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Comment by awofford | Hacker News Reader

My guess is the ROI is provided by people giving up before they actually get help from a human.

I've analyzed support ticket requests before, and that doesn't seem to be the case. At least for the two times I've done this: 1) IT support tickets for a local school, and 2) Tickets for a B2B SaaS app. In both cases the majority of tickets where for things that seemed to me to be obvious. That if the user just bothered to spend 10 seconds looking they would figure it out. But they didn't. Some training helped on the IT side, and some UX improvements helped in SaaS app, but the bar is _sooo_ much lower than many expect.

This should be a lot more obvious to the tech crowd than it is. I suppose it's the familiarity effect (see https://xkcd.com/2501/)--what's obvious to us isn't necessarily obvious to most people, and we heavily undercount the degree to which confusion-of-basic-things exist because it's second nature to us.

And we are talking even more basic than most people on HN can imagine.

Such as:

"Is your device turned on?"

"Are you logged into the site and not just searching google for the thing your want our application to do?"

"Have you actually purchased our product and not a competitor's you just think is similar?"

I wonder that too. If you're only measure one part of the funnel (e.g. CS costs) and not the total funnel (e.g. losses due to poor CS quality like a customer dropping the project) then it's easy to conclude that making CS more painful is a win.

It depends on the business, but the kind of metrics you are talking about are measured and taken seriously. People have absolutely gotten fired for CS quality KPI drops.

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