Right now Google makes the second most profit per employee of any large enterprise on earth: $269,000 in profit, annually, per employee.
I know of other- successful!- companies that make less money per employee, because they hire people to do customer support.
To start your argument, I think you have to explain why Google can not hire more CSRs, even though they are the #2 most profitable enterprise on Earth.
To begin your "back of the envelope math test", you should ask:
If Google were to hire CSRs until its profit went to $0 per employee per year, how much of an effect would the additional CSRs have on the experience of Google's customers? How many CSRs would that be? How many customers would each one be handling per day?
Saying that a company which is profitable because a small number of employees serve a large number of customers can obviously afford to hire a large number of employees isn't a math test, it's wishful thinking. Do some math.
It would go up, probably quite a bit, and the profit would re-emerge but at a lower level per employee.
The real problem is that their scale (in terms of reach, money, customers, political leverage - you name it) is so large that a company could compete or out-compete on customer service and still wouldn't win a significant chunk of their business. That's why they don't need to hire more CSRs.
You need to answer that one before concluding that customers' experience would improve.
So no, I don't need to answer that beyond any number greater than there are now, which I already did.
Or let's make it 3-fold and claim the other hundred grand is for training and office space (yeah, can't get a CSR to work remotely and definitely can't earn less than minimum wage nor those jobs be abroad because I'm building an unrealistic quibble).
It's like people arguing that you can't know the sky is still blue on Earth because you haven't been outside yet today. Please. Worse than that, it again obscures the real questions - what level of CS does Google need to provide to stop customers going to a competitor, which is the level they have now, and hence, since they're too powerful to be competed with what should be done about it? What can be done about it?
Apparently temporary works and contractors make up around 54% of Google's workforce. https://www.vox.com/2019/4/4/18293900/google-contractors-ben...
The rest of this comment is going to be somewhat critical of Google criticism and seemingly apologistic. Please assume positive intent.
I agree that Google certainly could do more to help people on its platform. But this will always be the case until every single customer service issue is solved to the user's satisfaction. The important question that I never see anybody asking or answering is "How much is reasonably enough, and how do we know (subject X) has done enough?"
It all boils down to what we believe the moral obligation of people (and companies, by extension) ought to be. Any extra service that Google provides beyond those required for profit maximization (e.g. customer retention, maintaining reputation, being only slightly better than the second-best option) is purely charity. Then, how do we evaluate when a certain amount of charity is sufficient, let alone necessary? Public sentiment is fickle, and therefore not a great measure. I bet even if Google increased its CSR by 10x, we'd still see communities eagerly latch onto any criticism of the tech giant and shout "you have to do more!" without quantifying what the final demand actually is!
I take the moral position that we as a society certainly can and should do much more to take care of each other. Telling each other to be better is absolutely valuable and I will never argue against that. But I believe we ought to do a much better job of suggesting desirable and realistic end states, instead of perpetuating insubstantial discourse amounting to one of either "They need to do better!" or "Come on, they're doing the best they can."
Admittedly this places me in a non-committal position. I don't have any great suggestions for what the end states of YouTube, Twitter, et al should look like from a content moderation perspective. But I would love to hear input from actual experts in who can offer some reasonable ideas about the most cost-beneficial solutions for society as a whole.
Duty is not charity. It would be perfectly reasonable for society to determine that YouTube incurs a duty to its content creation partners, and at no point should that be considered requesting a favour.
I agree that Google has a moral duty to take care of the people who choose to put their trust in their platforms.
But, point taken.
That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
If P (large profit per employee) then Q (should be able to spend more on customer support)...
- The converse is If Q then P (clearly not applicable in this case)
- The contrapositive is If not Q then not P (in this case, you would hope it’s true but obviously not!)
- The inverse is If not P then Not Q, which would roughly translate into if profit per employee is low then you would not expect a company to pay more for customer support.
Perhaps you could argue that the logical conclusion is that any profit just means they aren’t spending enough on their support. Funny thing is economists would argue profit demonstrates they are spending enough on keeping customers happy.
It certainly appears that they can afford to do better (although arguably they don’t break out financial results just for YouTube do they?) and we certainly want them to better.
I think the fundamental problem is that for every million dollars they pay humans to “do better” it’s like trying to move the beach with a pair of tweezers — you don’t even make a dent. No amount of money will solve the problem by trying to pay humans. They can only succeed by making the algorithm better, and that’s not a problem which scales with headcount (mythical man month)
> That’s not the logical conclusion, that’s the inverse.
Your logic is misapplied. If Google's profit is an indicator of its customer service obligations, it is logically necessary that less-profitable companies have lower such obligations than more-profitable companies do. If they had higher obligations, Google's profitable status would indicate that it didn't have much in the way of customer service obligations. If they had equal obligations, then profit would not be an indicator.
I simply wanted to point out that a statement like "Companies that are wildly profitable should not shirk customer service responsibility" is not logically equivalent to saying, "Companies that are not wildly profitable should shirk customer service responsibilities."
To argue that because you disagree with the inverse of a statement, therefore the statement itself is not valid, is faulty. The inverse of a statement need not be true for the statement itself to be true.
"No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service.
What I read from OP's statement is mainly this; we know in this case that it's not for lack of resources. So perhaps we can agree every company has the responsibility, but not all companies have the means. Is it not more reprehensible to fail to provide a service you are responsible for when you have the means to provide it than when you do not?
Or more to the point, it's certainly noteworthy that they could become one of the most profitable companies in the world despite having such widely recognized terrible customer support. One might say it's significant evidence that they are able to maintain their profitability through not entirely competitive means.
I also probably should have more charitably interpreted GP as "companies in a strong position have a better ability to provide good customer service."
> "No company should be let off the hook for having awful customer service" does not preclude judging one of the most profitable companies in the world more harshly for having awful customer service.
What you're describing in that second pulled quote is a continuum of customer service responsibility versus profitability. According to you, the more profitable company has a greater responsibility than the less profitable company does.
E.g. "I couldn't hire more customer support agents because I'm broke," and "I am one of the most profitable companies in the world, but I still refuse to hire more customer support agents because I'm a monopoly and don't have viable competitors so it doesn't matter anyhow"...
No, this is incoherent. If the judgment for your failure to provide support is "that's understandable; we could hardly expect you to do any better" -- that is the same thing as you not having a responsibility to provide support.
No, it isn't.
But the damage it causes to innocent parties through its choice of business models is.
It is easy to forget that not so long ago, the Internet giants of today were little startups too, and not so long before that, they didn't exist at all. They have reached the dominant positions they are now in through a combination of factors. Several of those factors involve absolving themselves of responsibility for things going wrong, even things that might have been (or might still be) considered illegal, because preventing them is difficult or practically impossible with a purely technological solution.
Well, guess what? There is no law that says they get a right to exist and be astonishingly profitable by relying on technology at the expense of anyone else who gets hurt by their action or inaction. There is no law that requires the existence of huge video redistribution services that allow anyone to upload content, including malicious content that may cause serious harm to others, with impunity. Laws that do protect these organisations, such as the safe harbour provisions under the DMCA and its counterparts around the world, were invented after the fact and it's far from clear that they strike a healthy balance (particularly when, as I can personally testify, the likes of YouTube do not always meet their obligations even under the very generous terms of those laws).
If these companies can't act as responsible corporate citizens using their current business models, maybe they shouldn't use those business models. It is disturbing that this simple idea now seems almost heretical, as if we are somehow beholden to these Internet giants and the world would fail without them, and so it's somehow OK that they also magnify harmful effects from spreading dangerous misinformation to invasion of privacy but as long as it's someone else uploading the content the hosting service is deemed innocent of all wrong-doing.