Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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> To avoid the Ombudsman being overused, you could give it a price of say $20, which is always refunded when the case is resolved.

What if the cost was put onto the business instead of the consumer and the business just hired support people who are all Ombudsmans by default?

Instead of focusing on copy / pasting boilerplate scripts and answering as many tickets as possible, they should focus on the problem the customer is having by default and do everything possible to reduce the number of incoming questions by fixing bugs, making a better product, improving their docs, etc..

I personally do around the clock email support for 35,000+ people who sign up to my programming courses and support isn't bogging me down. Relative to the number of minutes I'm awake, support is one of the least business related time consuming things I do per day, but I send individually personalized in-depth answers to everyone who asks me questions -- usually within an hour or less.

Because requiring the customer to pay a cost fixes the incentives problem. A customer may have an issue that is a minor inconvenience to them, that can either stay as not resolved, is due to error, or is simply not worth resolving to them. By having them pay for fixing the issue it could greatly reduce the number of inbound cases, allowing them to go straight to people that can act on them instead of sitting in triage and getting canned responses for O(days|forever).

I agree that in theory you can accomplish the same thing by making the product foolproof, but I don't think you can accomplish that for consumer facing products, and that doing so may not be a worth while trade-off. Additionally focusing on issues that greatly impact people rather than small things that cause friction with the product may (or may not! if it causes lack of retention) be worth more.

In terms of games theory; if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer, then that's an incentive to ignore the consumer's complaint. Especially if that company has a monopoly.

I can understand why GP suggested company pays $20.

> if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer

Simplifying, that's "if (false)", since ignoring the customers in the limit gets you a failed business and bankruptcy.

not if you have a monopoly. Which is why customer support for most ISPs in the US is so abysmal.

And even if it is just a sufficiently large company, if the customer is not a large payer and the issue is non-trivial to solve, the the cost of losing that customer could very well be less than the cost of fixing the issue.

What I was addressing was specifically the notion that companies pay zero cost for ignoring a customer, or the idea that they believe the same. That's false. Now there's no question there are some customers these large companies are better off without, and there are large and small examples of companies firing customers, or ignoring them til they go away. Nothing wrong with that. All the time on this site we talk about firing unprofitable customers. If you do this judiciously it's just good business. Doing that in particular cases is not the same as doing that generally.

For the non-enterprise user, isn't this the scenario established today, with no failed business?

No, I don't think so. All the major internet companies listen to their non-enterprise users. They may not provide enterprise quality support to each individual user, but user voices in aggregate are considered critically important.

A company has no incentive to ignore the customer, all else being equal, but they do have costs in servicing the customer and costs from ignoring the customer.

Assume the company has no way of distinguishing "valid" or "high impact" cases from other cases. This means that in order for the company to handle cases they need the sum of fully treating every case to be greater than the sum of the cost of fully treating every case. This is almost certainly never going to be true, unless each of your cases is high cost to ignore (think enterprise support).

So you need to funnel down the cases. Typically this is done with low tier support that tries to suggest fixes and such. You can also offer high value added support to give customers the ability to pay for a support plan. This $20 proposal is like that but on a more ad-hoc basis.

The suggestion is the customer pays $20 so they don't try and go straight to the ombudsman with ever little issue. The company doesn't and shouldn't pay the customer under any circumstance.

In technical support, one of the largest problems you have to deal with is all of the idiots that don't know how to use the product and won't look up the documentation or learn the product on their own. These people spam the shit out of support all day for the most basic shit. Seriously, I was working support at an anti-virus company and 85% of the calls into the paid business tier support were requests for us to do installs or basic application configuration for them. I know that not everybody knows how to configure a firewall, but "where do I download the install file for x" is literally Google-able.

The idea of an ombudsman is ultimately a bad one in this case because the problem isn't with the product or the support or the documentation. The problem is people Always think their issue is special and the most capable person should help them. Our support tier was paid, so more often than not we did what they asked, but the free customers would just get routed to a sales rep because free customers are even dumber and more entitled than the paying ones.

This whole situation is farcicle to me. Yet another free customer blew a minor issue out of proportion and had to apologize when it turned out the system hadn't failed him, he was just a free loading mooch all along.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net does something kind of like that. It costs money to raise any support ticket (you have to have a special support subscription) but you get refunded your "support points" if it turned out to be a problem on their end.

Because that isn't a useful allocation of resources.

Support that powerful are going to basically be devs. With dev salary expectations.

I think it's useful and it's very much worth it to give support a salary where they are enthusiastic to be employed.

If someone uses your product or service and has an issue, the first contact they have with your company is through support.

A crappy support experience could easily be the difference between having a life time customer valued at thousands of dollars, or your customer feeling frustrated and going to another company, netting you $0. That has a butterfly effect too because having 100 happy customers who are praising your support could lead to many new sales from organic recommendations. Having a bunch of customers who felt neglected by your support could yield a situation where your company is now on the front page of HN for having bad support or worse.

For whatever reasons, bigger companies focus more on measurable metrics like "tickets closed per hour", where the emphasis is on things that aren't important because measuring customer happiness is pretty subjective and doesn't translate well to employee evaluation scores.

I know if I ever got the point where I would need to delegate support assistance to someone, you can be sure I would pay them amazingly well, at least equal to a developer's salary because I never want anyone to ever feel like they get ignored or have a low quality experience with my products.

I think this happens because it's very very difficult for a manager's manager to know if the frontline employee is spending their time solving real problems or slacking off with no actual regard for the customer.

"Metrics" are an unhappy middleground for everyone.

Airbnb is a great example of both. If you call tech support and get India, hang up. If you're lucky they're useless. If you're unlucky, they're going against your direct command and contacting the drug dealers in your house about a complaint. Contrast that to reaching one of the many on-shore agents who do their jobs well. One call, one or two people max and the issue is mostly resolved.

I've got no idea what the cause is. It's probably a mix of poor management, ineffective metrics, low salaries and a work culture in India which isn't synonymous with quality. The bottom line is, even the same company can be doing support wonderfully and terribly at the same time.

Yeah AirBnB support in India was awful and I wrote the company off after dealing with them for 20 minutes. Their onshore team actually cared about the huge cockroach infestation in our unit but the Indian guy I first talked to did not give a damn. And that’s who you’re most likely to get at 4 in the afternoon on your first day.

Part of "Wear the Customer's Shoes" at Twilio (when I was there) was that each quarter every developer and product manager was expected to spend a full day doing front line support for free(-ish) tier customers and however long it took to fully resolve the tickets they got during that time. Really let you understand the type of problems people had, how to have empathy, and basically how to make a better product.

In my experience companies use not only "tickets closed per hour", but combine those with "average score" of 1-5 stars.

Yeah but at a large company the ratings don't matter too much in the end because it ends up being a spreadsheet game focused on hiring for the lowest cost while maintaining a level of support that's barely 1 notch above "horrible support".

So if you end up hiring someone who produces a bunch of 1-2 star ratings, you just fire them and try again with someone else until you get someone who produces mostly 3s+.

In the end you would think this would result in better support but it never does. You just end up turning over a lot of support employees, and the user experience for the customer is still bad because you need to first get through a robot menu, then talk to an entry level support who will happily let you pour your soul out on the details of the problem for 5 minutes, and then at the end they are like "oh, I can't do that, but I can forward you to someone who can".

And now you get to be put on hold again, anticipating by coincidence you'll probably lose the connection, and if you're lucky now you get someone who is capable of understanding the problem and you get to re-tell the whole situation again.

Before you know it, with wait times included you're 20 minutes into this and you just barely got to the point where you might get help for the issue. Businesses could solve this problem, but they don't. Instead of hiring better support folks for more money, they put the burden on the customer to have to wade through a bunch of BS and essentially train their entry level support for free -- and it's worse than free too because you're paying that company money for their service and you're trading time from your life to do it.

Yeah, even russian social network (200m users) have a bunch of very smart people supporting users from password recovery to psychological help. No way big startup can't afford something like this. You just have to do so.

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