Tell HN: Make your company have a contact page

> I want to help them get their business online

I'm not meetup but I do get a lot of sales calls where people want to help me with my business, and those are my least favorite calls to receive. I do have to put my number out there publicly and one of the downsides to doing that is I get a lot of sales calls. When I get a call on my work number, and I say "hello", and the other person is from someplace I never heard of, the first thing I ask is "is this a sales call?" And they never say it is, of course, they say they want to help me with my business.

So: yes, Meetup SHOULD make it easier for people to contact them, but they're probably avoiding your particular type of call. Unless, of course, you want to help them for free, in which case... why would you want to do that.

I thought it is fairly obvious. As a company, you want to avoid any type of communication where the end result is that you spend money, and maximize the flow in the channels that actually bring in some money.

I was recently surprised to learn that MattressFirm will only let you use their phone number for sales, not anything to do with an existing order. There is a chat, but no email. The contact form doesn't even have a free text entry, you can only choose the general topic and then presumably wait for a reply to even start the conversation.

I do not like the trend of companies being difficult to contact and identify at all. Looking for bed frames online, numerous sites had no identifiable information about the corporate identity of the business, ownership, or contact info. And then there's the stuff on Amazon were literally no one knows where it is coming from.

For me at least, having a real contact method is a significant indicator of trustworthiness and quality, whether or not I need to use it.

> numerous sites had no identifiable information about the corporate identity of the business, ownership, or contact info

That part is mandatory in some EU countries (at least France and Germany) - legal information, as well as at least an address (usually also an email and phone). It makes it easier to know what you're dealing with.

Ah, so that’s why German websites often have a “impressium” section.

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

I just bought an expensive mattress from them and had a problem. I googled their name and my town and called them and got immediately through to the store itself.

A friend of mine worked for one of those companies that automates company phone calls, where you talk to a robot voice and select numbers on the keypad. They said that the company did research into customer satisfaction, and found this is achieved by minimizing the number of key presses to reach a human.

They advise(d) all of their customers new and old, gave them templates for their customer service process, and _all_ of them (big names) chose to make speaking to a human as difficult as possible. They then of course complained that customers were having a negative interaction with the system, but refused to make it easier to speak to a human.

This seems to be the way things are going now - and for this reason I favour smaller, local companies and people over larger services, even if their offerings are not as good and the prices higher. I know that I can at any time contact these people and they will try to help me. That's worth a lot.

I've worked on IVR systems and everyone involved was already acutely aware that most customers prefer speaking to a human as quickly as possible. The problem is that call center time is crazy expensive, especialy competent call center reps who can actually solve problems.

So businesses have a choice: charge a premium to cover support costs or minimize their call center costs and compete on price. (Or somewhere in between.)

Personally I like working for and dealing with companies that go the former route even if things cost more.

But for the companies that choose to be price competitive it's not necessarily a bad business decision to make your most demanding and expensive customers unhappy and send them to your competitors.

Yeah broadly speaking there are two classes of customer:

1) ones who want to talk to a human as soon as something goes wrong

2) ones who try literally everything possible to avoid talking to a human, and only reach out when there is absolutely no programmatic exit from whatever weird edge case they are in

If you make the experience good for (2), you spend an enormous amount of money on (1). If you cut down on the wasted money for (1) (ie, the people whom automated phone trees actually help), you make life miserable for (2).

There's no automatic way to differentiate the two types... yet. But I can dream.

Before I permanently cancelled cable TV in 2009 I remember the TV remote had instructions printed on the back for first line troubleshooting. It said make sure your TV and the cable box have power cables plugged in, and that the TV is set to the right input. That was probably their #1 phone call.

I think more companies will start charging for human support and troubleshooting in order to incentivize customers to stick with the IVR phone tree unless they really need a human.

That could be a subscription, warranty, price per call minute, or something else. (And if they don't charge they'll make you pay with your time by keeping you on hold.)

That would allow people who know they need a human to just choose it up front, but it will mean paying more.

I think yours is a very key point. People are not all nice: they're either easy or difficult to work with.

Having done some customer support for various businesses, many customers (even the ones experiencing legitimate problems that aren't their fault) are reasonably polite, don't waste time asking pointless questions that can easily be answered with 30 seconds of looking at our site, and are relatively pleasant to serve.

It's a handful of customers that have contributed the majority of pointless customer service headaches.

> They call and ask the most trivial questions that are available right on the homepage without even trying to get the info themselves.

> They call us from a loud area and complain vigorously when we can't hear them or they can't hear us.

> They want to talk about their life and tell us stories from their day. In some cases, I sympathize if they're older or something that they want to have a couple of minutes of smalltalk, but there's younger people who think nothing of trying to occupy half an hour or more of a business's time for their own ego and pleasure.

> They outright lie about things that happen to try and get free stuff.

> They threaten with chargebacks to try and get free stuff (especially when they namedrop that they purchased on an American Express card).

> You'd be surprised how many people contact businesses they never even purchased from, confusing us for some other company they used, and being irate that we never delivered their goods and occupy a lot of our time providing incomplete information trying to look up their account.

Better UX and business processes can help to a point, but certain people are incompetent and/or think they're the center of the world and will be displeased almost no matter how well you serve them.

To some extent, I understand why in some cases mega-corporations try and make it confusing and friction-filled to contact them. If they actually did offer good support to everybody the way most of us are adult enough to handle, they'd drown under the weight of dealing with the confused morons and difficult people.

I don't disagree there is a cost trade-off. I still can't help but feel there should be a solution.

Of course as tech people we think "AI". I know there has been some work on chat bots to "help" with this, but they end up in infinite loops when the topic become too complex. Still I think this is a little better than listening to queue music in the hope you get through to somebody.

When it comes to human time, cost per hour is fixed, a human can only process so many calls an hour and decision making is mentally taxing. I don't think the answer comes from trying to make these people more productive.

You can look for "cheaper humans", i.e. non-local labour, but that comes with other issues. Language barriers, working hours, etc.

There's just no nice ways out of this mess.

I think in the medium-term timeframe AI will handle talking with the customer as the first tier of interaction to collect the basic details of the problem and provide initial troubleshooting steps -- the kind of stuff where you can tell a rep is reading off a script. Then a more skilled human support rep will be on hand for cases where escalation is necessary.

I think it'll be generations before the second tier is replaced by AI.

Related: A proper company needs to have individuals (founders/management team) that publicly stand behind it. We don't need necessarily need email-addresses/phone-numbers, but we actually do need to know the names of the people who are responsible.

This is one of the very few things I like about German laws relating to tech (I'm not German): They absolutely do require an "Imprint" section in every web site with such information.

It makes sense, at the very least for sites where you sign up and share your personal details and/or buy something.

Aside: I am appalled by how many big sites have broken core flows on their websites for days. I could not reset my password on UPS.com for days, there was an "internal server error" so it must've shown on some dashboard. I had to create a new account. Does no one monitor these sites and breakages on important functions like users not being able to pay for a delivery? Whoever's running tech there, at meetup, or anywhere else they need to change careers.

Every time I click a contact link that directs to a knowledge base homepage I die a little inside.

I literally found the ticket system in seconds by googling "meetup contact" (second result for me). Not sure what this post is about to be honest.

I usually search Twitter and meetup seems to have a dedicated Twitter account for support. Sure, having a place to contact support from their website would be ideal when things go south on their website, but meeting people where they are - on Twitter for example - is also very common practice and helps others about the known issues/progress at the same time.

Their whois also provides a form to contact them.

https://whois-webform.markmonitor.com/whois/meetup.com

While we are here, it's 2022, did you know you can make your software send email from addresses that can also receive emails back? This whole "donotreply" business really should have died in the 90s. You want people to reply to your automated emails that make no sense! It is the crucial context!

Or if they don’t want to change the sender probably due to quality/spam issues, just setting a reply-to is extremely simple and basically solves the problem.

In the before times, support sites had IVR and absolutely no one liked it.

Now they have voice recognition: "OK, you want 'help'. What kind of 'help' do you want?" It is not even remotely like talking to a human.

I hate that even more. A poll about "which is worse?" would be entertaining, if nothing else.

That's a very nice thought... helping meetup.com debug their app. But they're sort of like the pakleds of the tech industry. I spent several hours a couple years ago isolating some bugs, but their response is they wouldn't fix their code. The bug I found only impacted 10k to 50k users so it wasn't worth fixing. It's probably time to replace meetup.com with an open source tool + generally agreed upon naming conventions individuals or organizations can run to achieve the same ends.

Or maybe this demonstrates the utility of a "Contace Page as a Service" tool. Companies already outsource their jobs pages to 3rd parties, why not their contact pages?

I've been in a situation where I notice a small bug on a site or a copy typo and have no way to contact its creators to tell them about it. I think there should always be at least a general email or something.

+1

Two recent experiences:

ASUS has Contact CEO page. They sent a response email asking for more details, which I sent. No response back whatsoever after that in spite of me reminding via 5-6 emails by now. This has been on a 'Premium' Warranty support request.

Wells Fargo insists on contacting via phone; does not provide email or web-based form to contact. Their official toll-free phone number for India seems always switched off. (I have reported this to US support, am hoping that they would help.)

https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

I came here by:

Click Help in the footer

Click Technical Issues

Click a random article

Click Have questions? Get help at the bottom of each article.

https://answers.gethuman.com/Meetup-com/How-Do-I-Contact-Cus...

have you considered that Meetup.com knows that their site is/was down?

That doesn't negate OP's original point that they should make it possible to contact them. What if he had found an error on an obscure page that they might not have noticed, or a security hole instead?

security.txt file in the well-known?

Anybody really use that?

If you have meetup organizers paying you hundreds of dollars per year, the least you can do is have a support person (or a bot) fire out a canned email response to the effect of “we’re aware of the issue and working to fix it.”

We just have a link to "chat" that takes you to a bot. We want your MONEY. t.goog

ehhh pingdom?

> I want to help them get their business online but they have made it nearly impossible

And you think you are qualified to do this because...why exactly? This is stunningly arrogant. Meetup and any other reasonably sized site at the very least is monitoring their HTTP response codes and some random person on the internet telling them "hey, your site is down" isn't helpful at all.

Frankly, you don't even realize that a lack of contact page is by design and that nearly every business does as much as it can to minimize the cost of support interactions with its customers as much as possible. Many SaaS companies have so little per-user profit margin (if there's a profit margin at all) that they simply cannot afford to have people calling, emailing, and snail-mailing them. Generally speaking you see customer support start out as being fairly good if informal as a company grows, and as time goes on, the company locks down more and more of its customer contact.

Uber is a great example. They went from having a hotline listed on the website for 'emergencies', to only providing the number in-app if you had a ride in progress or recently completed, to then implementing a system where the app would trigger a call to you...again, only if you'd recently been on a ride.

> Meetup and any other reasonably sized site at the very least is monitoring their HTTP response codes

Perhaps they should consider taking action based on that information. Meetup's website is hurting, and OP decided to assume it was because Meetup didn't know there was a problem. This isn't arrogant, it's the charitable approach, because the alternative is that Meetup can't keep a website running.

Uber is a perfect example of a company whose support story got progressively shittier as their market penetration increased. They cut out customer support to save a fraction of their budget and they can get away with it because their userbase is fucked without them, not because they're some magical management wizards who have secret access to fundamental truths.

If you can't support your customers you're bad at your business. CS failure is not something to put on a pedestal.

Its not arrogant. I've worked with some pretty giant organisations that have their monitoring wrong but think its right.