Well, that's their problem.
There should absolutely be a "right to speak with a human", like a restaurant must pass health inspections, and other such things.
If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.
> If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.
If you're not paying for a service, are you even really a customer?
Hacker News is free. Do you really expect to be able to pick up the phone and call someone at Y Combinator to discuss your Hacker News account? Do you really think it's a good idea to make this a legal right?
Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account.
The whole idea is ridiculous. Unless you want most of the free internet to disappear completely (or move overseas) then it's a non-starter.
I am sure there are other cases I have missed, but this should give an idea. The problem will be in defining the rules specifically enough to address your concerns, yet vaguely enough that companies will not find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while violating the spirit.
Yes, Github would fall into the categories above. If, as a result, Microsoft decided they no longer wanted to provide non-paid accounts, then so be it. Their business model was unsustainable if it could only work by abusing their users. Some things of value may be lost.
This right to speak to a human should apply to non "web" companies too.
But, having the last resort option to speak to a human even when there is the ability to reach a human via other modalities can be useful.
There is a large "enterprise" company where the support folks always ignore everything I submit to the ticket, and then ask for all the things already provided. The only way to make progress with them is to get on a call. You are correct, it shouldn't be necessary-- but it is. And, if you do not have that last resort method, good luck. You may be stuck having to reply with the same information to a series of support folks without making progress on the case for weeks.
You seem to be implicitly assuming that the human on the phone has more power than the one behind a ticket system, but there's no reason to believe that. If the rule is that you need to provide specific information to recover your account, speaking to a human won't fix that when you don't have the information.
Clearly companies are en masse externalizing the costs of support onto users, and plainly not supporting users in fixing real problems with systems that are now required to live in society. It's at the stage where it's breaking our well functioning civil society and turning the first world into a third world kafkaesque dystopia.
I believe this is an economic race to the bottom and regulation is the answer to fixing it.
Here's the basis of an idea for how to fix the power dynamics so the market works properly
1) an ombusdman that can fine companies for user abuse of wasting user time, and redistribute the fine to the users 2) regulations of how long a company can on average keep users on hold, such as no more than 10 minutes to speak to a human, otherwise the speak to a human option is useless as the company makes it take longer than the median user can afford 3) regulations of threshold of acceptable customer complaints against a company, otherwise the company will make the service operators unable to actually fix anything as you note 4) a process with the ombusdman where when the number of complaints exceeds a threshold the company is fined and the fine distributed amongst the complaining users 5) some sanity check here to prevent user abuse, such as checking the average wait times, and confirming the customer service actually never fixes issues from a number of tests. The tests could be made in collaboration with a subset complaining customers.
That's a much, much, much bigger ask than just "speaking to a human".
It is not necessarily about power, it is about judgement. However clever or 'smart' the systems we design, there is still a vast gap between what automation can understand and what a human can understand. There are countless examples of a system only doing what it was told to do, where any human with an IQ higher than 80 would immediately recognize that the system is being incredibly dumb and wrong in this particular case.
There needs to be some last resort for the victims of those errors when there are real consequences to these mistakes.
It's hard for my not to wish you to have the kind of horrible automated ticket/service experience that makes everybody who had gone through it immediately understand the value of speaking to a human.
For instance I had an issue with my phone, I had to call support. I got redirected to 5 agents at 3 different companies before I finally started getting anywhere. Note some of those agents even gave me the wrong phone number and basically ended up taking me to some random unrelated companies. The end result was to start doing things over email (basically same as ticketing). After hours of phone calls and even longer on hold I'm finally (maybe) getting somewhere using emails. Still haven't gotten to the destination but maybe I will soon
Places where you "don't pay" still have certain regulations they need to pass.
If you give free food to people on the street (for some marketing event or charity or whatever) you still need to pass the cost of sanitary inspections and such.
>Or how about GitHub? If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account, their only option would be to disable all free accounts. If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account. The whole idea is ridiculous
They way you've framed it, perhaps. Or maybe not.
For one "If you wanted to use GitHub, you'd have to get a paid account" is not that ridiculous. It's how businesses worked since the dawn of time: people paid to get their services. If GitHub and every other "selling eyeballs" business is forced to come back to that, that's a win in my book.
Second, notice the strawman phrasing: "If they were obligated to provide phone support to anyone with an account". How about them being forced to giving it to anyone with a PAID account?
It's not a win for the hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries who cannot justify the costing. The free account model has massive value to an unimaginable number of people in the world, whereas to those like you and I it's of minor benefit.
goods/services I have exchanged funds for.
Additionally I would point out that Gmail makes plenty of money off our data and we all have written about or thought about how 'users are the product'.
Not sure why there's seemingly a heightened emotional response here.
If you don't pay for it: "You're not the customer, you're the product."
If you do pay for it: "You get what you pay for."
If you pay for it and have a contract specifying you will get it: "Not worth taking it to court."
If you do take it to court: "We must stop all these frivolous lawsuits!"
There is always an answer.
Like how the McDonald's coffee case was called frivolous even when it manifestly was not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
> The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman, suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region when she accidentally spilled coffee in her lap after purchasing it from a McDonald's restaurant. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.
[snip]
> Liebeck's attorneys argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald's. The attorneys presented evidence that coffee they had tested all over the city was served at a temperature at least 20°F (11°C) lower than McDonald's coffee. They also presented the jury with expert testimony that 190 °F (88 °C) coffee may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about three seconds and 180 °F (82 °C) coffee may produce such burns in about twelve to fifteen seconds.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Sure, it's convenient to have a free github account. I get it, I have one.
But what motivates github to give out free accounts? It is most definitely not that they are a benevolent company doing it as a free community service because they're nice. No, they do it for three main reasons:
1. Get individuals familiar with and hooked on the service so they'll promote it as a paid service at their workplace.
2. Build the network effect that helps them. "Everyone is on github", so you must be too.
3. Build a moat against up and coming possible competitors. If the baseline is free, it's harder for a newcomer to build revenue in that space to compete.
All of these are self-serving interestes, they help github (which is fine) but they also hinder potential competition (not good) and build a tendency towards monopolistic services (very bad).
Applying it to all businesses sounds like a bad idea, however. Financial institutions? Certainly. Healthcare companies? Makes all kinds of sense. But I don't see an ethical imperative for, say, Giphy (pre-acquisition) to provide that kind of support.
Giphy hosts user-generated content and encourages sharing.
Imagine someone uploads a gif of you and fake subtitles of racial slurs and calls to violence.
It starts trending. Your friends and families are asking you about it. You've submitted a request to remove it, but got no response yet. You can't get hold of any human at Giphy. You get a call from your company's HR.
Giphy definitely needs human customer support.
It may need (I don't know if they have this already, and I don't care to do the research) a "Report" button with various options including "Hate speech" and "Takedown Request: Moral Rights" and similar.
Think about it: A political image that's offensive to one side or another could generate hundreds of thousands of protest calls, if everyone had the right to speak to a human. I mean, if you knew you had this right, and you wanted them to take down an image, then of course you're going to demand the right to talk to someone. To say that you don't like the image.
Which they could just as easily handle with a Report button and a single review of the image by a human to check to see that it satisfies the ToS.
And that's just one image. Every one that goes viral could result in hundreds of thousands of calls.
No, it really just doesn't scale. If you give people the means to call you, you need to be able to handle way more people calling than you have customers, and some companies that provide a valuable service simply don't have the margin.
Additionally, you are not a customer of giphy. So now giphy has to reasonably have the amount of human customer support for non-customers? So, essentially everyone on earth?
Yes, you'll need more staff depending on your business' impact on people's lives, regardless if they are "customers" or not. If you have so many complaints you can't pay enough people to deal with it, you should not be in business.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/16/pornhu...
Why do you choose such a company to do business with at the first place?
> Part of me thinks (perhaps naively) if I had the ability to speak with a real person over the phone, we could sort this out instead of constant emails or creating tickets that go into a black hole. As more companies outsource, automate, or severely cut their customer service department, there needs to be some kind of pressure to stop these frustrating experiences from happening.
Look at Dell or HP customer service. Google, Github or Digital ocean will become the same. Yes, you will never get the product designer or systems or devops engineer from those companies. The customer service will repeat the same thing million times over. (I lost Apple account, and unlike Google, I could reach Apple but they just repeated the same thing. (i.e) password is wrong; not our problem).
Also note that if there is direct connection to devops or dev, people ask silly questions to waste time. (i.e) These companies pay just $5000 per year to run their entire business with profits 100X and expect $10,000 per month DevOps will troubleshoot their problems.
> Voting with our dollars doesn't work when these companies are so integrated with our lives.
Example please. As long as it is not w e a p o n s all is wide open market.
This has evolved to the stage where it's endemic in what used to be well functioning societies, that day to day civic economic interactions are now broken, which is what the posted talked about.
The answer is regulating to avoid this race to the buttom.
To use another example - there are various consumer protection laws in the UK and EU. They cover all sorts of things like guaranteeing safety standards and requiring companies to accept returns. They have arisen over time to cover situations where consumers aren't capable of making the decision (e.g. safety which is complex or you might not find out for 10 years) or it's not something companies compete on but it's something you want for customers (e.g. returns).
Different political approaches, such as the more liberal one in the US leaves it more up to competition, the idea being that competition provides for consumers and it's easier to grow and operate businesses so the economy flourishes and everyone does well that way.
I'd suggest that it's not a perfect system and that you have to fill in the gaps. This is why America is rediscovering the union - in theory companies compete for the job market. If one job is incredibly shitty then employees can leave and get another one. This should provide competitive advantage to companies to make jobs non shitty and companies that don't can't hire and die out. In practice, for reasons that I don't fully understand, that hasn't worked out. Covid has been a trigger for some movement here and therefore some pressure, but it hasn't solved all the problems. Instead an alternate approach can work where employees can bargain collectively.
For me, that answer is a clear no, in that you are not (and should not be) guaranteed that the market provides you such a choice nor does it offer you the choice to deny others the freedom to choose GSuite as it sits today in features and pricing.
:shrug:
Are you 'side hustling' to make money and thus having customers?
I think this would probably be addressed in a minimum size (headcount) before the regulation is required, which makes sense because the problem is businesses scaling their customer base and scope beyond their physical resources.
Here are some real world examples that would hold up pre-current state: Club: even if I dont pay for a beverage or cover, I am in fact a customer. Shown by the fact that if I get injured at said club, or other events occur the responsible parties are managing/own the club.
Print shop: Go into a shop, pay for a thing or service, are a customer.
There was a time, that many of us can remember, where automated phone services were nascent, there was no IVR and there was definitely no complex intent recognition paired with sentiment analysis.
The smallest little business needed a phone. When it rang, they answered it. Those businesses afforded it and frankly the min. wage has barely gone up since then so a business, one that exchanges a service/place/goods/my information for money, can afford to do it.
I am in full agreement with my perception of OP's comment.
What do you think about implementing this with a minimum organization size? I just do not see this same problem happening with small firms, generally they are easy to get in touch with. I wouldn't want them regulated unless the nature of the problem changed.
I'd make the discrepancy of revenue generation because otherwise a company may just find itself full of contractors and not enough FTEs to qualify for having this 'right to speak with a human' (like Uber).
wdyt
This 100%. It reminds me of the similar issue of zero-hour contracts and living wages. One person I know complained that putting restrictions on zero hour contacts, and upping the amount that he would have to pay workers, would mean he couldn't hire any (for his extremely early-stage startup with no investment(!)).
In a similar vein, the answer is the same -- if you can't afford to pay employees, don't hire them.
And this applies more generally than either of our examples -- if a company cannot afford to do something ethically, then it shouldn't do it at all. A business that cannot survive when forced to comply with the bare minimum of ethical practices deserves to fail. You cannot simultaneously believe in a capitalist market without embracing with open arms, the failure of companies that couldn't stick it.
I think you underestimate how many services you rely on that wouldn't be able to survive with a legal requirement that they were required to take calls from any human that wanted to contact them. Presumably those services are useful to you and you wouldn't want them to be closed down, yes? And similarly, you wouldn't want to be paying the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center to deal with not only customers but potentially affected non-customers (as in the Giphy example in the parallel comment thread).
You're estimating what, that every customer would on average spend at at least an hour a month on the phone with each and every service they do business with?
There is a reason that most companies make it hard to talk to a human before you've already exhausted all other support channels.
Make something like that a right and people will use it. Maybe 99% of the time you won't need a human for a particular service in a month, but there will be users who are on the phone every day, maybe multiple times per day.
And your monthly fee would need to exist to pay for the users who abuse the right.
If you can't afford to work a job, don't take it.