This culture of not treating people even half-decently frustrates me. Is it so hard to acknowledge that the user is a human?
There's some article that said 90% of computer users are below proficient, they have their routines but get totally lost if something doesn't work...
OTOH, having no support isn't the answer either, especially if the issue is actually on their side, and the user is genuinely inconvenienced.
It would also probably generate more support scams.
This would solve the issue of monkeys wasting support's time while offering a way to get support for those who know what they're doing and are happy to put their dollars on the line.
Does this model actually work? I'm sure there are some reputable companies that could make it work, but I'm not sure I know anyone who would trust Facebook to get this right.
One could crowd-source it, but there's probably a high chance of brigading...
Just offer support to the proficient ones.
Big tech, Google and Facebook in particular don't have "weird process gaps". What they have is a willful ignorance of any and all customer service. They are the vanguard of a new economy devoid of any and all notion of customer service. That quaint notion is too expensive in today's economy. Today, "customer service" is provided via a one way email black hole.
The only way anyone gets customer service from any unicorn is either by shaming them in a vial social media post or leveraging an internal contact. There used to be a time where one could call and talk to an actual person who actually worked for the company and might, just might be in a position to help. Those days began to end with the shift to offshore call centers and now have completely vanished thanks to canned email responses. I NEVER in my wildest dreams would have though "I wish Google had an offshore call center to support me".
Years ago, while flying British Air from Nairobi to London I had my camera equipment and dress shoes stolen by ground crew. I called up BA and explained that I had watched a person on the tarmac open my bag as it was being loaded onto the plain. I don't even know if the ground crewman was a BA employee or an Airport employee, but the BA rep on the phone told me she was mortified at what had happened and the next day they couriered a check to me. No bickering, no stonewalling, no email voids, just pure customer service.
That one great experience was snatched from the jaws of disappointment by a timely customer service rep with the authority to help and has meant that I will fly BA whenever it is possible over all other airline options. Would they do the same today? I doubt it, but they did it once and I will always be a fan as a result.
I've heard a lot of well-deserved criticism of BA as well, but it does seem like many of their staff are still willing to go above and beyond.
Left my keys on the plane seat, and remembered once I was at baggage claim. All Delta would do is let me fill out some paperwork. I ended up having to have a locksmith come out to the airport parking lot to make a new key for my truck.
Don’t forget that just last year we were watching videos of innocent passengers being violently dragged off planes that they paid to be on. Despite some feel good anecdotes, airlines are by no means a bastion of customer service nirvana. Airlines hold 2 of the top 20 spots among the “Most Hated Companies” in the US.
Good customer service, even when your ASP is tens of thousands of dollars per customer, is probably the single hardest thing for most companies.
Whether it’s Airlines, Search Engines, Phone/Computer Manufacturers, Car companies, etc., we’ve seen basically every otherwise beloved brand fall on their face when it comes to customer service at scale. (And that’s when we’re not discovering their products are faulty, dangerous, secretly crippled over time, spying on us, exploiting our personal data,...)
Of course there are weird process gaps. Here we are seeing an account being flagged for incarceration, possibly because the account is actually being attacked by someone submitting fraudulent requests in an attempt to get it closed.
I don’t have a Facebook account and I don’t want one. But if that isn’t a weird process gap I don’t know what is.
Are you referring to the United incident in 2017, or a later one?
You don't get customer service from an ad platform unless you are a paying advertiser. Complaints from the eyeballs carry less weight than complaints from the money shovelers.
If you are a supplier of eyeballs, you are purchasing stuff in exchange for eyeballs. You are purchasing things, so you are a customer. Also, when you pay for an Android phone, you are a paying customer of Google, with cash, credit, or whatever. Lots of other things, but those are the first that come to mind.
I usually pay for things these days via an odd ritual in which I insert a small plastic card into a slot, and then, believe it or not, it is actually returned to me.
If I give you something in exchange for a chicken, and you maintain "I did not pay you, because a chicken is not cash", do you think the IRS will be convinced there was no transaction? Or s/chicken/bitcoin/.
However, if a dictionary definition is presented to me, and it doesn't include a usage of which I am aware, that doesn't mean I disagree with it even then. It likely just means that something was left out - maybe because people still hope to sell dictionaries, or alternatively because, having given up on selling them, neither accuracy nor completeness is required to sell online ads.
Do you agree or disagree with it? According to this definition, am I “paying” to use Facebook?
As such, definition #13 seems applicable - "money, goods, etc." can't possibly be construed to mean "money and not goods, etc."...can it?
Definition #17 might also apply - you "pay" to use Facebook, oh how you pay...
Anyway, I don't have any particular issues with this entry, and I think the very first definition demonstrates that payment is commonly understood to include "doing something" which is an extremely broad category.
Definition 17, while fitting, is outside the scope of this current thread.
The point is, Facebook only cares about your experience with their service if you are paying them money. Even the IRS doesn’t care; Facebook doesn’t send you a 1099 for your use of their service, do they? The IRS doesn’t charge them tax on your data, do they? This would seem to indicate that the situation falls outside the “exchange of value for value” type definition of “pay.”
If I understand your dismissal of definition (1), you are implying that it is significant that definition (2) by contrast only says "money" and uses an example of dollars. I think that's too legalistic and just an artifact of the way things were edited. Dictionaries aren't written to prevent lawyers from finding loopholes, so I don't think you can count on everything being repeated absolutely uniformly. In actual legal documents, they define terms or phrases used repeatedly up front to reduce the repetition, and dictionaries don't seem to customarily do that. So again, definition (1) is evidence about how people behave in the world, not necessarily the definition we are using and from an unimpeachable authority.
Cutting you off at the scale they are at is just no big deal to them, but you may in fact miss your payment.
Not an excuse though, but spending money on these services is rare and it could be argued if you really are the customer of Facebook for example.
The companies in question probably just rely on the dependency of users, so any support has a low priority.
This has never been the case on HN. Here are some 'pg comments on the topic 'dang provided a while back[0].
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 (2008)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 (2008)
The whole point of having a downvote system is to correct people towards more productive behavior, no? If people don't know what they said wrong, how can they fix it?
If the the user can't figure out why they're being punished, and someone like me who has been on this site for a long time and is also going "why on earth did that get downvoted", then what purpose does it serve other than as a public flogging device?
Then again, considering that the site design hasn't changed to even have a up-vote button that works on mobile, I'm not exactly holding my breath that anything here could ever change.
Either the gaps are not that rare, or FB doesn't give a shit. There are no other options.
Enough to employ people to look into the problem(s) and fix them?
Assuming 200 working days a year and that 1 CSR can handle 10 cases a day, that means 1000 people can handle the case load. Given Facebook has ~43k employees right now, and assuming they actually have nobody to handle these cases, they would need to hire 2% more employees.
I’m not sure if that meets the definition of “a few extra people,” but FB could easily do it if they wanted to. 1000 people being paid $60k apiece plus $60k worth of additional carrying costs (benefits, etc.), that amounts to $120M in additional expenses. Naively subtracting that number from their 2018 net income of $6.88B leaves $6.76B (actually more due to the additional expenses being tax deductible).
So, basically, we see that FB cares less about user support than making an additional 1.7% profit. Yeah, they don’t give a shit.
So Facebook should just admit it doesn't scale, and work on doing things smaller and better.
If it was a startup, the HN crowd would be all about "doesn't scale!" But since it's a FAANG, it's, "Sure! Just keep on going and hurting society. Am I vested yet?"
No, thought the dev team, this mistake would never happen, the only way to "get out of jail" is to show us your release papers!
It's pervasive, isn't it. Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. What I realized once was, the TSA agent doesn't want or isn't allowed to think and make decisions, because making decisions mean being responsible for those decisions...
Unfortunately, children being used for smuggling stuff or as bombs on legs is nothing new :'(
Humans are cruel.