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>Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.

This sentiment is, in essence, the problem. It's perfectly logical for this trend of distancing customers from their , as you put it, "all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language-meat-bags" when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.

> the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.

Companies or organizations in general, won't survive if their costs are too high.

There is nothing prescriptive about it.

It is a merely a description of market dynamics.

You can have whatever value system you wants and you can burn money doing whatever you want, but a value system doesn't change the reality of market dynamics.

And no amount of blaming all problems on nebulous ideas like "capitalism" changes that either.

You can either recognize reality or enjoy bankruptcy. Your choice!

> when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.

...Yes? That's literally what a corporation is for. That some might have good customer service is simply a marketing method to get people to continue using that company to, in the end, earn capital. If you want to run a service whose primary motive is not earning capital, create a non profit.

No, it's not, or at least, it doesn't have to be, and it wasn't always. It's amazing how our modern society has so completely lionized and internalized greed.

Maybe the core concept of a corporation could be, for example:

- to make an excellent product in a sustainable manner,

- to provide gainful employment,

- to steward a natural resource,

- to push the boundaries of human knowledge,

- to organize a portion of society,

- etc.

I'm sure I could go on, this is literally 3 minutes of thought so far.

All of these could be pursued as the primary purpose of the corporation, with a goal of doing so profitably as a secondary concern. None of these are fundamentally incompatible with seeking profits. And in fact, in the past, as part of incorporation, you had to create a charter: what was the purpose of your corporation? That's actually still part of the prices if you go to register a business, though I don't know how meaningful it is anymore. Even the doctrine that corporations be managed "for the benefit of the shareholders," does not necessarily imply a focus on earning capital above all else.

But when the idea that profits are the sole and highest aim of a business, then yes, a lot of very good things get lost along the way.

This is already s long comment, so I'll stop here. I'm not convinced that the way we've chosen in 2024 to conceptualize corporations, even capitalism, is the only way. I think this statement:

> [Earning capital is] literally what a corporation is for

is a value judgement, not a natural definition.

Not sure what you mean "it wasn't always," because it literally started off as a way to divide trade proceeds, you could buy shares in an entity that entitled you to shares of the profits. Again, you could just as easily start a non-profit to achieve all of those things, corporations have always been for earning capital as their primary motive, it's not a value judgment, it's simply the definition of a corporation. It is actually you who is making a value judgment, that corporations should do X, Y, and Z unrelated to earning capital as a primary objective.

At this point we're going to need to provide sources if we want to get further value out of this discussion because I disagree with your definition and don't believe your characterization of the history of incorporation. Profit sharing and ownership interest have always been a motivating aspect of incorporation, yes, but historically the main goal of the corporation has not been earning capital as their primary motive. The first US corporations, for example, where chartered by the government with specific goals in mind. The question of scope/goal is still part of the incorporation process. If the purpose of all corporations was profit, by definition, why ask? I that is vestigial: we used to care more about the charter and goal because profit was a concern, but not the primary concern.

I'm also intentionally not making a value judgement on what a corporation should do, rather pointing out that there exist many possibilities beyond a pure profit motive.

Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you.

Many of the companies you are asking to provide service are making a buck or two a month from you, even if you are nominally paying hundreds of dollars. So if you call up a real human, you can be draining away months, years, even the entire profit margin you will ever be worth, pretty quickly. Especially if you want to be talking to someone making more than the US minimum wage.

You don't need the principle that "the only purpose of a company is to earn capital". All you need to explain the current situation is "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income". You can't have customers costing you more than they pay you and make it up in volume. So consumers are basically just boned; they will not and even can not pay enough to get good support for most of the things they buy. Not in theory, not in fact.

I know places that provide very good support. But they are places where the profit margin on a customer is well sufficient to pay for a support person's amortized time, and losing the customer still hurts the bottom line, even after a support call or three, because even three extended support calls that resulted in consults straight to engineering still weren't anywhere near enough to cancel the profit margin.

> Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you

this makes zero sense. Fat paychecks and bonuses are part of this calculation.

You’re both right! Nuance is important :).

This is an interesting thought, assuming a call center employee is paid $35k, total cost of employment being $70k, you could hire 14.25 employees for every million dollars.

If every Concast exec got paid a paltry $5M (lowest paid exec salary), they’d be able to hire around 975 more CS reps.

They have 13.6 million subscribers, so they’d increase the number of support reps by 0.000071691176471 per customer.

My thought was maybe they could reduce their marketing budget but it seems their business has shrunken by ~50% in the past 10 years.

https://www1.salary.com/COMCAST-CORP-Executive-Salaries.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/497279/comcast-number-vi...

Most people who just knee-jerk that the problem is excessive executive pay have not worked the math. This math is typical of all the businesses I've ever worked the math for. It may sound good to say "take all the executive pay" and "turn it into customer support"/"pay it to all the employees"/"drop the price of the service"/etc., but if you actually work the math typically it turns out you're trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. Such high pay may be problems for other reasons but it is not the root problem for very many large companies, if it is for any.

I think ISPs are actually a great counter-example to your point. The major ISPs are not dominant because they are the only ones able to stay profitable given the tight margins.

There are several examples of local, for profit, ISPs that are about to provide a better service, at a lower cost, and with better customer service. The major ISPs have not responded to this by truly outcompeting these challengers, but by weaponizing the legal system to shut these competitors down.

So, while I agree that "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income", I disagree with your premise that you cannot provide decent customer service within the profit margins of these businesses.

It's not fair to think about this just in terms of capitalism. Even non-profits and charities have customer support systems. A customer who cannot or will not help themselves costs that organisation more to service than one who will. This is pretty universal.

If an automated system can handle 50% of the calls quickly and accurately, you're getting better value for your other user, who might be paying for the organisation's running fees.

It's only when it grates like this, when you're screaming "CONNECT ME TO A HUMAN!!1" at an AI where it's really a problem.

Nonprofits and charities operate in a capitalist system. They aren't apart from it.

Capitalism operates in a finite world with a brittle biological network that serves as a fundamental condition for sustaining life further, including capitalists agents.

It doesn’t mean capitalist overlords consider this vision as a perspective that should condition every moves they make, on the contrary it’s often like fully embracing unlimitism and echosystem mass destruction is the must have attitude.

That is, people are not absolutely bound to forge opinions and act in a way that matches the social norm of the day.

While hegemonic anthropological systems are hard to ignore for those living in their sphere of influence, it doesn’t mean every single human endorse wholly its axiological mindset.

Consider Jean Meslier the French Catholic priest who was discovered, upon his death in 1729, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism and materialism.

Being embedded in a system has nothing to do with with being intimately akin with this system.

> core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between size of company and quality of service. The bigger the company I suspect that great service is not as likely to lead to a positive gain for the company - especially at near monopoly scale. A new sale has little value to the monopoly, while a new sale for the small biz might put payroll over the top for next pay period.

My dad's ISP did exactly what you say is impossible. It was a small ISP in Salt Lake City (xmission, if anyone cares). They had actual humans answering the phone, and no bankruptcies.

I worked for a small ISP in the mid 90's and we did the same. The only reason this worked is because back then, barely anyone was online. And many of the people who were online were technically sophisticated early adopters that needed less support. Today's world is very different.

Most of the companies I've worked for have been the same, and my personal companies as well. The financial reality that I've experienced is that customer service is a very expensive, and it doesn't take long for a call to use up your profit margin.

But good customer service pays dividends in the long run even if it appears to be a loss in the short. In cold money terms, it's not an expense, it's an investment.

Imagine something like a credit score but for technological adeptness. A high score and you can reliably get an on prem human and even sometimes an engineer. A low score and you just get endless bots. Average and you get the current system.

Indeed. A good service system will ask that. I've had that for technical equipment ("Are you a buyer, installer, operator, etc?").

And hey, it'd be nice if that translated into a lower price but I won't pretend that us geeks don't cause as many problems as we eventually fix.

> Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.

Nah, the C-suite fat cats just need to take a few million less for running a shitty business, and use the money to hire people who actually have to do stuff for customers.

If the first contact I can have with support is an LLM, that's the same as not providing support. Even talking to non-technical staff following scripts first, as obnoxious as that is, is preferable.

The only reason that I'm calling support in the first place is because web searching and their automated systems have failed me.

I may not be the standard customer, but that's not my problem. If that matters, all that's saying is that the company doesn't want me as a customer.

No it actually can be done competently, believe it or not. The best example of this I've seen is Swisscom. Swisscom has a customer support bot, they call it "Sam". Sam is amazing and a lesson to all other companies in how to automate customer support.

1. Sam tells you it's a bot. They don't hide what they're doing.

2. Sam is optional. You can choose to call human support at any time.

3. If you agree to always try chatting to Sam first they cut you in on the savings, and reduce your monthly bill. The reduction is big enough to be definitely worth it, it's not 10 cents a month or anything like that.

4. Sam escalates quickly and voluntarily if it can't work out how to answer your question. It doesn't try and block you from talking with a person.

5. Sam is astonishingly good at actually answering questions. I don't know what tech they're using for this; it seems like some sort of really souped up LLM with great RAG, maybe. Whatever it is, it works. Several times I've contacted Swisscom support and gone through Sam, and it did in fact solve my problem.

6. All the above is true even though I'm interacting with Sam in English, which is not a Swiss national language.

Truly, this is what a good bot-supported contact experience should be like. Of course in most cases institutions don't do such a good job, and just become frustrating. Bots that pretend to be human, bots that don't seem to know the answers to anything, bots that make it as hard as possible to escalate and of course in the end ... nothing in it for the customer to put up with that. But if Swisscom can do it then other companies can too, there's nothing magical about this use case.

My assumption is that after a while we're going to find that most people actually prefer bot driven support experiences, same as how they came to prefer self checkout at supermarkets, ATMs at banks etc.

> Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.

Or, the ISP/shareholders would have to accept slightly lower profits. I know, I know, this is totally unspeakable here, but might as well at least list the option for completeness.

You aren't getting it. The difference isn't between "high profits" and "slightly lower profits". For most businesses it's between small profits and large losses.

Oh won't anyone think of the small profits of the large corporations!

AT&T 2023 revenue was $122.4 billion.

https://about.att.com/story/2024/q4-earnings-2023.html

Why are you quoting a revenue figure but talking about profits?

AT&T has a profit margin currently of about 11%, which is around the average profit margin across all industries. It isn't a particularly profitable business. Not the worst, but also far from the best. In a company like that profitability can be very volatile. Small changes in the per-user cost can wipe out all profits overnight, which is why it's common for companies with billions in revenue to suddenly flip from net profit to net loss. That happened to AT&T in Q4 2022 when they went from a +17% margin to -7% in the space of a single quarter. They didn't start making profits again until a year later.