Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

> Not having an easy fall back to a human is also the error which a lot of silicon valley companies seem to fall into

it is explicitly cheaper and scales, to automate all response. Companies that paid humans to do customer service have been crushed by the scale of the new companies. A dozen hundred-year-old retailers in the USA are closing all their stores, they had hundreds of people making sales and doing customer service, while earning a living for themselves and their families.

View on HN

It's cheaper but ineffective. The trick is to use automation as much as possible and not a drop more. Excellent customer service agents are actually helpful for this. The agents you have aren't mindless drones, they're people and they don't want to do yet another stupid call where they explain that button X does thing Y, even though it's labelled X, they can gladly explain what needs improving because they're interacting with your customers all day - and then you can fix it. Cherish these people.

My good bank (First Direct) has done really well at this. I can call them about anything 24/7, a human answers about as quickly as a person would answer their own phone, maybe 5-10 seconds, not long enough for one of those stupid "We're very busy" messages. But I rarely talk to them because all routine stuff just works correctly so I don't need to. I called them once to ask what happens if I need a whole lot of cash right soon (since they don't have physical locations, the answer was for very large amounts I need to give a lot of notice but a courier brings me the cash) and decades ago I called them because I wanted my debit card to work in the ATMs for other banks (remember when it didn't? Maybe you're too young). Also I called them to transfer money to buy my current home because that's too much money to be authorised by a web form apparently.

You pay your bank a lot more than you pay Amazon, on a margin basis.

Current accounts in the UK are pretty much always loss leaders to lure people into the bank’s other products such as credit cards or mortgages. The margin on the CA alone is most likely negative.

First Direct is a bit of a niche though.Customer service is expensive because 90% of it is dealing with the same stupid questions over and over again. You will get to the point in any business where it isn't feasible to pay human beings to cope with this.

The point is to find a way to have the 90% questions answered by a machine, and the 10% by an expert human. And LLMs are (another step towards) making it hard to argue that this isn't feasible or isn't a good experience.

> Companies that paid humans to do customer service have been crushed by the scale of the new companies.

I agree in general, but Amazon is the exception—they've gotten to their dominant positions in online retail and cloud compute with strong support and great customer service. I'd go so far as to say it's their secret sauce. For them to go the route of all other megacorps and banish their paying customers to automation hell seems very "day two."[0]

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon...

the other way to see this is that the "new companies" are doing loss leading, do not actually make a profit on their retail businesses, are trying to gain an illegal monopoly by putting competitors out of business by doing illegal business practices and dumping not just products and services but dumping entire industries on the market for below cost.

They were crushed because a lot of them didn't do the "minimum"

> hey had hundreds of people making sales and doing customer service

Yeah, instead of a website with prices and an easy way to order

And yes I've known "mom and pop" stores that have just that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com