Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The only reason I maintain a Twitter account is that it seem to be the only way to engage the "good" customer support at so many companies these days.

I've heard enough people say the same thing to assume it must be true. I also saw a lot of this type of complaining (usually expressed in hyperbolic, super-outraged language) when I used to use Twitter.

This seems very counter intuitive though. Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible? It makes the company look bad, and encourages opportunistic complaining (I'm sure there are people who feign outrage over some small issue in the hope of being sent some coupons or a discount code).

Surely they'd be better off investing in private complaints channels (email, chat etc), and making it clear that you'll get the fastest response by using those.

I wonder if it's because the customer service channels were often outsourced or off-shored years ago, and are hidden behind layers of process and management. Whereas the head of marketing has the company Twitter account on her phone.

>Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible?

It's a perverse result of treating customer service as a cost center. The department that you call when you have a problem has targets - average call duration, cost per resolution etc. On a micro level, that seems fairly rational. They want customer service representatives to deal with complaints as quickly and cheaply as possible. On a macro level it's largely irrational, especially in the age of social media. Those CSRs are incentivised to fob off customers, who are then incentivised to complain on social media.

The problem persists because of a division of responsibility - private complaints are resolved with resources from the customer support budget, but public complaints are resolved with resources from the marketing budget. For the customer service department, it's hard to argue that you should spend $200 to please a customer who is only worth $20 a year. For the marketing department, it's a no-brainer to spend $400 to prevent a social media shitstorm.

Fixing that problem requires either strong leadership from the very top of the org chart, or tremendous bravery from just below the top. Someone has to make the case for the company losing fairly large sums of money in customer support expenses to prevent the risk of people badmouthing them on Twitter. Loss aversion cuts both ways - you don't want to spend the money to prevent a hypothetical, but you'll spend the money in a heartbeat to fix a bad news story.

> Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible?

I think the topic here is that customer support only/mainly replies in a constructive and interested manner when the issue is brought to public, e.g. on Twitter, because now they are being publicly called out for their behavior. Appalling, but appears to be true.

On the other hand, when using private channels for customer support you'll get responses that range from being passed around by call center operators that are powerless (and thus useless) to solve your problem, to downright being lied to.

Private support channels, namely those operated by real people, are costly, making Support a constant target for budget cuts rather than actual, professional management (that "investment" you mentioned). Plus, these channels are known for their hostile/toxic environments and meager paychecks, so it seems unfair to expect high quality professional customer support from the "official" channels; but the bean counters made the budget work, hooray!

You're getting cause and effect wrong.

Because it's public, they act on it. I'm completely certain they'd prefer to be doing off-Twitter support, via the complex phone tree, emails that take 72 hours for a response, etc., but they don't have that option.

My point was that maybe people wouldn't resort to public complaining if they got a quick and helpful response from a private channel.

Sure, some people would still complain in public just to make a scene (because some people are like that) but presumably the number would go down.

It's unlikely they can sustain the Twitter level of response time and lavish personal attention for the more normal support channels.

It could also be good for the brand to be publically helping upset customers. Probably case-by-case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com