After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away."
This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same web page that you are, with no more ability to change anything than you have. And it will take 30 minutes to get one of them on the phone because "we are experiencing unusually high call volume" which translates as "the new vice president fired 10 more customer service agents to make his numbers look good."
If robots are involved it means "the new vice president wanted his numbers to look even better."
Companies have apparently run the numbers and decided it is cheaper to effectively ignore and dissuade dissatisfied customers than to try to resolve their issues. And since most companies insist on binding arbitration now, they're not even worried about class-action lawsuits.
> After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away."
Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.
Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support.
TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it.
The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having.
Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload?
Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc
All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.
> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.
Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.
Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc.
The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unknown reasons so we're stuck with the smooth talking asshole. Not that we had one, I've seen almost a dozen in my career and apart from one, all were useless _to us_.
AWS doesn't benefit from them resolving the ticket in a timely manner... or at all. AWS benefits from being able to put someone in between the customer and the rest of the company. It's like a layer of insulation, that prevents the customer from actually inconveniencing the business or any of the other people who work there.
TAM doesn't necessarily resolve the ticket nor that's their first priority. Their first priority is to be a contact person or a face of a faceless company. I don't believe they're paid by a resolved ticket (all tickets get resolved anyway), MTTR or something similar. Tickets are for some faceless support personnel. TAMs are supposed to help you, but unless it's something trivial they are a waste of time.
Believe it or not, there are helpful support resources out there which are typically hard to come across, you’ve admittedly just had a shitty experience (not uncommon)
This is too cynical. For serious B2B customer service, and higher end B2C businesses, they are genuinely there to make sure every last inquiry is resolved to satisfaction.
Of course that's because they don't charge a fixed rate, usually a pricier variable rate.
As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace.
For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose issues make them fall outside the golden path of standard procedures: an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question, if you add up all cost associated from the employees involved, obliterating any margin from that customer. I doubt that AI will change this much. So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. The best you can hope for is that someone will create a ticket that someone else will look at at some point if a lot of similar tickets accumulate.
>an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question
How? I've worked in a call center where big companies outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe, and we were paid 3-4 euro an hour. Even if a "complex customer question" takes an hour (which doesn't happen often at all), what sort of overhead can there be?
> So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you.
How is it a question of intellect? Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action (untick a box somewhere, offer a refund, whatever).
And how would that be profitable long term? Just by virtue of the fact that in a market with actual competition, leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable.
> outsource their customer support in Eastern Europe
I worked in Europe where it was not acceptable to address the customer in broken English. Easily $15 an hour. But what you are paid is not what it costs the business, (desk, training, IT support, part of a manager, etc), that can easily be double what they are paid. For anything outside the script someone with supervisor access and the authority to make high level decisions needs to get involved, those people cost even more. Some customers call several times for a complex question. $30 was just the average for complex queries.
> Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action
Most of these instances are much cheaper to solve by fixing the UI to allow the customer to do it themselves, if it isn't then it's usually cheaper to lose the customer. And you do not want to make something like "refunds" too easy.
> leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable
I'm sorry to say it, but dissatisfying customers that are expensive to service is often exactly what you need to do to maximise profits, as long as you manage to avoid damage to your brand. It's even better to encourage those customers to go to your competitor. What may "feel right" to you, is not what "feels right" to an MBA. Engineers tend to underestimate that.
I've also worked in a highly technical customer service role and you are absolutely right. 95% of our time was spent on 5% of our customers.
Even though they spend millions of dollars a year on support, they easily cost us more than that to help them. Simple issues that we had documented solutions for (and explained to them dozens of times preciously) were just as critical as outages to them.
We had to throttle the support we gave them in order to provide a better experience for everyone else and try to train them to be better customers.
IMHO, this is the main reason L1 support "sucks" so much. Having been a support guy in a previous life, nothing feels worse than skipping the annoying trivial question (e.g did you install the software after diwnloading it?) only to find out after 25 minutes of debugging that they, in fact, did not actually install the software. That particular call started with "all I see are codes" as the opening line. Had I asked if they'd installed the web application on their server instead of extracting random .js and .aspx files and double-clicking on them in Explorer, I could have saved everyone a lot of time.
When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could.
Good customer service inspires loyalty to a company in a way discounts/advertising cannot. Their topline might not be the best, but they'll never go out of business.
I've had this experience with Ally bank. Their SMS-only 2FA, lack of international wire transfers, and compete failure to work with Plaid drive me insane, but I'm still using them because I get a kind, helpful human every time I call.
Except when it is not. With Ally customer service - I was once on hold for more than hour before I could speak to an agent. Not the ideal scenario - and their backend systems were not even able to resolve my issue even after multiple calls.
I’ve been in the contact center consulting space for years and unfortunately, some industries just know there aren’t many alternatives or the effort to move somewhere is so high they really don’t need to strive to make the customer feel special or welcome.
Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them.
Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan.
The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.
IME big companies have pretty solid procedures for battling these, and in some cases for punishing people who do this. IIRC, people have lost FB or Google accounts over valid chargebacks.
And then you can't use Uber, or Doordash, or Instacart. It works for single transaction merchants, but for platforms that having become critical to functioning in today's modern society, it's unfortunately not the magic password.
If you need to issue charge backs you shouldn't be using them. Painful lesson but call the restaurant. Call a cab. Go to the store yourself. Your modern society is a wasteland to be avoided.
I'm not sure how you want a disabled person to go to the store themselves when they're physically unable to walk, but where services are convenient for the able-bodied and minded, they're literally lifeblood for the disabled. Modern society can be avoided by those with that privilege, but for the rest of us, it's the one we've got.
It takes privilege to be able to afford those luxuries that I can assure you many disabled individuals cannot afford. Those without get by with help from others.
Cabs are more popular with the disabled over Uber because the driver will get out and help seeking a better tip. Calling a restaurant vs using UberEats app is easier for some types of disabilities and easier for the elderly. Many disabled can go shopping or have government services to physically go for them.
> It takes privilege to be able to afford those luxuries
As someone who's able to afford those luxuries because of a software engineer's salary, it does. The disability welfare system exists though. It has its problems; not being able to have more than $2,000 in a bank account forces people into a very learned helplessness even with the support of friend and family. Those government services are starting to subcontract to those platforms because whatever. If you can walk, an Uber to the hospital is better than an ambulance. So at least for me, it doesn't make it a wasteland to be avoided. I'd be dead several times over if it weren't for the miracle of modern medicine and have been blessed with good fortune, so maybe I have more reasons to be grateful to it than you, but, well, it's the one I got.
If they are in a consolidated market they will just tell you to go ahead and chargeback…they’ll deny list you and make you pay a big fee when yo I get tired of their (lack of) competitors and come crawling back.
I mostly agree with this. If you observe the KPI set used to run support teams, especially with large inbound you will see NPS used as a proxy for quality of resolution but folks mostly don’t respond to those prompts.
More interesting to support team managers are things like deflection rate (didn’t get to an agent) involvement rate (needed an agent) and eventually resolution rate (resolved issue). The last one in the absence of feedback is only a very weak proxy for a resolved issue.
If you consider customer support a cost center, you can guess how managers would optimize these numbers.
I don’t necessarily think there is much wrong with this - having a good product with excellent design, build and proactive support (docs, manuals, walkthroughs, proactive comms) - is likely very good for both customers and the business serving them.
This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same web page that you are, with no more ability to change anything than you have. And it will take 30 minutes to get one of them on the phone because "we are experiencing unusually high call volume" which translates as "the new vice president fired 10 more customer service agents to make his numbers look good."
If robots are involved it means "the new vice president wanted his numbers to look even better."
Companies have apparently run the numbers and decided it is cheaper to effectively ignore and dissuade dissatisfied customers than to try to resolve their issues. And since most companies insist on binding arbitration now, they're not even worried about class-action lawsuits.