's only when the party using the chatbot has something I want that I have any incentive to even consider playing along.
- kcatskcolbdi 7mo ago
  And all these replies spilled ink over an argument that had..... absolutely nothing to do with the article. So wild to see how many people refuse to read something they want to discuss.
- cbsmith 7mo ago
  One could almost imagine the article was intentional self-parody. Almost.
boplicity 7mo ago
If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.
- jeffparsons 7mo ago
  Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years. This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.
- shimman 7mo ago
  Corporations have really hammered in the propaganda haven't they? They idea that a trillion dollar corporation can't have good support because they're just greedy and don't want to hire workers needs to be reinstated every moment.
- RIMR 7mo ago
  This is an oversimplification. When people talk about wanting "free support", they mean that they want support included with the price of the product (no extra charges), but you're still going to get what you paid for, and expecting too much might not get you what you want. If you pay $20/month for a software subscription for your small business, you're going to get a different kind of support than the enterprise customer paying $100k/month. The small business customer will get support via email with multi-day SLAs, and the enterprise customer will get priority support via screen-share with same-day SLAs. And there are free-tier services that offer limited support, where users that don't pay anything expect to be treated like they're full-fledged customers. There a limited scenario here, where a paying customer has so many problems with the product that the cost of support exceeds the revenue the customer provides, and when one can confidently say that this is not the result of an overly-needy customer, you spend the money figuring out the problem and making sure that the solution is available to help any customer that follows. The cost of support my exceed revenue for one customer, but once the solution is in the knowledge base, you don't have to repeat those costs again for the next customer. But there are also small customers who fumble the product and put too much strain on support until a decision is made not to prioritize them over other customers. I have seen small customers with unreasonable expectations get "fired" simply because their revenue wasn't worth it. If a company routinely sees support costs exceed revenue, that's usually the company's fault for having a faulty and/or hard-to-support product. If a single customer's support costs exceed the revenue they provide, that's usually the customer's fault for leaning too heavily on support to be their personal I.T. provider.
alexpotato 7mo ago
> Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training. I often wonder that if you paid $60K for a top quality support person instead of $30K for two average people (or even $20K for 3 bad people) then the following might happen: - you would get better support calls - happier customers - longer tenured employees - all of the above would lead to a reputation as a company with AMAZING support
foresto 7mo ago
If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. More often than not, I'm calling to do the company the favor of reporting an unaddressed failure mode in their service, often with technical details that would help them quickly identify and fix the cause (and reduce their support call volume)... if only that information could be delivered to the right people. I don't have infinite time or patience, though. When blocked by a moat of hold times, chat bots, first level support scripts, etc, I will give up. Yes, calls like mine are in the minority. But they are especially valuable, and I think well worth their share of the costs you describe. Maybe companies should be identifying customers with above average tech skills, and routing them to better support channels next time they call. Maybe we need shibboleet. I don't know what the best solution is, but there must be a better way to do triage than funneling everyone into a flowchart of counterproductive misery, as is widespread today.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  > If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. You'd be amazed at how not normal that is though. The number of people willing to throw up their hands to ask for help rather than researching anything is pretty damn high.
motbus3 7mo ago
Ir is just imagination to not consider the legal trouble od not providing proper support or even worse, improper support
- dylan604 7mo ago
  Where is support legally mandated?
dylan604 7mo ago
One company whose software I used had an annual support contract. If you did not renew that contract, every time you called support they would ask for a credit card number. If you found an actual bug, the card would not be charged. If it was a user error, the card would get charged. This seemed pretty reasonable to me.
godelski 7mo ago
> People demand free support. > When I worked at Microsoft Last I checked windows was a paid product... Last I checked the common nicknames were "Microslop" and "Winblows" Maybe if Microslop spent more time improving their product they'd spend less money and time on support. Sorry, I have no empathy for a multi trillion dollar company that's shoving things down our throats. I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience as an employee but my feelings about a mega corp are very different. It's like watching someone wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills
wcfrobert 7mo ago
Software scales. Customer support doesn't. SaaS companies do not want to deal with customer support at all. It's only gotten worse with AI agents. It's incredibly frustrating to spend a good 10 minutes navigating a website's complex web of menus to get a phone number (I think they deliberately try to hide it...). Then spend another 5 minutes listening to bots telling me to press 1 for English, only to fall into the wrong menu where the bot repeats some useless information I already know, say goodbye, then hang up. Having a bot say to me: "we care about your concerns, and we value your business" is absurd and oxymoronic. Compare this to say Chase, Amex, or Geico. I call, someone answers within 2 minutes and addresses all my problems/concerns in fluent English. I'd happily pay a premium for that.
maest 7mo ago
The support cost is why I email support to unsubscribe me from newsletters I haven't signed up for, instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. I then mark the email as spam anyway in gmail. It's petty, but I haven't found a better disincentive.
TZubiri 7mo ago
>People demand free support. Ok, SaaS it is then >People demand to pay once and that's it. Ok, ads, you got it. >People demand no ads. Ok, chatbot support then >...
kcatskcolbdi 7mo ago
The article isn't about customer support.
Yizahi 7mo ago
I can understand this issue with low margin private businesses. But the LLM bots are now everywhere. I call my bank and I must tell a dumb robot a description of my problem, which it then claims to not understand and fucking hangs up on me. Now I need to repeat like a parrot "operator, operator, operator" until that clanker resigns and connects me to an operator. And the issue is managing a specific account, so nothing in the FAQs was relevant. Bank has more than enough margins for human support. Or another case - our government went all digital lately and we have main point of access to many stuff via an app/webportal. That service only has a very dumb and limited bot as a support, while service governs a lot of important functions. So instead I have to write comments under their Facebook marketing posts, then if I'm lucky some human spots them and then a real support writes me in a Facebook messenger. This is beyond infuriating. Government also has more than enough money to spend. Same with other businesses with proper margins, like telco, automotive etc.

by com2kid 7mo ago

wvenable 7mo ago

My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.

crabmusket 7mo ago
"smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.
- LorenPechtel 7mo ago
  Yeah. I recently had to deal with Amazon's robot. Definitely bird-brained but close enough that the right objective was accomplished even though I don't think it ever understood what happened (but woe to the non-native speaker!) The problem is not chatbot customer support, the problem is bird-brained managers that think a system that solves 99% of issues doesn't need a fallback for that 1%.
- lurk2 7mo ago
  This is the thing that drives me crazy. Most of these phone calls should just be emails; I can usually stand to wait a week or two for the company to get back to me. General support funnels like support@example.com have been dead for most consumer-facing technologies for close to a decade at this point. I’m not installing an app for every company I’m forced to interact with when there are already existing, universal technologies available that they could implement if they just priced their products appropriately.
  - kanzure 7mo ago
    It would be nice if more businesses embraced email instead of requiring phone calls for basic tasks. Imagine how much more productive we could be if we could just send off a quick email with the information and questions. Instead, what we're likely going to get are "voice agents" calling each other when we could have just used email instead...
    - shimman 7mo ago
      Businesses likely don't know a better way because the person selling them software doesn't want them to use an open and federated technology. They want the business to use Slack, with a SalesForce CRM, and then add a JIRA workflow to top it off. Most of the time it's simply not being aware of what's out there or just showing them a different work flow.
muyuu 7mo ago
my only experiences with chatbots so far have been as instruments for companies to avoid their contractual obligations and just not provide the options that I would have asked a person directly for obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss
- tempest_ 7mo ago
  I mean that is also the job of existing call handlers. "We are experiencing an greater than usual call volume, please wait while an agent becomes available" only to be randomly disconnected has been a thing for most of my life. Everyone seems to be hyping open claw at the moment soon its just going to be LLMs talking to LLMs.... I wonder if they will develop a short hand and start talking in wingdings.
lurk2 7mo ago
Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.
esafak 7mo ago
Do you remember what product they used?

pants2 7mo ago

Curious, why was it $20? I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?

com2kid 7mo ago
I edited my comment above and explained, that $20 is an amortized cost representing everything that goes into picking up that phone call.
- BalinKing 7mo ago
  In that case, wouldn't you be happy to get more calls, so that the up-front "training" cost is worth it? Naïvely I'd expect that every additional call would _decrease_ the amortized price per call.
IanCal 7mo ago
They need a place to be, they need to get hired, trained, managed and all the associated general costs of employment (hr, payroll, etc). They need equipment, there's monitoring, evaluations etc. Then you also have to pay them regardless of whether someone calls.
mrandish 7mo ago
While I agree with TFA's point that forcing a chatbot isn't a substitute for just having the info available, organized and searchable, the answer to your specific question is that the fully burdened cost of a trained support center human includes a lot more than their gross hourly wage. There's recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training plus space, desk, computer, phone, IT, HR, health care, vacation, sick days, insurance, employer's share of employment taxes. A rough rule of thumb is the full burdened cost of an hourly office knowledge worker is two to three times the gross hourly wage.

Quothling 7mo ago

Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different companies working in different directions. Maybe Microsoft customer support is a bad place to measure these things because of the size, but around here quite a few banks have tried outsourcing their phone support to everything available and have come back because it cost them customers. Even customers who never phoned them. That being said. Your example of customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. Once (if?) AI voice chat is good enough to replace chatbots we may not even realize we're talking with an AI unless it tells us.

leptons 7mo ago
>customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI companies are far from profitable, burning billions to insert themselves into customer support pipelines and everywhere else they can, and then the other foot will drop. Uber and Lyft are far more expensive today than when they started, and the price to run "AI" will also inflate when these companies have to pay off all the billions they've spent but didn't earn. I doubt it will end up costing much less if less at all than human support, with worse results.
- com2kid 7mo ago
  AI voice chat can be done for cheap. Lots of it is RAG and knowledge base lookups, you don't need large fancy models. Indeed you want fast responses, so low parameter models are better. TTS and ASR models are tiny now days, like a handful of GB tiny. Last time I priced this all out the VOIP fees cost more than self hosting all the models.

jongjong 7mo ago

The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them. All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business. Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.

com2kid 7mo ago
> Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs. As I mentioned, due to high support costs we worked to improve the UX and we ended up dropping our support costs dramatically. Doesn't change the fact that everyone who did call cost us more than our profit on the sale. Customer support is expensive. Microsoft used to charge for customer support back in the day (90s). The way it worked was that if it was your fault, you paid, if it was a product bug, there was no cost for support. While not a perfect system, it at least aligned everyone's incentives in the right direction. (The huge glaring flaw being it was MS that decided if they were going to charge you for the support call or not...)
victorbjorklund 7mo ago
Which examples? Lots of times it’s not a forced monopoly but just that customers want the monopoly because they are best/cheapest. Take Google Cloud that people complain about its lack of support. Yet people sign up even if there are thousands of competitors.

autoexec 7mo ago

Microsoft is a company that has very little right to complain about support costs. They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software and updates that required support in the first place. Nobody wants to call Microsoft for support. They do it because they've been forced to, usually by Microsoft. This kind of support can hardly be called "free" because even when Microsoft isn't charging customers to speak with the person on the other end of the line the customer has already paid in time and suffering (and sometimes lost data)

bsder 7mo ago
> They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software I doubt it. I suspect the number one tech support call is "I forgot my password" and everything else is a long way below that. I'll slag on Microslop all day, but users are dumber than dumb.
- dsjoerg 7mo ago
  Users are "dumb", and it's a dumb _system_ and dumb business that doesn't plan for that in terms of FTUE, business model, support model, and product flows. We product makers get to think about our one little product all day, and it's our job to make our product work for the "dumb" users. It's not their job to adapt to us.
- Blackthorn 7mo ago
  Very easy solution to users forgetting their passwords. It's to not need a password for your software. Something that once upon a time, Microsoft did not require with their operating systems.
  - andrew_lettuce 7mo ago
    Exactly, if 1/2 their support calls are PW resets, and that costs them a fortune solve the problem, don't slap AI lipstick on the chat pig.
  - autoexec 7mo ago

kazinator 7mo ago

People prefer a pricing model in which support appears free. Free support (that is good) creates the sense that the company stands behind the product and service, and leads to good reviews, so it is a win/win.

lifis 7mo ago

Why not charge for support? And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.

com2kid 7mo ago
Companies used to charge for support. But if one company stops doing it, eventually everyone has to stop doing it. Then the race to the bottom begins...
Jiro 7mo ago
Because if you charge for support but refund it if it's the company's fault, the company now has a big financial incentive to never admit it's their fault.

drusepth 7mo ago

> When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. This doesn't seem like a bad thing when it comes to aligning incentives (assuming customers actually want a product they don't need help to use).

Sohcahtoa82 7mo ago

> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button. And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password. And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link". I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible. I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.

wtallis 7mo ago
> Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that. Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better. By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.
- Terr_ 7mo ago
  > their own purpose-built modem/routers Which, last I knew, were leased-out with their line-item on the monthly bill. So it's not as if they aren't choosing (and charging-for) the situation. My own modem and router paid for themselves very quickly.
redox99 7mo ago

jibal 7mo ago

Why are you talking about support? The article has nothing to do with that.

chillfox 7mo ago
I can't believe how far down I had to scroll before someone called the OP out for not having actually read the article and just decided to make up their own topic.

protocolture 7mo ago

>Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are. Same in the ISP space. ISP's with low margins often lose multiple months of revenue on a single support call.

dmd 7mo ago

You wrote all of that in response to the title, without reading even one paragraph of the article? Wild. The article is not about support chatbots.

radiorental 7mo ago
You might be talking to a chatbot!!
wtallis 7mo ago
Support chatbots are pretty much the only scenario where "don't make me talk to your chatbot" is a problem in practice. If someone tries to use a chatbot to engage with me in a personal or professional discussion, I don't lose anything of value by simply ignoring them permanently. It's only when the party using the chatbot has something I want that I have any incentive to even consider playing along.
kcatskcolbdi 7mo ago
And all these replies spilled ink over an argument that had..... absolutely nothing to do with the article. So wild to see how many people refuse to read something they want to discuss.
cbsmith 7mo ago
One could almost imagine the article was intentional self-parody. Almost.

boplicity 7mo ago

If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.

jeffparsons 7mo ago
Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years. This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.
shimman 7mo ago
Corporations have really hammered in the propaganda haven't they? They idea that a trillion dollar corporation can't have good support because they're just greedy and don't want to hire workers needs to be reinstated every moment.
RIMR 7mo ago
This is an oversimplification. When people talk about wanting "free support", they mean that they want support included with the price of the product (no extra charges), but you're still going to get what you paid for, and expecting too much might not get you what you want. If you pay $20/month for a software subscription for your small business, you're going to get a different kind of support than the enterprise customer paying $100k/month. The small business customer will get support via email with multi-day SLAs, and the enterprise customer will get priority support via screen-share with same-day SLAs. And there are free-tier services that offer limited support, where users that don't pay anything expect to be treated like they're full-fledged customers. There a limited scenario here, where a paying customer has so many problems with the product that the cost of support exceeds the revenue the customer provides, and when one can confidently say that this is not the result of an overly-needy customer, you spend the money figuring out the problem and making sure that the solution is available to help any customer that follows. The cost of support my exceed revenue for one customer, but once the solution is in the knowledge base, you don't have to repeat those costs again for the next customer. But there are also small customers who fumble the product and put too much strain on support until a decision is made not to prioritize them over other customers. I have seen small customers with unreasonable expectations get "fired" simply because their revenue wasn't worth it. If a company routinely sees support costs exceed revenue, that's usually the company's fault for having a faulty and/or hard-to-support product. If a single customer's support costs exceed the revenue they provide, that's usually the customer's fault for leaning too heavily on support to be their personal I.T. provider.

alexpotato 7mo ago

> Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training. I often wonder that if you paid $60K for a top quality support person instead of $30K for two average people (or even $20K for 3 bad people) then the following might happen: - you would get better support calls - happier customers - longer tenured employees - all of the above would lead to a reputation as a company with AMAZING support

foresto 7mo ago

If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. More often than not, I'm calling to do the company the favor of reporting an unaddressed failure mode in their service, often with technical details that would help them quickly identify and fix the cause (and reduce their support call volume)... if only that information could be delivered to the right people. I don't have infinite time or patience, though. When blocked by a moat of hold times, chat bots, first level support scripts, etc, I will give up. Yes, calls like mine are in the minority. But they are especially valuable, and I think well worth their share of the costs you describe. Maybe companies should be identifying customers with above average tech skills, and routing them to better support channels next time they call. Maybe we need shibboleet. I don't know what the best solution is, but there must be a better way to do triage than funneling everyone into a flowchart of counterproductive misery, as is widespread today.

dylan604 7mo ago
> If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. You'd be amazed at how not normal that is though. The number of people willing to throw up their hands to ask for help rather than researching anything is pretty damn high.

motbus3 7mo ago

Ir is just imagination to not consider the legal trouble od not providing proper support or even worse, improper support

dylan604 7mo ago
Where is support legally mandated?

dylan604 7mo ago

One company whose software I used had an annual support contract. If you did not renew that contract, every time you called support they would ask for a credit card number. If you found an actual bug, the card would not be charged. If it was a user error, the card would get charged. This seemed pretty reasonable to me.

godelski 7mo ago

> People demand free support. > When I worked at Microsoft Last I checked windows was a paid product... Last I checked the common nicknames were "Microslop" and "Winblows" Maybe if Microslop spent more time improving their product they'd spend less money and time on support. Sorry, I have no empathy for a multi trillion dollar company that's shoving things down our throats. I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience as an employee but my feelings about a mega corp are very different. It's like watching someone wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills

wcfrobert 7mo ago

Software scales. Customer support doesn't. SaaS companies do not want to deal with customer support at all. It's only gotten worse with AI agents. It's incredibly frustrating to spend a good 10 minutes navigating a website's complex web of menus to get a phone number (I think they deliberately try to hide it...). Then spend another 5 minutes listening to bots telling me to press 1 for English, only to fall into the wrong menu where the bot repeats some useless information I already know, say goodbye, then hang up. Having a bot say to me: "we care about your concerns, and we value your business" is absurd and oxymoronic. Compare this to say Chase, Amex, or Geico. I call, someone answers within 2 minutes and addresses all my problems/concerns in fluent English. I'd happily pay a premium for that.

maest 7mo ago

The support cost is why I email support to unsubscribe me from newsletters I haven't signed up for, instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. I then mark the email as spam anyway in gmail. It's petty, but I haven't found a better disincentive.

TZubiri 7mo ago

>People demand free support. Ok, SaaS it is then >People demand to pay once and that's it. Ok, ads, you got it. >People demand no ads. Ok, chatbot support then >...

kcatskcolbdi 7mo ago

The article isn't about customer support.

Yizahi 7mo ago

I can understand this issue with low margin private businesses. But the LLM bots are now everywhere. I call my bank and I must tell a dumb robot a description of my problem, which it then claims to not understand and fucking hangs up on me. Now I need to repeat like a parrot "operator, operator, operator" until that clanker resigns and connects me to an operator. And the issue is managing a specific account, so nothing in the FAQs was relevant. Bank has more than enough margins for human support. Or another case - our government went all digital lately and we have main point of access to many stuff via an app/webportal. That service only has a very dumb and limited bot as a support, while service governs a lot of important functions. So instead I have to write comments under their Facebook marketing posts, then if I'm lucky some human spots them and then a real support writes me in a Facebook messenger. This is beyond infuriating. Government also has more than enough money to spend. Same with other businesses with proper margins, like telco, automotive etc.