Ask HN: Is anything being done to improve customer service?
It seems to have reached a breaking point, where a lot of companies and services simply has no capacity/ability/willingness to fix customer problems.
I speculate that economy of scale is somewhat to blame for this; After all, if you process hundreds of thousands of customers per day, it makes no difference if a a few edge-cases crashes and burns, it's simply not a good investment to fix them, because, unless they are extraordinarily famous (and probably not even then), no amount of noise they can make will actually impact your profits.
It seems that aside from the most absolutely trivial of problems, companies and services are entirely unwilling to fix it, that is, if they even have a human being that can be reached in the first place.
Is anyone working on finding the causes for this degeneration and identifying what can be done to rectify it?
I'm starting to develop the opinion that some law should be in place to enforce a level of customer-service from any company that operates for-profit.. probably even have some goverment instance to which one can file complaints with companies to get them to help you.
Edit: This post was prompted by the fact that I've now been "in queue" for 1 hour and 20 minutes, trying to reach the customer service of what used to be a public-driven postal service (but is now, as is painfully evident, a privately owned company), to try and find out why my package has been held in customs for almost a month with nothing happening. Along with several Kafkaesque encounters with flight booking companies.