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I think these companies are just fundamentally not profitable, and they have zero incentives to care, even less than the systems they tried to replace. My DoorDash account is now flagged because a driver delivered to a completely different house, and I had the gall to report it as not delivered. I even texted the driver after they sent a picture (which verifies it as not my house), but they didn't respond. Now, my DoorDash account has all sorts of weird things happen to it, as if my account is a fraud account, even though their own systems verify my report. The GPS coordinates associated with the delivery email also show it was at a completely different address. The DoorDash support just ended tha chat when I chatted in about the subsequent issues.

These modern day, purely software-based companies don't care about customers because they don't have to. They abstract away the customer and the customer experience to pure statistics. The best (i.e., worst) example of this is Amazon. It takes somewhere around 5 minutes to get to an actual human after you are barraged and belittled by their Alexa chat assistant. The chat assistant will condescendingly tell you to give it accurate information, otherwise it will give poor resolutions. Oh, I'm sorry Amazon "forgot" to refund me $700+ for an item that was successfully returned and they "forgot" to encode this into their system. And there are some instances where it will refuse to connect you to an agent.

That happened to me with Amazon. Driver decided for some weird random reason to deliver my entire monthly order to a strange address two blocks away.

Amazon insisted that was impossible because their deliveries are GPS fenced within a small distance of the address.

However the delivery photo didn't match the apartment of any of my previous 100+ deliveries or any apartment in my complex for that matter.

They made me fill out by hand an incident report for every single item in the box (like a dozen) before they would give me a refund and now my account seems silently flagged for fraud where every CSR interaction is difficult and tedious.

I finally found a matching photo of the random apartment by browsing google street maps and sent it to them but they could care less.

The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).

Oh also, all my Amazon deliveries since then now come via USPS and not their own drivers/contracted

I'm sure that is beyond frustrating. These companies just truly do not care, in an actually agressive way.

> The problem with a company so big it has millions of customers is that you become easily replaceable once some poorly coded automated system decides it's so and no-one can override it (or is willing).

Yep, I edited my comment with additional Amazon elaboration, probably while you were responding, because they're the worst. Haha. They didn't refund me properly for an expensive returned item and ended up giving me a "one-time exception" for money they owed me. It's not only just frustrating and mindnumbing, it's like getting slapped in the face. Sort of like those robot patrol cops in Elysium. And the silent flagging you described is what happened with my DoorDash account.

We are heading more and more into a "computer says no" dystopia. How many times per day are we already told things like "the system won't let me do that", "I'm not sure why the system says that", "that's weird", "just wait and it'll sort itself out", etc.

We have however many lines of code running that has little proper encoding of domains and required knowledge, but the systems are treated as the single source of action and truth.

How nice would it be if AI chat replaced virtually all customer service agents, but those same people were employed to resolve escalations with the authority to do so?

The problem is that these companies are so large that they can only handle customer service with automated error-prone systems, but are also so large that if you get blackballed by them you are in a real jam because they’re the only vendor in their market.

Those are their problems, though, not ours. These corporations have become incredibly adept at making their problems their customers' and others' problems.

They have even been farming out R&D and testing to customers and unwitting participants, such as the self-driving car companies and even Apple with features like their fall detection flooding 911 call centers with false positives.

FYI, after a DoorDash driver marks a delivery as complete they cannot see any new messages from that customer.

What is the point of sending the photo to the customer then if the customer can't respond to it and DoorDash doesn't pay attention to it themselves?

Next time skip the bullshit and do a credit card chargeback.

For the people building the product, suggestion boxes don’t hit the same way as actually using it. I think the employee driver badge is super corporate but also a good move if you want to improve the product. At Microsoft this was called dogfooding, and for pre-release software it was painful, but an important part of the culture.

I notice this all the time with software. I tend to keep hardware for 5-8 years, and by the end of that window, apps and websites start feeling sluggish. Of course they do: all the devs have modern hardware and don’t notice how crappy the experience is on old hardware. You can tell them, but they don’t feel the pain and their empathy is limited by how much it actually impacts the bottom line.

Several people have told me that Bertrand Serlet used to have Core OS engineers run with very low ram and slow computers so they’d feel the pain. Any 90’s-early 2000s MacOS engineers around to confirm?

There aren’t many three sigma customers, and it’s cheaper to drop you then fix the bug.

You might like the short film “Please Hold” for a more nuanced take.

By three sigma customer, I meant that I've taken thousands of Uber rides in three years, and tipped very well. They have completely ignored what a positive outlier the account was when deciding to abandon it.

In triage, my customer segment is one you'd want to save. At least thinking rationally as a business owner.

> How can this happen? How many other three-sigma customers are mysteriously ghosted off Uber cold-turkey? How can a public company survive with this brittle a system?

If you have ever worked in one of these move fast companies, you know that nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense.

Fundamentally, these companies are not set up with the right mission and the right incentives. Doing good by customers and employees is not a thing.

The suggestion that this has something to do with "these move fast companies" is off the mark. I can tell you about tiny local businesses with about dozen employees, maybe less, whose owners' don't-care attitude has the same effect.

My point was that among public companies, there is a class of companies that move fast and quick, as opposed to businesses that are slower and cautious. The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone. Slower companies go through ups and downs in their stock prices all the time and don't blink much because they want to be around for a long time.

> The slower companies by design are slow because they care more about long term value than the next quarter alone.

This is something that is at odds with my firsthand experience here, too. Your previous characterization:

> nobody in the company cares. Every single person there is just doing enough for a promotion or to avoid a pip. Quarter after quarter, they are just focusing on BS metrics such as tickets resolved, lines of code and other such nonsense

... also applies to them—i.e., large, inefficient orgs that have nothing in common with the move-fast approach. Slow companies are slow because their size and approach to hiring/retention means they're stupidly inefficient. They end up with ossified corporate and social structures that the defenders don't even understand. (Ones that aren't a form of redundancy or the result of other wisdom, but because tons of people in the org, including leadership, can't see beyond the end of the shift, let alone to the same quarter the next year, and can't be bothered to care, either).

Completely out of luck, I switched entirely to Careem

It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening, which would also explain why nobody's telling you what happened. (Not trying to excuse Uber or "the system" here.)

This is a very interesting take, thank you. Is there "denied party screening" for things such as Uber passenger rides or food delivery? I have the same exact experience (almost identical) with Grubhub+ when ordering food, though just with these vendors (Uber, Grubhub) and no others.

What vendor does this, is it possible to correct one's profile? Also, is there any general redress mechanism?

The whole thing is strange since Uber and Grubhub dont have any real identification on you except phone/email/creditcard name -- is that even enough to do denied party screening and blacklist someone?

Also, anyone know the rationale to conduct denied party screening on food orders?

> It sounds like you were in the Middle East... my guess is that you got flagged by their denied party screening

Can you fill in what that means? Why is the Middle East relevant and what is 'denied party screening'?

It means their name matches someone else's name on a US government watch list, or that they are considered a terrorist or are sanctioned. The Middle East has a large number of these individuals, as does Russia, and North Korea.

For me, I have 2 phones: the one with all the google software removed, in which uber and lyft wont work. The phone which has all the google software: lyft works, uber wont. Same experience with uber error reporting as you said. They dont exist. Message received loud and clear though, I'll just use taxis first and lyft second and uber never.