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Comment by suresk | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that any tech companies are good at this?

I would, a few times per year, spend $10 or $20 to promote some tweets on Twitter. At one point, I stopped being able to do that, due to some nebulous "violation" of their TOS. I've gone back and forth with them a handful of times, and they always basically say "Yep, we looked into this, and you definitely did something bad, but we won't tell you what it was or which tweet it was in." They still send me emails and other ads trying to get me to buy advertising, though. I don't really care, it is just kind of funny.

I don't know why they all are so bad at customer support.

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Traditional companies are now just as bad anyways, Experian's website is giving me errors and the number to call has absolutely no way of reaching a human, all of the options in the menu just lead to voice clips. I found another phone number for Experian support and it's the same thing. I've searched up and down about my specific error (which is a generic "technical difficulties" error) and I've looked for alternate ways to contact and I've exhausted everything I can find. So, I guess I'll have to file my dispute through snail mail, because it is literally not possible to reach Experian if you wanted to.

Customer service is expensive. I've had more luck with the tech companies because at least they sometimes pretend to care whereas some of these traditional companies would rather you died in a fire than got assistance from them.

The only time I've ever really gotten good customer service was from businesses that people could decide not to deal with if they didn't like the service.

You are unlikely to be a customer of Experian, instead your employer and bank are.

https://www.experian.com/consumer-products/identity-theft-an...

$19.95/mo

That would be a protection racket payoff. Better classified as a victim or a putz in this case than a customer.

My theory is they're bad at customer support because they spend nothing to support us. That's why AT&T, Comcast etc can support ~100 million people by phone, Amazon support a multiple of that by live chat and Google can't even reply to email.

Comcast "support" is almost not better than just having robots at the other end, never have I ever gotten a problem resolved from support, I've just had them try to upsell me relentlessly. To this day my Comcast email is somehow setup wrong and I no longer care to try to fix it.

Interestingly, Comcast has been one of the consistently better support experiences for me over the years. Usually very quick and pretty helpful, even if it is just to schedule someone to come out and look at the problem.

Their service in general has gotten kind of unreliable around here the last year or so, with a handful of widespread outages, one of which lasted almost an entire day, but the customer support has never been something I've been unhappy with.

Google support is bad because 99% of Google users are not customers, but the product.

The lack of being rooted in a customer serving business then extends to other areas where you are the actual customer, like Google Apps etc, where support exists but is often sub-par.

> I don't know that any tech companies are good at this?

I’ve found Amazon has always been generous and easy to deal with from a customer support perspective. Apple is pretty good as well though you often have to pay for it (maybe not for web services, I only have experience with hardware and device software issues)

Amazon feels like it has gone downhill lately. The last few times I've complained about them not meeting their Prime shipping guaranteed delivery dates, they've been fairly rude and unhelpful.

At least in Germany, they are still fine (though AFAIK they also don't have the counterfeit product issue they seem to have in the US). I was asking how to handle some DHL shipping problem, they said they can't help me but they are sorry and I got a free month of prime.

Amazon. You generally get a very polite human on the line in seconds.

Jet.com was surprising generous too when I chatting with support.

At the rate you spend, if you're on live human support calls for a total of an hour a year, twitter might break even on you.

They'd rather lose your business, than lose money talking to you.

Edit: my bad, it wasn't clear in your post that you were promoting your tweets using Twitter.

Wait, what is? The $10 or $20 was money I was paying directly to Twitter for their advertising services, not to some third party doing shady stuff.

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