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Comment by wildrhythms | Hacker News Reader

The story that GamersNexus shares here of dealing with Newegg's support is so painfully realistic. Support reps have no idea what's going on. There is little to no escalation process. The support folks probably receive no training about the RMA process, how damaged hardware is assessed, or even what 'thermal pate' is. For companies like Newegg, there is no value anymore in quality support reps with expertise... companies only focus on quantity and trimming the budget: hiring the smallest team possible at the lowest price. This transcends so much of the tech industry.

I used to work in IT support, started at $65k which was amazing for where I was living at the time. Everyone on the support team took pride in our work, and we shared a culture of expertise and owning the issue; of quality over quantity. Everyone suffers- the customer, the company, the support staff- when the goal is sheer throughput and 'cost efficiency'.

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Not just customer service but also their media liaisons.

It's a long video[1] but another Youtuber called Brett from UFD Tech has been talking about Newegg recently too. Newegg agreed to sponsor a fan giveaway by providing an Intel CPU to a winner, but after receiving photos and marketing from Brett did not respond to inquiries about the CPU for five months. They also didn't pay for two product review videos that Brett had made for them. Like with GamersNexus, they didn't respond to inquiries about fixing the situation until Brett posted about it on Twitter.

Another small but interesting detail about this is that Brett never revealed the identity of his liaison with Newegg, but after making the video he received a photo from someone he's keeping anonymous that knows the liaison. In the photo, the anonymous person asks the liaison what is going on with the UFD Tech issue, and the liaison explains what happened but blames the lack of communication on him losing emails and not having Brett's contact information to make it right. A lie considering Brett was emailing the liaison during all of this.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_rKnK-uAM

I once had a lengthy chat interaction with a Google Store CSA about charging me 12 times for an order that ended in them saying "I'm sorry, it's all automated and I can't do anything."

It was sort of a profound summation of the state of customer service today.

I had to cancel a credit card because of Google. I tried buying 4 pixel phones from them. They cancelled the order 3 times after exactly 7 days, but didn't cancel the transactions on my card. I obviously didn't have that much money on my card (meaning the limit was lower than the amount). Increasing the limit would've released the money to Google automatically. So I cancelled the card and reopoened. I bought the phones from a local dealer afterwards.

It is the nature of the credit card system that refunds may take 5-10 business days to show up on your statement. That isn't the fault of the merchant.

(though, canceling orders is)

We recently got aquired by a larger SaaS based in Canada. All their employees, including me now, go through a 3 week introduction program which includes 1 week in support. I have to say I'm stunned by the level of quality and attention they put into their support.

So there are counter examples still.

One of the huge issues in industry today is that internal promotion isn’t the default, so people don’t work their way up the chain in companies anymore. Starting at a service desk, mailroom, or as a page used to be a rite of passage that let you learn a lot about the business and informed the rest of your tenure. Now people get hired into a mid level job and have to reverse engineer what the business does. It hurts IT because you have a bunch of capable people who seemingly are clueless as to how the business makes money.

> transcends so much of the tech industry

Pervades might be better, but fully agree with your comment/experience.

It's sad that "at scale" has become synonymous with "without human oversight". It used to be that businesses tried to scale up while providing a level of support for their customers that showed they were valued. As a user today it is so hard to get bug reports directed to someone that can effect change in the right part of the system. As a software developer, I absolutely love getting bug reports for something I can fix, and I know how to file a good bug report. I see this universally across virtually every online product I interact with, from online accounting software to online mapping products and various large tech company's email services. I'm a powerless, unimportant user, not worth listening to because my statistics are not those generated by millions of other people.

The thing that boggles my mind is the lack of formal escalation in modern support departments. It existed because it was a good model: it worked, while managing headcount and cost. Your front line people aren't trained or paid to know everything, but for God's sake have someone backstopping them up with deeper knowledge and access!

Spoiler: there is no such thing as “escalation” most of the time. CSRs at the same level escalate to each other just to make you feel good. My wife use to work as a CSR at Verizon.

When I was in college, I worked CSR for a software product, and we definitely had an escalation path.

My level, to any peers who might know about the specific issue, to our management, and then to engineering (if technical) or our support VP (if business). And it was critical, because inevitable engineering "Oh, that doesn't work that way, but we never wrote it down" or "Oh, I guess that would be a thing people would want to do."

Sadly, after the company was bought the system was collapsed down to the standard front-line-or-close.

For support where someone needs help yes there was a real “escalation path”. But when Karen called complaining about a policy, they were “escalated” to someone else telling them the same thing.

Aren't the calls recorded? That would make this kind of deceit actually encouraged by management?

Management is fully aware and supports it. They don’t want to be bugged either.

> It's sad that "at scale" has become synonymous with "without human oversight".

That’s exactly the point of scaling though. You’re using automation to replace a human component. It’s as true now as it was during the industrial revolution.

Unfortunately you can’t have it both ways.

Thankfully if you want to deal with humans then you can still buy from small independent outlets. But you then also have to accept that might come with a higher price tag too.

Honestly, I don't care if I have to pay an extra $5/month or more so that when that rare need to talk to a human comes up. The problem is that the automated system isn't doing the job that the humans did, and there's zero recourse. It's a disease infesting tech companies that needs to be addressed by consumer protection laws.

The thing is not everyone is willing to pay more. Some people can’t even afford to pay more. That’s how we ended up in this race to the bottom to begin with.

EU offers some protections here but not with services run outside of the EU.

> It used to be that businesses tried to scale up while providing a level of support for their customers that showed they were valued.

I want to reassure you (or horrify you, depending) that poor and fraudulent customer service and products are definitely not a new phenomenon.

The easiest way to "scale" is set your base value to 0. If you don't do it at all, it's easy to double it, triple it, increase it by orders of magnitude.

If your base value is 0, then the value to your customers is also 0. In theory, a company with good customer support should have a competitive advantage over a company with poor customer support. But in B2C industries, customer support always seems to be a race to the bottom.

That seems like an expected outcome if you consider support requirements a relatively rare event though.

Because customers will almost always choose to buy from cheapest, or 2nd cheapest vendor.

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