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Comment by itishappy | Hacker News Reader

I think the bigger issue here is companies (ab)using social media for their services. How did anyone ever think this was a viable customer service solution? It's publicly visible, you do not control the platform, impersonation has always been a risk (Musk made things worse, but the flaws were already there), and at some point you're going to need to share personal info so you're going to need to funnel people to your actual platform anyway!

Are these companies now planning to move customer service to Facebook and TikTok, or was this always insane?

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> How did anyone ever think this was a viable customer service solution?

It was pretty great actually, I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone. It was a pretty well-known approach.

They do provide some support through Facebook via Messenger, but it was never as popular. TikTok isn't a great medium for this kind of thing but if it helps them reach their customers, why not?

[edit] > ...and at some point you're going to need to share personal info so you're going to need to funnel people to your actual platform anyway!

Not in my experience, they just moved to DMs.

> I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone

That's the problem, not the solution. Why the hell was this the case? I guess because it was public.

Either way it sucks. Obviously (good) CS should be via a private channel.

Customer service issues generally get escalated when someone starts advocating against your company, as there is now a tangible cost involved in not fixing the issue. Companies saw people hurting their reputation on twitter and wanted to be able to respond to prevent and minimize damage. It makes sense that if someone complains publicly, you would want to respond publicly, at least initially.

Initial contact would be public. Followup would be private. Much easier, not needing to create yet another account on some CS site, and a much better app experience via DM on Twitter.

> Either way it sucks.

Nah, it was great. Lots of people really liked it.

Keep in mind, it generally wasn't the only option for support, but an option you could choose.

> Nah, it was great. Lots of people really liked it.

That's great! Except now it's gone and you've spent years conditioning all of your users to complain publicly about any issues instead of using your customer support service, and you've just lost the ability to send replies. Is that a bug? Who knows! You can't fix it either way.

Says who? Dozens or hundreds or thousands of people putting pressure on a company to act right when they screw over a customer is good, actually.

Problem is then company is going to only act if they are HN front page or enough people tweet and put pressure then it is not a viable solution for most of us without the social media connections to make that happen.

Also forcing people to use a social media platform to raise a support ticket for something completely unrelated to media or even tech is not a good thing. Not every user of a product (say a kitchen appliance) is going to even know how to use social media

Good for us, that's for sure, but the companies may see things differently.

> Obviously (good) CS should be via a private channel

Exactly the opposite. The interaction being public keeps companies (a bit more) accountable and that can do wonders.

CS is like publicity; in the modern era you need to reach lots of channels, because your customers may not prefer to dial a phone.

The companies are all hostile towards customers finding out how to privately contact them in order to cut their customer support.

That trend started before the trend of smartphones/texting/mobile.

Or you can also take the Google approach and minimize and obfuscate channels for support communication.

> It was pretty great actually, I got far better service from airlines via Twitter (RIP) than I did by phone.

Oh, I totally believe it, and that is exactly my point. X offering the best-in-class UX for customer service is great for users but (in my opinion) an egregious failure for the companies affected.

Companies are choosing to operate a critical portion of their business using somebody else's infrastructure with no contractual obligations! X is not responsible for architecting their platform to suit a service they do not offer and that nobody pays for.

> Not in my experience, they just moved to DMs.

I'm horrified but unsurprised that people are willing to share their personal info such as trip itineraries (hopefully not credit card info) with X. I am surprised (still horrified) companies choose this too.

To be clear, I am not a Musk apologist. I will never have an X account, and that's yet another issue with the current system. I can now expect to be treated as a second class citizen to airlines unless I opt to share my details with Musk.

> I'm horrified but unsurprised that people are willing to share their personal info such as trip itineraries (hopefully not credit card info) with X

Some will even share these things with the whole world!

In a lot countries outside the US this kind of customer support happens on Whatsapp.

This wasn't the companies' idea.

You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies, so you had to just publicly blast them on Twitter.

Their fear of bad PR outweighed their fear of spending money to support users.

Yeah, I remember during one of Mojang's migrations I lost access to my Minecraft account. Nothing happened from my communications through support. The only reason I have a twitter account was to whine at a Mojang representative and it actually resulted in the problem being solved.

I hate it.

“It just goes to show, if you want to get anything done in this country you have to scream until you’re blue in the mouth.” - The Parrot Sketch, MP

Dang I need to do that. Microsoft killed my Minecraft account with their forced migration.

It was the companies' idea to make it so convoluted to reach a human that the default became public shaming

> You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies

Not to derail you but I have an anecdote. I had an issue with my Google Fi account. Support was a breeze. I completed a web form that said "call me" and within a minute or two I was on the phone with a very helpful human who actually fixed my problem.

I also have an anecdote.

My brother is mentally ill, and he hadn't set up 2fa on his Gmail account. It asked him to do that, and then it somehow got flagged as suspicious activity.

I spent the next 6 months in a hellish loop trying to recover it. I was even able to forward them the invite email I sent him from ~2004 when Gmail was invite-only to prove that he was the owner of the account.

It was never reviewed by a human. I would have paid $5,000 to talk to a human for 10 minutes to resolve it. It was a devastating problem because there were so many accounts and documents we were locked out of. It delayed his mental health care for months because of a similarly Kafkaesque issue with his hospital.

I finally got a human to respond by tweeting to Google about it. They informed me that they couldn't help unless I logged in the Twitter with the email address he couldn't access and then tweeted at them.

We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.

So your anecdote means basically nothing when Google casually allows people's lives to be destroyed because they were ignorant enough to trust Google's word on anything.

> We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.

Working exactly as designed, requiring you to be rich and powerful enough to have the influence necessary to get the help you need.

Google employs just the right amount of support to ensure that they do not have to interface with the poor.

Yep this is scary, and is absolutely one of my fears. Years ago I forgot my Google password and couldn't follow the normal recovery path for some reason. (Forgot my backup email password? I forget.) I had to go through a lot of automated hoops and weird verification steps but eventually I broke through.

Absolutely terrifying.

That wasn't Google's customer support though. IIRC, they initially partnered with Sprint to handle the infrastructure and support (and later one of the other companies, but that was after I stopped caring). That's who you were talking to.

If they are outsourcing, is it any different than outsourcing software? In the end the person on the line represents Google.

It is different because literally no other service they offer has even basic customer support. My friend's agency was buying $1M/year of ads and couldn't get his account unblocked after it was flagged for no reason. Google admitted it was flagged by accident and just put him in an endless cycle of "we're working on it" emails.

Depends. Can they actually represent Google? If you call, saying you cannot access your account, will they help you or just refer you to Google? If you call and ask about AdWords, will they transfer you to an AdWords representative or refer you to Google. White label support is much different than outsourced support.

If the person on the line can help me with my other Google account issues then sure, but that's probably not the case.

It wasn't their idea, but it was their choice. They chose to support this, now they're choosing to stop supporting it. Surprise, that's causing even more issues.

I understand this was a business decision, I just think it was always a risky one.

The nice thing about funneling people through twitter is that you can discriminate based on following. Is this an influencer who will create a shitstorm if we don't do anything? Better suck up to them. Is it a loner who has no chance of creating a fuss? Just ignore them.

Which is why you see people coming to HN to get help when Google inevitably locks them out of their account with no customer support to be found.

That’s not an abuse of the platform. It was one of the main use cases for many people. Getting support from an official account is much more convenient than creating an account on some bespoke platform.

And if you’re hung up on the “social media” aspect just know that getting customer support and chatting with your friends are some of the main use cases of the Chinese super apps Musk wants to emulate.

Companies would rather not provide customer service at all to many categories, as many customers statistically are cheaper to churn than serve.

So you don’t need to funnel them. In many cases the ideal resolution is they go away.

It makes sense to go where your customers are.

If I have a question about a product and I see that the company selling it is on Twitter, I'll tag them and ask them. It takes less than a minute and I'll get feedback in an app that I already use. Strangers can also chime on and help me out.

Compare this with having to look up their website on Google, then having to track down where their customer service is. Ask a question there, then either have to wait for an email (annoying, often ends up in spam), or I have to keep a tab open just for their customer service chat.

> I think the bigger issue here is companies (ab)using social media for their services. How did anyone ever think this was a viable customer service solution? It's publicly visible

You seem to think this was the only option for support. Instead, you are arguing for them shutting down an avenue of support that people used and liked. It would be like saying "Good thing they shut down phone support!"

You also seem to think that all support happened in public rather than just the initial contact. It was an easy entry way into getting support.

And it wasn't companies "abusing" Twitter. Rather, it was companies adopting to users using Twitter as a way to get support. If you don't see that, I don't know what to say.

Twitter is the only viable support option with some places. During the pandemic lockdowns, anything somewhat complex involving the California DMV had to start with contacting them on Twitter. I guess cause that's a whole separate intake process that was more nimble than their site.

I think nothing of the sort. I'm currently watching them shut down an avenue of support people use and like, and I think it's because they failed to assess the inherent risks that have always existed with using the service in this manner.

There's some selection bias in here too. People who have had excellent customer service experiences on Twitter aren't taking into account the number of people who did call or email customer service versus the substantially fewer people who used Twitter for the purposes of contacting companies for customer service.

Of course a company should have used Twitter for customer support - fewer requests, and the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising. Win win.

> the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising

This cuts both ways. If you have a well-oiled customer service team working in public, great! But if something major goes wrong one day and you have 3 million people @ing you with no easy way to identify their account in your system and suddenly your hashtag starts trending... that's free advertising too.

In 2020-21, some forms of online DMV support were only reachable via Twitter. Here I was thinking I could safely ignore social media, but I had to go make a burner just to get the right number to call about my PNO.

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