Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

I bet 99.99% of people who complain about not having a human to talk don't want to pay a single dollar for that human.

Louis Rossmann talks about this in the context of his old electronics supply company. One of the reasons he started that company was that the suppliers he had previously worked with had horrible customer service, and a lot of people he knew professionally complained about it. Thought he found a niche in the market.

So long story short he created a supply company with dedicated customer support, but his prices were correspondingly higher (those extra salaries have to come from somewhere). Most people just went with the cheapest option every time, one of the reasons that business failed.

People are stupid. They don't value certain value adds like good support until it becomes important. But more often than not by that point its too late. People are short sighted and value price over everything else.

This is ultimately why consumer protection laws exist. A person is smart, people are stupid and "the market" can't be expected to always act in its own best interests.

> professionally complained

If I told my cost center that I went with a more expensive vendor because "they were friendlier", that would pretty much open an investigation...

> I bet 99.99% of people who complain about not having a human to talk don't want to pay a single dollar for that human.

Guaranteed.

Would the people championing this idea be willing to pay $10/month for their Hacker News account because the company was obligated to provide real human support to everyone?

Or $10/month to GitHub just to be able to have a GitHub account?

Or if you plan to start a website or internet company, do you really want to have to put your personal phone number on the project to comply with such a law?

I feel like this was solved decades ago with toll-numbers (vs. the 800-* toll-free numbers). Want to call? it costs $2.00 per minute.

I agree, just charge whoever needs the service. People won't pay premium for support as an insurance. When something go wrong, they'll happily pay.

Probably not but if we do pay the 10$ a month i want that support

With all of the recent stories of people being locked out of their Google Accounts with no recourse, it would be great if Google offered one-time customer support for, say, $50 that would work with you to restore access to your accounts.

They may not make money hand-over-fist but I bet there's enough need for the service that it would be self-supporting.

If there ever was a shortfall in a given quarter, maybe companies could now dial up the strictness on suspicious account suspensions?

And when they dial it up a bit too much and people start moving to some new platform in frustration, they can just use those service fees to buy that!

Supporting evidence: you could hire a virtual (human) assistant to drive the ticket email process forward for you. "Nobody" does.

I can't speak for everybody, but the main reason I don't do this is that I've done it and it created additional work rather than saving any.

That has been my experience as well, by and large. The "virtual assistant" thing propagated by the 4-hour work week crowd only works under very specific circumstances.

Fair, though I wonder if that's indicative of the problem not being as simple as just explain it to a human.

Once one realizes this, one sees the value of paying for goods and services. Being the customer and not the product. The next step is seeking out the best service providers and rewarding them with dollars.

I totally agree and think this way. It's just that we are 0.01% of the market. Or, can we even call a "market" such a small group of people? We might be thousands, perhaps dozens of thousands, or even a hundred thousand. Yet, this isn't enough to sustain the sheer amount of services we'd require in our modern lives.

It's pretty hard to avoid being the product regardless of whether you're the customer.

I would be thrilled to have it taken out of the c-suite bonuses for organizations that large. Without hesitation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com