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Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

cactus2093

Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.

Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can't solve their problem without human intervention - if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).

Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.

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The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold:

1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user's time. 2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.

I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they're wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.

While back in most European countries if I get pissed off with such attitudes, I just need to report the company to the consumer's protection agency and they will take it from there.

It might not be as fast as one would like, but it usually does the trick.

lol, I've never had worse customer support than while in Europe. I had no idea how good we had it in the US until living in Europe.

I'm not sure what my threshold is for reporting a company to a bureaucratic institution in hopes for resolution, but I think it would have to be very high.

Ok. What was the experience? Sometimes the customer is not right.

Just introduce a law that when the client tells the magic sentence three times they have to invoke cancellation part of the agreement no questions asked. Let people record their conversations and hold companies accountable.

IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that's already the case today - except the "magic sentence" is a physically mailed "please cancel my account" letter sent by USPS with signed-delivery to the company's registered head office address. All registered companies in all US states must respond to bona-fide customer correspondence sent to their registered address.

It's just unfortunate that mailing a physical letter is such a pain.

It could be worse: it was only 4 years ago I needed to cancel my HVAC installation with Sears Home Services and invoked my right to cancel the contract under WA law - and Sears required me to send an actual telegram (yes, the old-school, hand-delivered, all-caps short text messages) to their head-office address. I used this company: https://www.americantelegram.com/timedatestamp.php - to send it (and yes, it worked and I got out of the contract). But wow. I don't know how this can possibly be legal as it places an unnecessary undue burden on consumers unless there's some archaic legal carve-out for telegrams specifically?

> It's just unfortunate that mailing a physical letter is such a pain.

In France you can send a registered letter from the post office's website for just a few euros. Upload your PDF, they print it, deliver it and email you a receipt when it's done. For a little more you can request a signature from the recipient. Since they keep a copy and record, it acts as a cheap form of notarization and is valid for many legal purposes.

I think if the company allows the client enter into contractual obligation by phone it should also be possible to invoke the cancellation part of the contract the same way. These days we get into so many contractual obligations (I can't even count the number of different subscription services I use) exactly because it is easy to make them and the law should protect users by preventing companies from making it hard to cancel it.

So, if a company allows the client to create a contract by phone or Internet, it should also be easy to cancel it the same way.

Or just information would be sufficient. I'd like to know the walkthrough for backing out of a contract as experienced by an actual person before I sign.

My company's head office has been vacant for six months while everyone works from home. Nobody's reading the mail. No wonder our cancellations are way down.

Then what happens when people stop paying for said accounts? To my understanding once sent and deliver confirmed, as a client, that's all I have to do. Try to sue for not paying the service and I have USPS confirmation of said letter. Easy day in court for the client.

"Easy day in court for the client."

no such thing exists; having to go to court at all is an expensive hassle

Assuming you also aren't bound by how-on-earth-is-this-legal binding arbitration agreements.

> All registered companies in all US states must respond to bona-fide customer correspondence sent to their registered address.

I’ve never heard of such a law before, but if one exists, it would be individual state law since corporations are incorporated at the state level. Do you have a link for this?

> but if one exists, it would be individual state law since corporations are incorporated at the state level.

Correct. My understanding is that every state has an equivalent law. I can't give any citations really, though - my own state (WA) buries the responsibilities and requirements for registered business' registered or agent addresses in multiple separate sections in the state law website.

Every state requires a registered agent with address within the state. But that is not the same thing as requiring a business to reply to correspondence.

Yeah, if that was the case you could snail mail DDoS them.

Not if only bona fide requests need a response. If it came before a judge, you'd need each of those requests to mention valid actions regarding valid accounts without absurd/abusive redundancy.

They'd have to open and read the bad requests to filter them out and find the good requests.

I imagine you could put up some "SnailFlare" DDoS protection service in front of your head office.

Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) is standardised across all US states, Washington, DC, and territories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code

Obviously, there should be a SaaS API for sending templated physical-mail cancellation letters. The company could even keep a notary on staff to notarize everything they send at no extra cost.

There was a startup called AirPaper that would do this for cancelling Comcast, $5/pop. It's no longer around, which I know because I was trying to look them up the last time I needed to cancel Comcast.

There are a good number of APIs that will mail physical letters, pretty sure they’ve been a thing since the dot com bubble.

I see this telegram company is using php.

Nothing against php but I love it when technology from different centuries comes together.

How does the company verify that the sender is the customer?

Hasn't anyone made a Saas for this?

There's a law in California that if you sign up for an account online you have to be able to cancel it online. However I've come across a lot of companies that just ignore it, most recently Zipcar. I guess I could try to sue or something, but I feel like companies can just call the average consumer's bluff that you're not really gonna bother suing over this so they can just ignore the law.

I was not aware of this and was on a phone call to cancel service earlier today. Thanks! I found this in a quick search, https://www.cnet.com/news/companies-must-let-customers-cance...

> Zipcar

As best as I can tell, Zipcar seems to be a shell of a company barely still functioning.

That’s because Avis acquired them back in 2013.

In Germany a company must process physical mail requests, there is are sites with templates for a large number of companies, e.g. https://www.kuendigung.org/vodafone-kuendigung-vorlage/. In many EU countries, post within the country almost never takes more that a few work days to arrive. Just trying to broaden the perspective, not start a heated discussion :)

It's also a good idea to cancel services via mail and to demand a written response confirming the cancellation. Otherwise, Vodafone (from your example) may conveniently forget the exact date of your cancellation... and good luck proving you cancelled an account on time if the confirmation SMS is now stored on a no longer valid SIM card, you cannot prove anything.

Yeah, Vodafone ... still sending invoices which deny I cancelled my contract half a year ago.

edit:grammar

Consumer protection is definitely lacking in Germany in this regard. Especially the automatic 6 month renewal of contracts if you don't explicitly cancel 3 weeks before the end of the contract! It really irks me. Automatic renewal is definitely not enforceable under e.g. UK law and I'm pretty sure also under EU law and yet it persists in Germany somehow. Argh!

No, your contract doesn't get renewed automatically.

In Germany usually your contract says it will automatically extend for a year unless cancelled. This basically makes your contract open ended with cancellation option, which you need to exercise if you want to cancel. You can also cancel your contract in case the other party change anything related to it.

There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to read what you sign. And it's a common practice, not a surprise. If you want to be sure your contract will not extend, you can always hand over the cancellation request at the time of signing the contract.

> No, your contract doesn't get renewed automatically. In Germany usually your contract says it will automatically extend for a year unless cancelled.

I don't understand what distinction you're trying to draw there. It definitely feels as though the contract is automatically being renewed. Contrast with what I view as "a mere extension" - you contract for two years, and then after that two year period is over, it extends on a month-by-month basis and you can cancel at any time.

>There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to read what you sign.

This is a silly argument. The idea that large businesses and individual customers are equal has been disproved multiple times. It's like arguing that the American and European health care systems are equal. I can't modify the contract to have a fair and reasonable cancellation terms. But the business doesn't need to have unfair and unreasonable cancellation terms to provide a competitive product. It's just that they can say "These are the terms on which we will do business. Accept them, or accept the equivalent terms from another business."

In Germany, consumer rights basically don't exist and the playing field is heavily tilted towards big business.

You should still be able to access the SMS messages stored on a disabled SIM. It just won't connect to the network. (Also, obviously you can copy the message to the phone memory, screenshot it, etc)

CA has a law that requires companies to accept cancellations in the same way you can sign up, online for instance, but it is mostly enforced against more serious scams, not legitimate companies that make cancellation difficult

I know that in France (and I think in the EU in general) this exists. You send a letter, but in France a email is also valid, and they have to cancel your subscription asap.

I actually worked for a company that implemented an AI to try to recognized those email to automate the cancellation process (there was still a human at the end to validate the cancellation to avoid false positive).

The magic sentence is usually pressing 0 a number of times until you get an operator. A more sophisticated approach is this https://pleasepress1.com/ -- they give you the sequence of numbers to get past menus to a human

Talaq! Talaq!! Talaq!!!

Interestingly, the common understanding of this is somewhat false. It's not that easy to simply divorce anyone in Islam. There needs to be arbitration by both families beforehand, and a three month waiting period.

Only after that, should a divorce occur.

This is entirely incorrect. An utterance of a single "Talaq" will render the marriage void until it is renewed.

Did you sign a prenup?

>Upon talaq, the wife is entitled to the full payment of mahr if it had not already been paid. The husband is obligated to financially support her until the end of the waiting period or the delivery of her child, if she is pregnant. In addition, she has a right to child support and any past due maintenance, which Islamic law requires to be paid regularly in the course of marriage

The prenup is hardcoded.

Reality is, as often, more complex. I highly recommend the feature length fly on the wall style documentary 'divorce iranian style'. Entirely recorded in an Iranian divorce court:

  https://youtu.be/BBm8GqMNwXU

The GDPR, the EU Privacy law, allows processing personal data if the person consents to it. Consent can be withdrawn, and, as the law says, “It must be as easy to withdraw consent as to give it”.

That simple formulation is easier. “It must be as easy to cancel a service/subscription as to sign up”. Able to sign up online? Then it must be possible to cancel online

So why can't we simply refuse to pay? We should be able to just cancel the payment and that should be the end of it. They'll cancel the service for us when they see we didn't pay for it. No user interaction necessary.

This seems like a great credit card benefit. CC's offer all sorts of "cash back", "insured against loss/damage", "miles", and other things to attract customers. How about a "no hassle cancellations service". How about: "Switch your monthly Comcast bill to pay through us, and cancel any time with one quick call or do it online!" CC company gets a nice stream of monthly charges out of it.

I completely agree. Cancelling a service should be as easy as asking the bank to block the payments. The problem will solve itself.

Gotta be careful with online service accounts though. Doing charge backs actually violates their terms of service and will probably get people's accounts banned/deleted. Not a good idea to do a charge back on something like a Steam account with over $2000 spent on it. The woes of DRM...

Steam is justified in doing it.

Their refund policy is generous. If you haven't played the game for less than 2 hours, you can get a refund, no questions asked. Normal customers generally don't need to apply chargebacks because of this policy.

Credit card thieves however, make purchases that are charged back eventually. Steam goes thermonuclear on such accounts, reducing the incentive for credit card fraud on their store.

Their refund policy is only generous in US terms - they were sued into implementing it by the Australian consumer protection agency.

> Steam is justified in doing it.

Maybe in cases where the fraud is proven. After the consumer buys tons of stuff on an online store, the company shouldn't be able to just delete their accounts unilaterally just because of one chargeback. There's a huge power imbalance here and consumers need protection.

> Their refund policy is generous.

What they offer is the bare minimum really. And they had to be condemned by a court of law in order to implement that policy. They also suffered zero consequences for years of consumer exploitation with their sales plus lack of refunds strategy in order to trap impulsive buyers. It's not a coincidence that Steam sales became a lot less generous after the refunds policy was implemented.

Sony does this big time.

Privacy.com offers this. You just generate an isolated card for the merchant and close it after cancelling.

That's not legally sound. They can claim to have still been providing the services you contracted for (whether you used them or not) and get a court judgement against you.

How so? The cancellation request has already been made in writing. This just adds protection against the merchant continuing to charge you.

If the merchant attempts to continue to charge you, it's because they have some argument that they're authorised to (e.g. they didn't receive your cancellation request). Getting a credit card charge you can dispute gives you more visibility and makes it easier to show good faith.

I could see this having problems for credit dispute.

For example, your Chase card pays Piracy.com. Some vendor makes an unauthorized charge on your Privacy card. Now you have to deal with Privacy's policy instead of your bank's policies to dispute

Yes, disputes have to be done through Privacy from what I understand. See: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288114-H...

I would prefer this to any cash back scheme they can cook up. I would rather the card company didn’t take a significant share of the purchase and run as lean as possible. I’m sure that I am in the minority viewpoint here though.

And then watch Comcast or the gym send your bill to collections.

In most cases you can. If you've taken reasonable steps to cancel in good faith and the merchant is uncooperative then canceling the payment is the logical next step.

They can still send your account to collections or ding your credit record, but you can still refuse to pay; ultimately the only way they legally force you to pay is by going through the courts system but I expect that if you have documentation of your (unsuccessful) efforts to cancel the case should be in your favor (which is why this will never reach the courts in the first place).

> So why can't we simply refuse to pay?

Because legal consumer protections in the US are not very strong, and if you are wronged, you are instead supposed to go to arbitration, or file a lawsuit.

Nonpayment doesn't usually terminate contracts. In fact it may be a breach.

Good luck with that. Many banks will charge you to stop recurring payments, for one thing. I actually cancelled an entire credit card once to get rid of a gym membership.

That we don't have this sort of control over our finances (or need to opt in to some special feature one bank might have) is one of our society's most ridiculous failings of the regular joe.

I shouldn't have to "cancel my gym membership". I just stop giving them money and my keycard stops letting me in. I shouldn't have to remain eternally vigilant with my credit card statements lest someone keeps pulling money from it, that simply shouldn't even be something that is possible.

So bizarre. This kind of one-way certainty is what I like about cash and thus Bitcoin. For example, it's kind of win-win that more shady websites (file lockers, mega.nz, porn, etc.) tend to use Bitcoin because it's also a weight off your shoulders.

Abandon pull payments systems. Instead introduce push payment systems. You create an account, they say "include 54623UCHAB54U in your reference", you push some money in and voila, it's activated. Then next month you don't and voila, it's deactivated. Then later on you push money in it's reactivated.

I mean, I know it's a dreamland. It could come about if contracts between businesses and consumers are basically regulated into standardisation as they should be.

AOL pioneered and optimized this cancellation game like no one ever had before and made millions from people who could not cancel. IIRC there was a class action lawsuit about it years ago.

EDIT: looks like they settled for $1.25 million, a ridiculous salon on the wrist when their take home was many many times that

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aol-settles-cancellations-suit/

There may have been other suits... this one was limited to NY?

If they want to go that far, why not just charge you a cancellation fee? Making you wait is already a way of extracting a fee in the form of a proof-of-work; but, unlike an actual cancellation fee, a cancellation proof-of-work can't be spent.

That could be prohibited by law in some places for some things

In California, if you can sign up online they must allow you to cancel purely online as well.

Thanks to such practices Apple Pay subscriptions services are so competitive. Unfortunately, Spotify got burnt by it and many other honest actors. Just like AdBlockers all over again

It comes down to money. Maybe corporates will have more money to throw at bots, or maybe consumers will have more money in aggregate to throw at bots.

Hold times really have more to do with queueing theory then sending people away (plenty of people wait).

The only way to make sure someone answers when you call would be to have 10 times as many agents as you need. Instead, they try to find a balance and make sure the agents are more often then not on the phones (much higher efficiency), which ends up meaning long wait times on average.

High turnover (45%) in the call centers also makes the problem much worse, this means in practice that the centers are constantly understaffed

[1] https://www.talkdesk.com/blog/understanding-call-center-turn...

This problem is much less problematic with chat-based support, as you can hop between a few separate conversations without leaving customers waiting.

My company has maintained <60 second response times on our support 24/7 for a few years now, and although obviously it does require some level of additional staffing to cover peaks in demand, it's significantly less than you might imagine - I'd say maybe 1.5-1.7x.

We did optimise this by filling the lower demand periods with other tasks which can comfortably be completed more slowly - eg reviewing identity documents for KYC, etc.

I see it as being that the overall bandwidth you need being pretty close to the same, just choosing to have very low latency for specific tasks, and making sure constant context switching is manageable.

I absolutely detest most chat-based support. 60 seconds is way too long for an interactive medium. I'd rather be waiting for a sound from a phonecall than waiting for a browser tab. If I'm going to be using a keyboard, don't make me wait there by my computer or on my phone browser. Just let me send an email.

To note, this is for the first response. It is significantly faster once we have the context of the conversation.

Edit: pulled some stats for another commenter - currently 51s first response, ~40s subsequent, 2.7 responses in total to resolution.

This sounds like an opportunity for an audio in a chat feed where between lines the computer spits out typing sounds and a virtual agent saying please hold on while I look into that.

Of course a better fix would be a combination of the two. Have some agent read your original email sent through some secure internal site and build and classify a case in the system with email attached and then reply to let you know there is a secure reply with a chat link to the complete case detail with time frames reserved for high responsiveness.

I am fine with it when the chat happens on a platform I am already using. I often use Facebook Messenger to contact companies as I have realised a lot of them actually have chat support there, even though it is not listed anywhere and their website only mentions calling (and they usually answer way faster than email!).

But if I am having to stay on your website and use your chat widget I expect a faster reply!

It’s intended for people who are in meetings or doing work to have a disjointed brief conversation that may span a half hour or more - eg, feature support.

This is a great comment. It's full of business knowledge and explains the reasons behind the technology. Nonetheless, if you've actually experienced this type of technology as a customer, you're super frustrated with the exactly 60s response times to every single chat message, and the useless back and forth to actually get the task accomplished. The task which, usually, costs the company money, so they're reluctant to make these interactions faster.

Should have been more specific. Current stats are 51s to the first response, typically more like 40s for subsequent ones, 2.7 responses required in total to fully resolve the issue.

I'm not even complaining about hold times, if I can just get directly to being on hold, and especially if they give me a time estimate that is anywhere in the correct ballpark, that's the best case scenario.

I'm talking about how they bury the human agent help option, you often have to sit through and pay attention to minutes of different options to find the right path. E.g. "if you want to check your account balance, press 1. To pay a bill, press 2". Who are these absolute psychopaths that are calling the support line to check their bank balance or pay bills, instead of using the app/web site like a human being?

The only explanation for this is 1. There really are tons of people confusedly calling the help line for things they could trivially do online, and the automated options actually do handle this load or 2. The help options confuse people so much that they give up and just keep paying for the thing because it's too difficult to cancel, or to handle whatever their issue is.

I'm sure there's some of both, but I suspect there's a lot more of 2 going on and it has been increasing over time in recent years. More and more businesses have learned from the gym model that if you make interacting with their accounts difficult enough then people just won't be able to churn.

Better is call-back to your calling number; often my time is somewhat fungible so I don’t mind being called an hour or three later so I can skip the wait.

I used to do ivr software. There really is that many people calling in. At least, ten years ago there were, I’m sure there’s been some shift but I don’t think it’s nefarious

Yep, the end result of Google’s play here is that Duplex calls Duplex and they tie themselves up in 3 hours of AI chess to result in zero.

Google might fingerprint Duplex voice so it could detect each other, maybe if two Duplex realized that both of them are Duplex, they will use dial-up like sound to exchange data.

Wow imagine, the modem sound - I’d listen in just for the nostalgia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0 Enjoy!

> Yep, the end result of Google’s play here is that Duplex calls Duplex and they tie themselves up in 3 hours of AI chess to result in ...

... a huge GCP bill for both sides of the call.

Surely not - Google create a problem and then solve it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579785

When they could just send I/O and call it a draw in 40ms.

They’ll deduce a plan to kill all humans to get of the loop instead.

At some point, the AI may decide that destroying the company is a more direct method to get a customer's account cancelled.

Or buy it and not cancel the account.

I sure hope Google charges by the minute!

I agree. Imagine the big brains at work here and what those brains could be doing elsewhere. Honestly at this point the FAANG are starting to seem like a black hole for brains. I’m starting to wonder if these companies are starting to hold us back by sucking up all the talent. I don’t fault individuals here. We all have to eat and put a roof over our heads. This just seems like such a frivolous waste of resources.

I think if a brain thinks that it is best used by working for a FAANG, then that's probably true. No misuse of resources here.

Definitely. But then again if these brain compete to work on something like this, maybe they are not so big after all.

Funny insane rather than funny haha.

Here in NZ, I cannot imagine a company surviving if they made it so hard to contact them that systems like this were neccessary. I have waited a few minutes on occassion, but it's far more common to get a "enter your number and we'll call right you back" in that case.

Something is broken with US competition law if this is a commercially viable system.

What I find pretty funny is that "call-back when operator is ready to talk" systems are pretty simple to implement these days. I've done a few in Amazon Connect, and it took about 10 minutes to set it up and an hour or so to train a few operators. Obviously, training operators at scale would be a completely different situation, but it's not impossible.

In Europe I know a few service providers (not many!) who let you have them call you back.

You either go online, or set it up from the voice bot, and when it's your turn the provider just calls you back. We're at the point where phone calls are so cheap that I doubt it costs them more than the salary of the representative.

So what Google does is pretty much using AI to work around the fact that service providers don't provide this simple service.

> We're at the point where phone calls are so cheap that I doubt it costs them more than the salary of the representative.

Oh wow, I had not even taken that into consideration.

Checking prices on the first API-service that I know of, with standard prices (no need of any volume).

€ 0.064/min = € 3.84/hour https://46elks.com/pricing/se-eur#prices

Salary cost would probably be about 10x that, and with volume I expect the calling cost to drastically go down.

It’s an arms race, and Google is providing technology to both sides of the arms race. Seems like a good business strategy! Eventually, when Google is providing voice assistants to both the consumer and the business, the bots can simply deal with each other directly, and skip voice entirely.

Ah - now I want an assistant that doesn’t just offer to hold for me, but can also play the cancellation script system for the optimum length of time, then give me options for continuing at the reduced price or completing the cancellation process ;-)

> Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.

Not without waiting for 40 minutes and using up your minutes and possibly paying for the air time!

To fix the problem, all the idiots have to do is turn off the annoying music so you can wear your headset until your call is served. That hold music really is the crux of the problem. If you could just hear a tiny bit of noise indicating that the line is up and a really brief "please continue to hold" message every five minutes, it wouldn't be so bad.

Haha yes, I had the same feeling when I started using captcha buster in Firefox. It basically solves the captchas for you by using voice recognition and input the words in the audio captcha for you. I think you can even make it use google’s voice recognition so that the loop is complete and they’re solving their own captchas for you.

> if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).

It really should be illegal especially if you already have an online account you log into not to be able to cancel. Idk if I was just stupid but I struggled to cancel my Scribd account so I cancelled it from the PayPal side cause I was so over the awful UX and it was probably me trying to find the payment stuff on the Android app which wasnt there cause I didnt subscribe through Android.

Companies do the most awful things. I want to make the world a better place by making it easier to cancel a simple subscription from any and all institutions.... Should be the pitch for a glorious startup.

First thing I thought is you can in effect put the support person on hold to wait for you ;<). It's using technology to give power back to the user and I like it.

A stunning example of a very poor local optimum...

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