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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

Every business should be able to service their customers in human-to-human interactions. "We're too big to have humans speak to our human customers" is becoming normalised and that's a trend we need to reverse. Growing revenue streams without investing in the support those revenue streams need, is a bad business practice.

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Ironically part of why I use Apple products at all is the human support staff available to me when I lived in London.

Problem with Dell, HP, Lenovo -> ship it back and pray

Problem with Apple -> walk into covent garden and ask.

My experiences with Apple support has been nothing except glowing. (Apart from one work incident where our IT supplier ordered Applecare (3 years service warranty) instead of Applecare+ (2 year accidental damage) - and my employee dropped his laptop).

I recently had a human at my local banks' branch (after 30 minutes of waiting) tell me I should call their phone hotline to get my issue resolved. They couldn't (or refused) to do it in person.

In many bank, the teller just don't have access to the system that can resolve your issue. They can call the hotline on your behalf, help you fill out forms and verify your identity.

You can get a phone call from an Apple representative very quickly in my experience.

https://support.apple.com/contact

It's a poor moral practice perhaps but arguably a good business practice to spend as little as possible on "cost centres"

Agreed. f Apple did this they'd quickly go from a $1 trillion dollar company to a $999 billion company.

It’s short term thinking - if you want don’t want repeat business burn your customers.

I got given a Patagonia bag (not my thing), the wheel broke off (thanks AA), took it to a store, and the customer service was so good I’m a convert. Conversely, I recently stopped using a service I spent >$20k a year on because their customer service was so bad. Can you boost profitability short term? Definitely, but I suspect in the long term you trading long term customer NPV for short term profits

Have you had no experience of a useless human wasting more time than a chat bot?

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