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But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to j

by exelius 12y ago

But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the business cares about is getting the same results for less money. Cost centers also tend to have very toxic work environments as a result: people are constantly reminded that the business can and will go on without them. Hence the epidemic of throwing people under the bus, trying to "catch" coworkers in a screw-up, etc. You don't have to be the fastest zebra, just faster than the slowest one.

DaFranker 12y ago
An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments. The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an average middle manager) mathematics and causal modeling. There's no simple metric that measures the real benefits of good customer support, even tangentially.
- codezero 12y ago
  Do you, by chance, have a list of those exceptional cases? I'd love to learn more! edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
  - jklontz 12y ago
    GitHub: I've emailed their support desk a half dozen times over the years, and each time received a response from an engineer within minutes containing an accurate and precise answer to my question.
    - noobermin 12y ago
      No kidding, I had a similar experience with them, although I only had to contact them once. It was, however, in the middle of the night because it was a school break and I was up. I was surprised to get a reply from them past midnight (and at least very late in PT). Another issue about customer support is that it isn't glamorous and usually not encountered by the typical customer since they usually handle issues and exceptions rather than the visible product. When someone mentions a company, pictures of their product, their service, etc come to mind before a customer service experience, unless it is a negative one. Had a good experience? It's usually an, "Oh yeah..." moment, at the back of your head. Psychologically, customers don't use these positive experiences to judge a company. If they have a negative experience, then that company is the worst in the world...
  - Zelphyr 12y ago
    Zappos is one that comes to mind.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    Zappos may be a candidate for that type of case; their entire value proposition is exceptional customer support. There is no other reason to buy from them -- they aren't the cheapest or the sleekest, but they have the reputation of going above and beyond for their customers. Their motto is "powered by service". This may be more of a marketing lesson than a customer service one, though.
  - erickt 12y ago
    Zappos built their brand on high quality customer service: http://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-customer-service-crm-2012-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-customer-service-crm-2...
    - adevine 12y ago
      Given that THREE of the responses to this question are Zappos, I'm going to venture that it's probably incredibly rare. Especially since, in Zappos case, they are essentially selling commodity products (branded clothes that you can buy from any retailer), so their only opportunity for differentiation is price or service.
    - bdcravens 12y ago
      Zappos has given me one of my best customer service experiences ever. $135 sandals, pit-lab puppy chewed one of them (only a chunk, still wearable). I emailed them asking if I could buy one sandal... they actually sent me a new pair, told me to keep the old ones, and even upgraded me to their premium class where it's free one-day shipping. I never hesitate to recommend them to everyone.
    - pyre 12y ago
      Zappos Anecdote: I reported a bug with handling of email addresses with a '+' in them (ended up in a URL in the email still as a plus instead of URL encoded). I gave a technical description of the issue. I got a prompt response, a notification that it was fixed, and my account was bumped up to some sort of 'premium' status (which I can't use because I'm no longer living in the US, but that's not their fault).
  - exelius 12y ago
    Apple is actually probably the best example of a company taking a cost center (in this case, manufacturing and logistics) and turning it into a strategic advantage. Apple wields its supply chain like a weapon. It's very difficult to compete with Apple because the world has a limited supply of high-quality parts (flash memory, LCD screens, etc.), and Apple can just outbid everyone else for the entire market supply for 6 months at a time and still make a profit thanks to their fat margins and high volumes. They've done the same thing with advanced manufacturing robots, and likely again with the metallurgy and large-scale 6-axis CNC manufacturing tools. The manufacturers of these devices can only make so many of them per year, and Apple just buys all of them. By the time the market catches up, Apple has moved on to monopolizing another factor of production for some new manufacturing process. This is why Tim Cook is CEO: he was the architect of their supply chain strategy which basically ensured nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple. But he took what was once a pure cost center for Apple and turned it into the engine of their dominance. I can't say I've seen the same for customer support though. It's just not a strategic advantage in most industries because only a small percentage of your customers ever call in to support in the first place.
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      Isn't Samsung the main supplier for many of the parts used in the iPhone? And that's the reason why a.) they're in the phone business and b.) they can dominate the Android market? They took the other side of those transactions so they could learn exactly what it took to build a mobile phone, and then once they had phone-building expertise, they just need to ramp up their own production and divert some to internal use to fuel their own smartphones.
      - ptx 12y ago
        Samsung made phones long before the iPhone existed.
        soperj 12y ago
        Downvoted for being right. Gotta love a zealot.
  - abfan1127 12y ago
    Liquidweb keeps me coming back because of their "heroic support". When I call, a sysadmin answers from Michigan. When I IM them, they answer.
  - fweespeech 12y ago
    I'm not the person your replying to but.... Generally in B2B where the accounts your call center are responsible for "keeping happy" are worth 5 or 6 figures in revenue...tends to lead to a very different environment. Of course, at that point you aren't really paying $10/hr but are hiring "support engineers" with real salaries. The only B2C one I can think of is Zappos.
  - kbenson 12y ago
    Sonic.net, in the ISP market. They spend quite a bit on customer support, and use it, where they can (locally, mostly) as a feature. Back in the day when they were reselling AT&T DSL (which they are doing again, I hear), it was a big bonus to get AT&T DSL at the same price, but not have to deal with AT&T almost ever. Let a third party deal with that and provide better service for the same cost. Win. Full Disclosure: I've worked at Sonic.net multiple times in the past, ranging from customer support when in college, to their operations and system administration department more recently. I have fond memories of it, and count it as one of the best places I've worked, but I'm not employed by them currently.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      I've never worked at Sonic, but I'll give you a hearty amen as a customer for several years. When I try to get friends to switch from Comcast, all I hear is, "But it costs more!" To which I say, "However, it actually works. And when it doesn't, you can talk to somebody smart." Not having to fuck around is worth cash money to me. Customer service isn't a cost center. It's a value creator.
      - gknoy 12y ago
        I realize it's a little bit comical to consider customer service so highly, but I have had __consistently__ excellent support from Sonic.net, and have been a very happy customer ever since literally the first day it was installed. I have similar probably-irrationally-high opinions of In-N-Out Burger's operations. I've had such excellent service for so many years that even when I have an objectively __terrible__ experience [0], I end up writing it completely off as a fluke, or an inexperienced or frazzled employee. I actually reflected on this the last time it happened, and even recognizing this I still think highly of their service. They get customer service so right in so many directions that I almost feel bad exposing the rare instances that my visit hasn't been flawless. 0: Last week, in the same visit to the drive-through: "No, I didn't order those [3] shakes. I actually ordered two fries." They eventually got me the right things, and my burgers were right, but I've had that wrong too before. Almost never.
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    Wasn't Zappos one?
  - wnevets 12y ago
    amazon
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    Apple is an example. Not current Apple, by the late 2000's Apple that saw exceptional growth. Apple was famous for being easy to replace broken products, get refounds, getting somebody smart to sell you stuff.
    - oliyoung 12y ago
      I walked into my local Apple store in November with an iPhone that wouldn't wake from a screen-touch, 15 minutes later I walked out with brand new handset. Apple's still like that, its why I buy their hardware.
  - azinman2 12y ago
    311 in San Francisco. Ok it's not a company, but damn for city government 311 has impressed me every time I call. People are knowledgable, available at odd hours, and if they can't help you the follow throughs have actually come through!
  - sswaner 12y ago
    I called Apple customer support last night for the first time ever. Called to get confirmation of AppleCare support for an iPad -- I didn't buy support :( My experience with them was the best customer support experience I have ever had. They were great. They were prompt, knowledgeable, and compassionate.
    - codezero 12y ago
      Ditto. I've had so many positive Apple experiences, even recently. A while ago, I could walk in the store and get replacement parts on the spot. They've replaced my sister's broken computer when she was out of warranty without giving her a hard time. Most recently I had a really esoteric thing where my Apple Developer account had my mom's name on it because it was linked to the phone I got from her... I dunno, anyways, I managed to get someone who manages developer accounts on the phone, even though I don't pay for the developer account, and they updated it for me and got it sorted out, with minimal friction, and only a small amount of time on the phone.
    - jmngomes 12y ago
      Like in call centers, the toxic people aren't the CS reps that answer your queries, but psychologically troubled managers and paper pushers.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    Amazon.com At one point, they decided to just give he customer whatever they wanted, except in cases of fraud or abuse, and they are fantastic now.
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
Someone dear to me worked in marketing there. Was basically the same drill, though not as directly abusive because she reported to good people.
kyllo 12y ago
I'd argue that this mentality is a byproduct of the concept of a "cost center" which is itself an arbitrary and toxic concept.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  Definitely, as if good customer support won't help future sales and increase customer retention. Without support and training software is kind of worthless.
  - exelius 12y ago
    Yeah, but the return on investment in marketing is likely much, much higher. Or, better yet, invest in making your product better so customers don't need to call support in the first place. Customer churn is also very, very hard to quantify, and your customers will leave you for a variety of reasons, many of which would not be impacted by better support (i.e. they move, go out of business, get purchased, etc.)
    - bbcbasic 12y ago
      Yes certainly, it is an illusion that marketing, customer support, product development and sales are all discrete things without any overlap.
  - zyxley 12y ago
    Heck, all you need for proof of that working is to scroll up and look at the people giving Zappos free advertisement on HN.
- jessriedel 12y ago
  The concept isn't normative and it definitely is meaningful. Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure. People know that in the limit of non-existence, the company can't survive without it, so customer support has to exist. But as long as money is used to support them with no easily measurable benefit, it will always experience strong downward pressure on operating expenses.
vacri 12y ago
I've worked in several cost centres, and the idea that they want to fire jobs and are full of stupid managers is simply not true. Mostly, the ones I worked in were scrambling for hires. In the big open-plan customer support job for a telco I worked, it took a month to train up staff, and retention was the biggest issue. When I worked in a neuro lab, us techs were the primary profit centre, while the neurologists themselves didn't pull in enough money to support their own wages. Yet we were constantly told that we were the ones losing money and had to rally round the flag in various ways - we were also paid 2/3rds market rate (young and dumb). This idea that cost centres are treated poorly and profit centres are rewarded seems more idealistic than realistic, in my experience. It also seems to me that you're handwaving away the author's issues - everything he said is a problem, regardless of the kind of department he was in.
kyllo 12y ago
But... customer support isn't a cost center at Apple. They sell the AppleCare extended warranty, and if you don't purchase that when you buy the product, you have to pay them by the minute for customer support via telephone.
- exelius 12y ago
  And most customers just go into an Apple Store if they have a problem, which is a profit center.
  - gabeio 12y ago
    Yes you can go there and pay to get things fixed but it's not 100% of the time. I just went to apple recently to get my MBP fixed and I saw the bill but apparently was covered by a recall. So, it was free.
shostack 12y ago
You are painting with an overly broad brush. Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long. You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fighting churn, and are an invaluable asset, not a liability. They can also be critical to making sure your product and engineering teams are up-to-date on everything they need to grow a successful product that your customers want to pay for. Unfortunately, many companies simply don't realize this or don't care because they have a captive market (for now). I would encourage you to research more about how customer support can be done "right" vs. "wrong." If customer support is a "cost center" for you, you're doing it wrong.
- smenko 12y ago
  Is this supposed to be ironic?? Given, you know, the original poster's grievances.... Support Heroes?.. No?
  - shostack 12y ago
    Not at all ironic. OP was posting about how customer support is a cost center, amongst other claims. He stated that it is like this in any company. I completely disagree and have experienced the proof of that first hand. I'm a little unclear from how you worded things--was the question around the notion of firing people as heroic juxtaposed against what we call our support team (ie. Heroes)?
    - cma 12y ago
      I think by OP he confusingly meant the person in the article, not the post at the top of the thread. Support hero's would be an ironic concept in relation to that.
      - shostack 12y ago
        Ah, that makes more sense. I admittedly read and responded to his initial comment before RTFA. I can see where that might be considered slightly ironic (while simultaneously terrifying that anyone would ever describe mass firings as "heroic").
curiously 12y ago
software engineers are also a cost centers.
- edc117 12y ago
  Depends on the role - for a COTS type of software, they are certainly not - they are revenue generating. Consultancy? Same thing. Now for internal tool development or support, sure, but how many businesses can operate without one? How many can 10 years from now? 20?
  - curiously 12y ago
    well considering we still live in the industrial age system of factory owners and factory workers (concept of managers and even lean startup has roots in car factories), I would find it very rare that a non monopoly software business would view their engineering team as profit generators. software and everyone involved in it's development are becoming commoditized via open source or money being injected by venture capital or a non-monopolized industry over time ends up on certain standards and margin falls for everyone.
zaroth 12y ago
You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues. At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden I was earning a percentage of revenue every time a customer bought the software I wrote, winning recognition from the CEO, going to Presidents Club, etc. and total comp basically doubled. Doing exactly the same job under Engineering in previous years won me maybe a few thousand dollar bonus, or one year a gift card for dinner. Somehow companies don't realize that you need everyone working as team to hit that revenue number at the end of the year, and every member of that team is doing essential work. You can have Customer Support rockstars, just like you can have Engineering and Sales rockstars. It's just that the Sales rockstars are trivially easy to measure (bookings) and so much easier to reward. I have yet to read about a compelling solution to this, because a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers, and there just isn't an equivalent process you can apply in the cost centers. Not every employee wants or needs to be on variable comp, but the way we manage and reward employees is often very much dependent on how closely they are to driving revenue. I would be interested in case studies on companies that have managed to Think Differently on this, and I don't just mean a "profit sharing" plan.
- dietrichepp 12y ago
  > a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers I'm interested in hearing how this is proven. I've seen incentivized sales reps close deals that damaged the company, just like I've seen "successful" marketing campaigns that eventually killed their products. If you use bookings as your metric for bonuses and then turn around and use bookings to measure whether the incentives are working on a per-worker basis, you'll miss a lot of negative effects. If sales starts overpromising the product, sabotaging each others' deals, or even chasing after bigger but short-term customers, you could see the metrics improve as the company falls apart. And then there's the fact that, even within a department, you'll hopefully have a group of people with diverse motivations. That's why I'm curious about how this model has been "proven".
noonespecial 12y ago
I think people need to remember that Apple is a tiny, tiny innovative core surrounded by a huge bog-standard "big-corp" full of the same chimps from the Career Builder commercials that all big-corps have. If you're not part of that tiny core, you just work at Office Space.
- smikhanov 12y ago
  This seems to be true. And also, while internet is full of stories of "what it's like to work at Google/Facebook/etc", you will have hard time finding a similar one about Apple. My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.
  - charlieok 12y ago
    I'm sure apple's "tiny innovative core" is very good at what they do, and works very hard, but I suspect the reason you don't hear as much about the work environment there is that they are subject to much stricter policies concerning what they write about their employer than are employees at many other places including google and facebook. Add to that a culture that values protecting secrets versus some notion of 'openness', and an incentive to hold onto that job if you really like it and the valuable stock options that may have come with it, and I'm not terribly surprised that you see relatively few insider stories.
    - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
      This. Someone close to me worked there for 7 years. The level of secrecy is crazy. Like, dysfunctional-hard-to-do-your-work and stay-up-all-night-working-before-a-launch-because-you-are-only-finding-out-about-it-then crazy. Talking in public about your job would not end well.
      - tajen 12y ago
        Therefore I'm surprised about the OP. Sure they have a specific employment contract in place with a batallion of lawyers drooling on their preys, so what does the OP risk?
patrickdavey 12y ago
I think that is a failure of (all the) companies that think that way. In my opinion customer support is a crucial part of any organisation big enough to merit one. Who else talks directly to your customers on a daily basis? Do you mine the data to find out where the biggest issues are and use that to inform your feature roadmap? I have worked in a call centre. It was an odd job, for a government department, ended up creating a sort of call logging and ticketing system for them - still used today (11 years later - but that's more an artefact of sunkworks dev in a government department than a testament to my coding skillz ;) Anyway, my point is, those employees were told, and felt, that their service mattered, that the higherups listened to feedback etc. Excellent place to work and a very good atmosphere.
akshatpradhan 12y ago
This is the fundamental problem with companies. Far too often we relegate Customer support to this minion role when in reality, they are our eyes and ears into the customer feedback loop. We should stop putting capable people into this role and put our exceptional people. Personally, I plan to put the customer service department under my UX Director's management. If we're to be better companies, we need empathy, and I see no better manager to instill empathy than a UX Manager.
pfortuny 12y ago
And how does this stop the company from being Apple, "innovative, changing people's lifes, etc...?" Just because it is "just" customer support it does not imply it is not Apple.
kfk 12y ago
Ahem... not to sound sarcastic but... everything... in a company... is a cost center. A good company knows you need to spend money to make money, in fact a lot of cost is reported ad a % of sales, meaning if you grow your sales you grow your cost. I really don't understand where your views are coming from, but they seem to be very biased. And remember that executives at public companies (like Apple) sell stock, not cost, and stock goes up based on expectations, not only cutting costs, meaning you sometimes are better off spending (like in R&D or in customer service) and give the expectation of a growing and solid company than cutting down all spend and give the idea that the firm has no future because managers only look things short term.
qmr 12y ago
Wow. Very, VERY applicable to my last full time position.

by exelius 12y ago

DaFranker 12y ago

An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments. The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an average middle manager) mathematics and causal modeling. There's no simple metric that measures the real benefits of good customer support, even tangentially.

codezero 12y ago
Do you, by chance, have a list of those exceptional cases? I'd love to learn more! edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
- jklontz 12y ago
  GitHub: I've emailed their support desk a half dozen times over the years, and each time received a response from an engineer within minutes containing an accurate and precise answer to my question.
  - noobermin 12y ago
    No kidding, I had a similar experience with them, although I only had to contact them once. It was, however, in the middle of the night because it was a school break and I was up. I was surprised to get a reply from them past midnight (and at least very late in PT). Another issue about customer support is that it isn't glamorous and usually not encountered by the typical customer since they usually handle issues and exceptions rather than the visible product. When someone mentions a company, pictures of their product, their service, etc come to mind before a customer service experience, unless it is a negative one. Had a good experience? It's usually an, "Oh yeah..." moment, at the back of your head. Psychologically, customers don't use these positive experiences to judge a company. If they have a negative experience, then that company is the worst in the world...
- Zelphyr 12y ago
  Zappos is one that comes to mind.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Zappos may be a candidate for that type of case; their entire value proposition is exceptional customer support. There is no other reason to buy from them -- they aren't the cheapest or the sleekest, but they have the reputation of going above and beyond for their customers. Their motto is "powered by service". This may be more of a marketing lesson than a customer service one, though.
- erickt 12y ago
  Zappos built their brand on high quality customer service: http://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-customer-service-crm-2012-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-customer-service-crm-2...
  - adevine 12y ago
    Given that THREE of the responses to this question are Zappos, I'm going to venture that it's probably incredibly rare. Especially since, in Zappos case, they are essentially selling commodity products (branded clothes that you can buy from any retailer), so their only opportunity for differentiation is price or service.
  - bdcravens 12y ago
    Zappos has given me one of my best customer service experiences ever. $135 sandals, pit-lab puppy chewed one of them (only a chunk, still wearable). I emailed them asking if I could buy one sandal... they actually sent me a new pair, told me to keep the old ones, and even upgraded me to their premium class where it's free one-day shipping. I never hesitate to recommend them to everyone.
  - pyre 12y ago
    Zappos Anecdote: I reported a bug with handling of email addresses with a '+' in them (ended up in a URL in the email still as a plus instead of URL encoded). I gave a technical description of the issue. I got a prompt response, a notification that it was fixed, and my account was bumped up to some sort of 'premium' status (which I can't use because I'm no longer living in the US, but that's not their fault).
- exelius 12y ago
  Apple is actually probably the best example of a company taking a cost center (in this case, manufacturing and logistics) and turning it into a strategic advantage. Apple wields its supply chain like a weapon. It's very difficult to compete with Apple because the world has a limited supply of high-quality parts (flash memory, LCD screens, etc.), and Apple can just outbid everyone else for the entire market supply for 6 months at a time and still make a profit thanks to their fat margins and high volumes. They've done the same thing with advanced manufacturing robots, and likely again with the metallurgy and large-scale 6-axis CNC manufacturing tools. The manufacturers of these devices can only make so many of them per year, and Apple just buys all of them. By the time the market catches up, Apple has moved on to monopolizing another factor of production for some new manufacturing process. This is why Tim Cook is CEO: he was the architect of their supply chain strategy which basically ensured nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple. But he took what was once a pure cost center for Apple and turned it into the engine of their dominance. I can't say I've seen the same for customer support though. It's just not a strategic advantage in most industries because only a small percentage of your customers ever call in to support in the first place.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    Isn't Samsung the main supplier for many of the parts used in the iPhone? And that's the reason why a.) they're in the phone business and b.) they can dominate the Android market? They took the other side of those transactions so they could learn exactly what it took to build a mobile phone, and then once they had phone-building expertise, they just need to ramp up their own production and divert some to internal use to fuel their own smartphones.
    - ptx 12y ago
      Samsung made phones long before the iPhone existed.
      - soperj 12y ago
        Downvoted for being right. Gotta love a zealot.
- abfan1127 12y ago
  Liquidweb keeps me coming back because of their "heroic support". When I call, a sysadmin answers from Michigan. When I IM them, they answer.
- fweespeech 12y ago
  I'm not the person your replying to but.... Generally in B2B where the accounts your call center are responsible for "keeping happy" are worth 5 or 6 figures in revenue...tends to lead to a very different environment. Of course, at that point you aren't really paying $10/hr but are hiring "support engineers" with real salaries. The only B2C one I can think of is Zappos.
- kbenson 12y ago
  Sonic.net, in the ISP market. They spend quite a bit on customer support, and use it, where they can (locally, mostly) as a feature. Back in the day when they were reselling AT&T DSL (which they are doing again, I hear), it was a big bonus to get AT&T DSL at the same price, but not have to deal with AT&T almost ever. Let a third party deal with that and provide better service for the same cost. Win. Full Disclosure: I've worked at Sonic.net multiple times in the past, ranging from customer support when in college, to their operations and system administration department more recently. I have fond memories of it, and count it as one of the best places I've worked, but I'm not employed by them currently.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    I've never worked at Sonic, but I'll give you a hearty amen as a customer for several years. When I try to get friends to switch from Comcast, all I hear is, "But it costs more!" To which I say, "However, it actually works. And when it doesn't, you can talk to somebody smart." Not having to fuck around is worth cash money to me. Customer service isn't a cost center. It's a value creator.
    - gknoy 12y ago
      I realize it's a little bit comical to consider customer service so highly, but I have had __consistently__ excellent support from Sonic.net, and have been a very happy customer ever since literally the first day it was installed. I have similar probably-irrationally-high opinions of In-N-Out Burger's operations. I've had such excellent service for so many years that even when I have an objectively __terrible__ experience [0], I end up writing it completely off as a fluke, or an inexperienced or frazzled employee. I actually reflected on this the last time it happened, and even recognizing this I still think highly of their service. They get customer service so right in so many directions that I almost feel bad exposing the rare instances that my visit hasn't been flawless. 0: Last week, in the same visit to the drive-through: "No, I didn't order those [3] shakes. I actually ordered two fries." They eventually got me the right things, and my burgers were right, but I've had that wrong too before. Almost never.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  Wasn't Zappos one?
- wnevets 12y ago
  amazon
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Apple is an example. Not current Apple, by the late 2000's Apple that saw exceptional growth. Apple was famous for being easy to replace broken products, get refounds, getting somebody smart to sell you stuff.
  - oliyoung 12y ago
    I walked into my local Apple store in November with an iPhone that wouldn't wake from a screen-touch, 15 minutes later I walked out with brand new handset. Apple's still like that, its why I buy their hardware.
- azinman2 12y ago
  311 in San Francisco. Ok it's not a company, but damn for city government 311 has impressed me every time I call. People are knowledgable, available at odd hours, and if they can't help you the follow throughs have actually come through!
- sswaner 12y ago
  I called Apple customer support last night for the first time ever. Called to get confirmation of AppleCare support for an iPad -- I didn't buy support :( My experience with them was the best customer support experience I have ever had. They were great. They were prompt, knowledgeable, and compassionate.
  - codezero 12y ago
    Ditto. I've had so many positive Apple experiences, even recently. A while ago, I could walk in the store and get replacement parts on the spot. They've replaced my sister's broken computer when she was out of warranty without giving her a hard time. Most recently I had a really esoteric thing where my Apple Developer account had my mom's name on it because it was linked to the phone I got from her... I dunno, anyways, I managed to get someone who manages developer accounts on the phone, even though I don't pay for the developer account, and they updated it for me and got it sorted out, with minimal friction, and only a small amount of time on the phone.
  - jmngomes 12y ago
    Like in call centers, the toxic people aren't the CS reps that answer your queries, but psychologically troubled managers and paper pushers.
- falcolas 12y ago
  Amazon.com At one point, they decided to just give he customer whatever they wanted, except in cases of fraud or abuse, and they are fantastic now.

cmrdporcupine 12y ago

Someone dear to me worked in marketing there. Was basically the same drill, though not as directly abusive because she reported to good people.

kyllo 12y ago

I'd argue that this mentality is a byproduct of the concept of a "cost center" which is itself an arbitrary and toxic concept.

bbcbasic 12y ago
Definitely, as if good customer support won't help future sales and increase customer retention. Without support and training software is kind of worthless.
- exelius 12y ago
  Yeah, but the return on investment in marketing is likely much, much higher. Or, better yet, invest in making your product better so customers don't need to call support in the first place. Customer churn is also very, very hard to quantify, and your customers will leave you for a variety of reasons, many of which would not be impacted by better support (i.e. they move, go out of business, get purchased, etc.)
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    Yes certainly, it is an illusion that marketing, customer support, product development and sales are all discrete things without any overlap.
- zyxley 12y ago
  Heck, all you need for proof of that working is to scroll up and look at the people giving Zappos free advertisement on HN.
jessriedel 12y ago
The concept isn't normative and it definitely is meaningful. Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure. People know that in the limit of non-existence, the company can't survive without it, so customer support has to exist. But as long as money is used to support them with no easily measurable benefit, it will always experience strong downward pressure on operating expenses.

vacri 12y ago

I've worked in several cost centres, and the idea that they want to fire jobs and are full of stupid managers is simply not true. Mostly, the ones I worked in were scrambling for hires. In the big open-plan customer support job for a telco I worked, it took a month to train up staff, and retention was the biggest issue. When I worked in a neuro lab, us techs were the primary profit centre, while the neurologists themselves didn't pull in enough money to support their own wages. Yet we were constantly told that we were the ones losing money and had to rally round the flag in various ways - we were also paid 2/3rds market rate (young and dumb). This idea that cost centres are treated poorly and profit centres are rewarded seems more idealistic than realistic, in my experience. It also seems to me that you're handwaving away the author's issues - everything he said is a problem, regardless of the kind of department he was in.

kyllo 12y ago

But... customer support isn't a cost center at Apple. They sell the AppleCare extended warranty, and if you don't purchase that when you buy the product, you have to pay them by the minute for customer support via telephone.

exelius 12y ago
And most customers just go into an Apple Store if they have a problem, which is a profit center.
- gabeio 12y ago
  Yes you can go there and pay to get things fixed but it's not 100% of the time. I just went to apple recently to get my MBP fixed and I saw the bill but apparently was covered by a recall. So, it was free.

shostack 12y ago

You are painting with an overly broad brush. Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long. You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fighting churn, and are an invaluable asset, not a liability. They can also be critical to making sure your product and engineering teams are up-to-date on everything they need to grow a successful product that your customers want to pay for. Unfortunately, many companies simply don't realize this or don't care because they have a captive market (for now). I would encourage you to research more about how customer support can be done "right" vs. "wrong." If customer support is a "cost center" for you, you're doing it wrong.

smenko 12y ago
Is this supposed to be ironic?? Given, you know, the original poster's grievances.... Support Heroes?.. No?
- shostack 12y ago
  Not at all ironic. OP was posting about how customer support is a cost center, amongst other claims. He stated that it is like this in any company. I completely disagree and have experienced the proof of that first hand. I'm a little unclear from how you worded things--was the question around the notion of firing people as heroic juxtaposed against what we call our support team (ie. Heroes)?
  - cma 12y ago
    I think by OP he confusingly meant the person in the article, not the post at the top of the thread. Support hero's would be an ironic concept in relation to that.
    - shostack 12y ago
      Ah, that makes more sense. I admittedly read and responded to his initial comment before RTFA. I can see where that might be considered slightly ironic (while simultaneously terrifying that anyone would ever describe mass firings as "heroic").

curiously 12y ago

software engineers are also a cost centers.

edc117 12y ago
Depends on the role - for a COTS type of software, they are certainly not - they are revenue generating. Consultancy? Same thing. Now for internal tool development or support, sure, but how many businesses can operate without one? How many can 10 years from now? 20?
- curiously 12y ago
  well considering we still live in the industrial age system of factory owners and factory workers (concept of managers and even lean startup has roots in car factories), I would find it very rare that a non monopoly software business would view their engineering team as profit generators. software and everyone involved in it's development are becoming commoditized via open source or money being injected by venture capital or a non-monopolized industry over time ends up on certain standards and margin falls for everyone.

zaroth 12y ago

You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues. At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden I was earning a percentage of revenue every time a customer bought the software I wrote, winning recognition from the CEO, going to Presidents Club, etc. and total comp basically doubled. Doing exactly the same job under Engineering in previous years won me maybe a few thousand dollar bonus, or one year a gift card for dinner. Somehow companies don't realize that you need everyone working as team to hit that revenue number at the end of the year, and every member of that team is doing essential work. You can have Customer Support rockstars, just like you can have Engineering and Sales rockstars. It's just that the Sales rockstars are trivially easy to measure (bookings) and so much easier to reward. I have yet to read about a compelling solution to this, because a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers, and there just isn't an equivalent process you can apply in the cost centers. Not every employee wants or needs to be on variable comp, but the way we manage and reward employees is often very much dependent on how closely they are to driving revenue. I would be interested in case studies on companies that have managed to Think Differently on this, and I don't just mean a "profit sharing" plan.

dietrichepp 12y ago
> a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers I'm interested in hearing how this is proven. I've seen incentivized sales reps close deals that damaged the company, just like I've seen "successful" marketing campaigns that eventually killed their products. If you use bookings as your metric for bonuses and then turn around and use bookings to measure whether the incentives are working on a per-worker basis, you'll miss a lot of negative effects. If sales starts overpromising the product, sabotaging each others' deals, or even chasing after bigger but short-term customers, you could see the metrics improve as the company falls apart. And then there's the fact that, even within a department, you'll hopefully have a group of people with diverse motivations. That's why I'm curious about how this model has been "proven".

noonespecial 12y ago

I think people need to remember that Apple is a tiny, tiny innovative core surrounded by a huge bog-standard "big-corp" full of the same chimps from the Career Builder commercials that all big-corps have. If you're not part of that tiny core, you just work at Office Space.

smikhanov 12y ago
This seems to be true. And also, while internet is full of stories of "what it's like to work at Google/Facebook/etc", you will have hard time finding a similar one about Apple. My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.
- charlieok 12y ago
  I'm sure apple's "tiny innovative core" is very good at what they do, and works very hard, but I suspect the reason you don't hear as much about the work environment there is that they are subject to much stricter policies concerning what they write about their employer than are employees at many other places including google and facebook. Add to that a culture that values protecting secrets versus some notion of 'openness', and an incentive to hold onto that job if you really like it and the valuable stock options that may have come with it, and I'm not terribly surprised that you see relatively few insider stories.
  - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
    This. Someone close to me worked there for 7 years. The level of secrecy is crazy. Like, dysfunctional-hard-to-do-your-work and stay-up-all-night-working-before-a-launch-because-you-are-only-finding-out-about-it-then crazy. Talking in public about your job would not end well.
    - tajen 12y ago
      Therefore I'm surprised about the OP. Sure they have a specific employment contract in place with a batallion of lawyers drooling on their preys, so what does the OP risk?

patrickdavey 12y ago

I think that is a failure of (all the) companies that think that way. In my opinion customer support is a crucial part of any organisation big enough to merit one. Who else talks directly to your customers on a daily basis? Do you mine the data to find out where the biggest issues are and use that to inform your feature roadmap? I have worked in a call centre. It was an odd job, for a government department, ended up creating a sort of call logging and ticketing system for them - still used today (11 years later - but that's more an artefact of sunkworks dev in a government department than a testament to my coding skillz ;) Anyway, my point is, those employees were told, and felt, that their service mattered, that the higherups listened to feedback etc. Excellent place to work and a very good atmosphere.

akshatpradhan 12y ago

This is the fundamental problem with companies. Far too often we relegate Customer support to this minion role when in reality, they are our eyes and ears into the customer feedback loop. We should stop putting capable people into this role and put our exceptional people. Personally, I plan to put the customer service department under my UX Director's management. If we're to be better companies, we need empathy, and I see no better manager to instill empathy than a UX Manager.

pfortuny 12y ago

And how does this stop the company from being Apple, "innovative, changing people's lifes, etc...?" Just because it is "just" customer support it does not imply it is not Apple.

kfk 12y ago

Ahem... not to sound sarcastic but... everything... in a company... is a cost center. A good company knows you need to spend money to make money, in fact a lot of cost is reported ad a % of sales, meaning if you grow your sales you grow your cost. I really don't understand where your views are coming from, but they seem to be very biased. And remember that executives at public companies (like Apple) sell stock, not cost, and stock goes up based on expectations, not only cutting costs, meaning you sometimes are better off spending (like in R&D or in customer service) and give the expectation of a growing and solid company than cutting down all spend and give the idea that the firm has no future because managers only look things short term.

qmr 12y ago

Wow. Very, VERY applicable to my last full time position.