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They'd rather you just not call at all (and waste your own time figuring out how to fix it yourself or get around it). Time Warner Cable has started charging $

They'd rather you just not call at all (and waste your own time figuring out how to fix it yourself or get around it). Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. They even told me once that their billing department couldn't take a credit card over the phone (I kid you not!) so I had to go to their in-person store the next day[1]. They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow that much - they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? I'm fairly certain they actively increase the minimum length of support calls specifically to discourage people from calling unless things are really serious (impossible to fix themselves). [0] This may not be everywhere, but I've received the message when I've called [1] To be more complete: it actually required several phone transfers, and when I finally went in-person, they told me that I should have just done it over the phone. EDIT Changed "at all" to "that much" - obviously they do in some cases, but the question is how much effort (and therefore money) are they going to spend on what is essentially a work-free cash cow?

dragonwriter 12y ago
> They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow at all Sure they do -- they don't care about optimizing your workflow. > they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? Even without a monopoly, deliberately driving away the section of the customer base that has the highest support cost is one way of maximizing profits, especially when you can't conveniently establish a pricing structure that effectively segments pricing so that those people pay more (because otherwise you have to subsidize their support costs out of the general pricing level.) There've been many articles over many years discussing strategies firms in many markets (some very competitive, some less so) take to do this.
- kosei 12y ago
  Exactly. Communications companies generate significant savings by driving people to self-help on their website or through chat reps (where they can handle 10 customers at a time). Also, longer wait times helps increase the barrier to frivolous calls and complaints. That said, my point was that there are likely some additional ways that they can target customers to improve customer service in a way that optimizes both their own workflow as well as that of the customer. The important part is to get both parties on the same incentive structure.
__david__ 12y ago
> Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. Having just done this a couple weeks ago, the message was more like "$5 for talking to a human for anything that can be done with the automated system". For my case it was paying the bill with a credit card. You can type it into the automated system, but if you insist on tying up a human just to dictate your card number to them, then they charge you the $5. When I talked to the human to explain something on the bill that I wasn't understanding, they were helpful and didn't charge me the $5, even when we discovered I needed to pay a little more and I paid it through him. This is similar to banks who charge people for doing ATM class transactions with a human teller. Personally, those types of things don't bother me at all, since I'm the type of personality that pretty much always chooses the automated way over talking to humans.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> They really just don't care about optimizing their workflow at all Sure they do -- they don't care about optimizing your workflow. > they already have a profitable monopoly and a captive audience, so why rock the boat? Even without a monopoly, deliberately driving away the section of the customer base that has the highest support cost is one way of maximizing profits, especially when you can't conveniently establish a pricing structure that effectively segments pricing so that those people pay more (because otherwise you have to subsidize their support costs out of the general pricing level.) There've been many articles over many years discussing strategies firms in many markets (some very competitive, some less so) take to do this.

kosei 12y ago
Exactly. Communications companies generate significant savings by driving people to self-help on their website or through chat reps (where they can handle 10 customers at a time). Also, longer wait times helps increase the barrier to frivolous calls and complaints. That said, my point was that there are likely some additional ways that they can target customers to improve customer service in a way that optimizes both their own workflow as well as that of the customer. The important part is to get both parties on the same incentive structure.

__david__ 12y ago

> Time Warner Cable has started charging $5 for anybody who wants to talk to a human being regarding billing[0]. Having just done this a couple weeks ago, the message was more like "$5 for talking to a human for anything that can be done with the automated system". For my case it was paying the bill with a credit card. You can type it into the automated system, but if you insist on tying up a human just to dictate your card number to them, then they charge you the $5. When I talked to the human to explain something on the bill that I wasn't understanding, they were helpful and didn't charge me the $5, even when we discovered I needed to pay a little more and I paid it through him. This is similar to banks who charge people for doing ATM class transactions with a human teller. Personally, those types of things don't bother me at all, since I'm the type of personality that pretty much always chooses the automated way over talking to humans.