Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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