7 ms·

The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the

by cjs_ac 7mo ago

The danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.

omcnoe 7mo ago
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see these exact same market dynamics at work in the mobile telco industry. Newer online only upstarts able to save on costs because they don’t operate a retail store you can visit to get help resetting your email password.
- Clent 7mo ago
  Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers. The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
  - array_key_first 7mo ago
    With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ryandrake 7mo ago
      Some people just prefer going into a physical place and talking to someone in a face to face conversation they can understand. I’ll very rarely want to sit in a phone queue just to talk to “Jason” who has a thick Filipino accent sitting in a crowded support room talking through what sounds like a a 1kbps VOIP connection. And I’m never going to text chat an AI bot for help. Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention. Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option. People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
    - gzread 7mo ago
      The person at the store has direct contact with the broken device, this is a much shorter feedback loop than telling you what to do, having you misinterpret it, having you read back the results, and then misinterpreting them.
  - xp84 7mo ago
    No. In the case of cell phone carriers, the only times in the past 10 years I have ever darkened the door of a retail store is times when the carrier was too incompetent to let me get my problem solved another way. For instance, there was a time at AT&T where if you had acquired a brand new unlocked iPhone that needs eSIM, you needed to receive a physical piece of cardboard printed with a unique QR code on it in order to activate it successfully. I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    Centralizing support generally saves money. There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city. Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them. When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone. (That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
    - massysett 7mo ago
      Yeah, but Baby Bell would dispatch a technician to your house if needed.
    - nebula8804 7mo ago
      >it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city I'd kill for the building in Denver. Instead I always get some extremely compressed voice connection in the Philippines.
- dehrmann 7mo ago
  One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue. But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
  - mey 7mo ago
    Personally switched from VZW to Google Fi. It's on TMOs network. As you can imagine, when engaging with Google's support was hilarious when there was something I needed, but overall I don't miss Verizon and pay drastically less.
    - rootusrootus 7mo ago
      For those of us who have crappy coverage with TMO, Verizon themselves offer a much better alternative to their postpaid service, called Visible. It's pretty hilarious how much better of an experience it is, and you are on the same network.
      - laurencerowe 7mo ago
        Coverage is very specific to your situation. I've had basically no coverage on Verizon in offices in the Bay Area where T-mobile worked fine while colleagues could only get Verizon at home.
      - throwaway27448 7mo ago
        I haven't had any issues with tmobile coverage (that wasn't also a problem with verizon) in well over a decade now. Hell it even worked well in the dense hilly jungles of burundi. Verizon customer service was so bad before I switched I swore them off for life.... The single place I noticed verizon gets coverage and tmobile doesn't is three levels underground in a concrete parking garage.
    - laurencerowe 7mo ago
      Is Google Fi particularly cheap? Their normal prices seem to start at $35/month for 30GB of data which is more than Verizon's Visible plans at $25/month. (The current 50% off offer on Google Fi does seem a good deal though.) I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
- nitwit005 7mo ago
  Those stores generally turn a profit eventually. A smaller company is just going to struggle to afford building out the stores and running ads to get people in the door.
  - tencentshill 7mo ago
    Those startups eventually need legions of fools with which to easily part their money.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- teeray 7mo ago
  It’s always amazing going to these stores and seeing the support they provide for frequent “how do I computer?” questions. To me, this is like going to the water department because you need a new faucet on the kitchen sink. We make no such distinctions about who fixes what for purveyors of Internet services though.
anonymars 7mo ago
Similarly when layoffs hit and morale gets low, guess what caliber of employee is going to jump ship and which is going to stay?
- gopher_space 7mo ago
  Everyone knows morale is a dump stat... if you don't track consequences.
  - marcosdumay 7mo ago
    Well, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.
    - gopher_space 7mo ago
      Interesting to think about how often I'm fighting both sides of that coin.
      - anonymars 7mo ago
        With time, I've come to think the trouble is--as usual--there's no singular right answer, only trade-offs Sabermetrics (Moneyball) captivated us with the idea that "gut feelings" and "stories" were inferior to raw hard data, but that same notion could also accurately be called "the McNamara fallacy"
gib444 7mo ago
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old. The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)... Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
- LeifCarrotson 7mo ago
  There is no breaking through it because those LLM replies are not tweaked for 5 year olds due to managerial decree, they're tweaked for the average callers to those support departments due to cold hard reality. If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier. Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    Yeah, this honestly scares me.
  - dwedge 7mo ago
    Is this not begging the question that 99 out of 100 were wrong? This totally depends if the aim is the solve problems or to reduce support costs - which are not necessarily the same thing. If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hold. I have an issue today where a service accidentally cancelled my package but still charged me. I asked for it to be reinstated or refunded, and three times I got the same identical automated output pretending to be a person, the fourth attempt is simply a credit card charge back and a lost customer
throwaway27448 7mo ago
To be fair, HP lost their competent customers a long time ago.
- aworks 7mo ago
  FWIW, I'm typing this on my sub-$500 HP laptop and it's fine. I would only call for support as a last resort, and I haven't needed to do that.
zombot 7mo ago
Which is still not enough punishment for a decision like this. But without adequate consumer protection laws abuse like this is to be expected.
ticulatedspline 7mo ago
While I tend to lean towards libertarian the reality is that "someone will fill the market gap and customers will leave" is largely a myth. Even without lock in or other reasons the market tends to be rather shallow with only a few choices. Maybe HP is the instigator but it largely signals to their competitors that "hey you can be abusive too". This creates a casual follow-the-leader collusion then everywhere sucks and there's nowhere to go anyway so why leave.
- graemep 7mo ago
  Its the economics of an oligopolistic market compounded by an information problem - mist people do jot know how good customer support will be at the time they buy.
dowoopwoop 7mo ago
> leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot Is this bad though?
- estimator7292 7mo ago
  > thus maximising your support costs Yes

by cjs_ac 7mo ago

omcnoe 7mo ago

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see these exact same market dynamics at work in the mobile telco industry. Newer online only upstarts able to save on costs because they don’t operate a retail store you can visit to get help resetting your email password.

Clent 7mo ago
Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers. The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
- array_key_first 7mo ago
  With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 7mo ago
    Some people just prefer going into a physical place and talking to someone in a face to face conversation they can understand. I’ll very rarely want to sit in a phone queue just to talk to “Jason” who has a thick Filipino accent sitting in a crowded support room talking through what sounds like a a 1kbps VOIP connection. And I’m never going to text chat an AI bot for help. Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention. Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option. People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
  - gzread 7mo ago
    The person at the store has direct contact with the broken device, this is a much shorter feedback loop than telling you what to do, having you misinterpret it, having you read back the results, and then misinterpreting them.
- xp84 7mo ago
  No. In the case of cell phone carriers, the only times in the past 10 years I have ever darkened the door of a retail store is times when the carrier was too incompetent to let me get my problem solved another way. For instance, there was a time at AT&T where if you had acquired a brand new unlocked iPhone that needs eSIM, you needed to receive a physical piece of cardboard printed with a unique QR code on it in order to activate it successfully. I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  Centralizing support generally saves money. There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city. Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them. When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone. (That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
  - massysett 7mo ago
    Yeah, but Baby Bell would dispatch a technician to your house if needed.
  - nebula8804 7mo ago
    >it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city I'd kill for the building in Denver. Instead I always get some extremely compressed voice connection in the Philippines.
dehrmann 7mo ago
One time, I needed this. I lost my phone with a physical SIM card and needed a replacement that day. Now I'm trying to remember the eSIM transfer flow to know if this is still an issue. But also, which MVNO should you go to? Carriers supposedly prioritize their own customers, so it feels a bit like running on spot instances.
- mey 7mo ago
  Personally switched from VZW to Google Fi. It's on TMOs network. As you can imagine, when engaging with Google's support was hilarious when there was something I needed, but overall I don't miss Verizon and pay drastically less.
  - rootusrootus 7mo ago
    For those of us who have crappy coverage with TMO, Verizon themselves offer a much better alternative to their postpaid service, called Visible. It's pretty hilarious how much better of an experience it is, and you are on the same network.
    - laurencerowe 7mo ago
      Coverage is very specific to your situation. I've had basically no coverage on Verizon in offices in the Bay Area where T-mobile worked fine while colleagues could only get Verizon at home.
    - throwaway27448 7mo ago
      I haven't had any issues with tmobile coverage (that wasn't also a problem with verizon) in well over a decade now. Hell it even worked well in the dense hilly jungles of burundi. Verizon customer service was so bad before I switched I swore them off for life.... The single place I noticed verizon gets coverage and tmobile doesn't is three levels underground in a concrete parking garage.
  - laurencerowe 7mo ago
    Is Google Fi particularly cheap? Their normal prices seem to start at $35/month for 30GB of data which is more than Verizon's Visible plans at $25/month. (The current 50% off offer on Google Fi does seem a good deal though.) I ended up switching to Mobile-X since I'm on wifi so much I only use a few gigs of data a month. $2/month + $1.90/GB vs Google Fi's flexible plan of $20/month + $10/GB.
nitwit005 7mo ago
Those stores generally turn a profit eventually. A smaller company is just going to struggle to afford building out the stores and running ads to get people in the door.
- tencentshill 7mo ago
  Those startups eventually need legions of fools with which to easily part their money.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
teeray 7mo ago
It’s always amazing going to these stores and seeing the support they provide for frequent “how do I computer?” questions. To me, this is like going to the water department because you need a new faucet on the kitchen sink. We make no such distinctions about who fixes what for purveyors of Internet services though.

anonymars 7mo ago

Similarly when layoffs hit and morale gets low, guess what caliber of employee is going to jump ship and which is going to stay?

gopher_space 7mo ago
Everyone knows morale is a dump stat... if you don't track consequences.
- marcosdumay 7mo ago
  Well, you can't measure it, so it can't matter.
  - gopher_space 7mo ago
    Interesting to think about how often I'm fighting both sides of that coin.
    - anonymars 7mo ago
      With time, I've come to think the trouble is--as usual--there's no singular right answer, only trade-offs Sabermetrics (Moneyball) captivated us with the idea that "gut feelings" and "stories" were inferior to raw hard data, but that same notion could also accurately be called "the McNamara fallacy"

gib444 7mo ago

For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old. The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)... Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.

LeifCarrotson 7mo ago
There is no breaking through it because those LLM replies are not tweaked for 5 year olds due to managerial decree, they're tweaked for the average callers to those support departments due to cold hard reality. If 99 out of 100 callers are wrong, are frustrated, and don't know how to clear their cookies, and then you call in, they'll treat you like those 99. Even if you're correct, just cheerfully trying to be helpful, and even if you did clear cookies literally identified the obvious typo in their Javascript that makes it work again or whatever, you're an outlier. Maybe you can get that person to readjust their expectations for you, maybe you can't, and maybe their management can embark on a massive education and training effort to teach their customer support agents to assume that each new caller is an intelligent expert who's aware of and has already tried the obvious things, but tomorrow they will regress to the mean.
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Yeah, this honestly scares me.
- dwedge 7mo ago
  Is this not begging the question that 99 out of 100 were wrong? This totally depends if the aim is the solve problems or to reduce support costs - which are not necessarily the same thing. If only 1% of tickets ever got past level 1 then okay but I doubt this is the case in most places. And if you already tried to fix your issue online there is nothing more frustrating than being told to do so repeatedly while on hold. I have an issue today where a service accidentally cancelled my package but still charged me. I asked for it to be reinstated or refunded, and three times I got the same identical automated output pretending to be a person, the fourth attempt is simply a credit card charge back and a lost customer

throwaway27448 7mo ago

To be fair, HP lost their competent customers a long time ago.

aworks 7mo ago
FWIW, I'm typing this on my sub-$500 HP laptop and it's fine. I would only call for support as a last resort, and I haven't needed to do that.

zombot 7mo ago

Which is still not enough punishment for a decision like this. But without adequate consumer protection laws abuse like this is to be expected.

ticulatedspline 7mo ago

While I tend to lean towards libertarian the reality is that "someone will fill the market gap and customers will leave" is largely a myth. Even without lock in or other reasons the market tends to be rather shallow with only a few choices. Maybe HP is the instigator but it largely signals to their competitors that "hey you can be abusive too". This creates a casual follow-the-leader collusion then everywhere sucks and there's nowhere to go anyway so why leave.

graemep 7mo ago
Its the economics of an oligopolistic market compounded by an information problem - mist people do jot know how good customer support will be at the time they buy.

dowoopwoop 7mo ago

> leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot Is this bad though?

estimator7292 7mo ago
> thus maximising your support costs Yes