Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind | Hacker News Reader

Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind

nytimes.com

71 pointsbriandear38 comments

1). Phones are really expensive to answer. Budget $7~12 a call for competently designed call centers staffed by Middle American housewives, probably 10x that if you have e.g. engineers doing things ad hoc. That's about an order of magnitude more than email support and, um, "a whole lot" more than a blended, scalable FAQ > self serve tool > email system. (You see this pattern all the time for a reason.)

2) "Insufficiently technical skill to use email forbids customer from successfully reaching support" is a feature not a bug. (For a software business.)

3) Ask me about the six calls I got from a customer a) arguing over the color of text on my page (grey vs. black) b) asking how to operate a third party's voicemail, c) confirming receipt of an email five minutes after it was sent... all happening on my emergency line between 2 and 6 AM.

4) Customers frequently perceive negative value from phone support. Think of companies with excellent phone staffing like banks or insurance firms. How happy are online reviews for those numbers? (Terrible, largely because the state machine on the phone is enforcing business rules that the customer does not care for. You know what the #1 call Facebook would get? OK, password resets, not a great example. #N? "Why does Facebook let X do Y?" "<That's a product decision>" "Can you change it?" "No." "It causes me social problems! I will now abuse you personally!" "Still no." "I have a lawyer." "No, in six minute increments." "Pretty please?" "No, I don't even have a button to do it.")

We have gotten phone calls from people wanting help running and installing completely unrelated software, in some cases on platforms we don't even develop for. We don't publish a phone number for tech support anymore and this sort of service request is more common than actual tech support on our own products, which is nearly always done through email. The people telephoning fairly often will say something like:

"I didn't want to waste your time with an email, I just have a quick question that won't take a moment. I am having trouble installing Outlook 97 on a computer I got at an auction, it's an SGI Workstation?"

"I'm not sure why you're calling, we don't produce or support Outlook, that version has been obsolete for many years, and was not written for SGI."

"You were so helpful getting your software installed before, I really appreciate it, and no one else has been able to help me with this."

"We don't support that, also it's not possible."

"Surely there is some way. Let me read you the serial number of the computer plate. Do you need the Outlook license key?"

"I can't help you."

This goes on for a while. I stay on the line mostly because I am amazed by the call.

Anyway the basic insight I have is that anyone with a reasonable request understands the information we have about email and forum support and uses that. It's only the unreasonable customers who feel sufficiently motivated to track down the phone number and make a call. As the parent post mentions, these sorts of calls often come in at weird early morning hours and weekends. We also get calls from people wanting advice in their life about non-support related things like where to go to university to learn to write software like we do or whether to buy a new car. Again, reasonable people understand that support is by email, unreasonable people don't and this explains why most phone calls are unreasonable requests. I still handle these politely, perhaps so I can later tell the stories to people as I am now. Maybe also I am a bit of a sucker for whackos!

... it's an SGI Workstation.

"Good choice sir! Do you have a support contract with us?"

SGI's were such cool machines I might actually talk to that person and explain what they are and why you can't help.

Oh I did that! This particular guy worked in a machine shop, he was in charge of the warehouse. He would watch the local classifieds for estate and defunct business auction notices and go and buy weird random stuff for no reason. That's how he got the SGI, but he didn't know what it was and thought it was a weird sort of PC that someone had installed Linux on. He was hoping to get Windows on it, and he had an installer for Entourage someone had given him or he had found at Goodwill or who knows, and his work used Entourage so he thought he would get that working for some reason. No one could help him but we had provided such helpful service in the past for our products he thought he'd give us a call at weird hours and see what we thought about his problem. This was not the only call from him, he made several over the years, he had my private line number because of a previous legitimate call that had gotten escalated to development.

He's just one example and one of the more unusual ones. There's also the calls from somebody that wants you to write custom software that only they could possibly ever use for them for free, they'll even be willing to forgo their royalty! Those ones are more frustrating.

Having a public phone number for Twitter to take random calls from free customers who are too impatient to wait 2 days for an email response since their fundraising twitter account was suspended for (quite reasonably) looking like a violation of service terms sounds like a nightmare. It's quite bizarre that the NYT was taking their side in this in the referenced article, or even writing an article about it at all. The people mentioned have a crazy level of entitlement and insane expectations from a free service serving tens of millions of people. Their bad attitude and whining at the end was infuriating even to me as a bystander observing the story.

If you charge enough (and in a recurring way), you learn to like calls from insufficiently technically skilled people. It's a kind of lock-in -- surely, no one else would put up with this. You also learn how to deal with it efficiently.

The trick is to not worry about any 1 particular person, but the whole burden. The average for us isn't bad -- if I could, I'd want to get more calls.

Also, if you have the kind of product with addons, you possibly get a chance to offer them (softly). In any case, they usually are the ones that promptly pay the maintenance contract (or can easily be shown the value of it if a manager asks -- here's your call log).

The thing I've wanted is a way to post a per-message "non-nuisance bond" on incoming communications.

Basically, a recipient can define multiple channels (mailboxes, call, physical mail, fax) to contact, and set a price for unsolicited communications on each. Maybe I'd say $1000 to take an unsolicited phonecall at night, and $1 for an unsolicited email during the day.

If the message was of value to me, I wouldn't collect the bond. If it was a waste of my time, I'd collect, which should be high enough to compensate me, as well as high enough to deter future communications. Pricing could adjust over time.

This would also serve to push users to contact me in the most convenient for me way, or at least to expose my priorities and preferences to the senders. When I'm driving, my phone call price drops below my email/text (instant response) price, but for $100k, I'd probably be willing to pull over and read an email once notified.

(There are lots of sender-bond systems, but they are all designed around spam, not nuisance email or even just unwanted email. Plus, they're per-sender, not per message. Mail from someone you like could be inconvenient at certain times, so with a sender-bond system, you'd be forced to choose either no-op or a lasting ban, which is lame.)

Totally OT, but I must say that I've seen the best startup ideas in HN comments like this one. It would need a lot of polishing, of course, but it's a decent start for a creative mind. :-)

What deters someone from lying and saying the call was a waste of time (thus collecting the bond) when it really wasn't?

You take that risk in contacting a random person. If someone does it, you probably won't contact the person again. There might be published stats on how frequently the bonds are redeemed per inbox.

Make your primary phone number a 900 number and send back a pay-by-text rebate if you don't want to charge the caller.

> The thing I've wanted is a way to post a per-message "non-nuisance bond" on incoming communications. > > Basically, a recipient can define multiple channels (mailboxes, call, physical mail, fax) to contact, and set a price for unsolicited communications on each. Maybe I'd say $1000 to take an unsolicited phonecall at night, and $1 for an unsolicited email during the day.

A good idea, but people will detect the perverse incentives and respond negatively. Give the bond to a (GiveWell recommended) charity instead, and it's perfect.

I don't see what the perverse incentives are here (you are paying to interrupt someone), but setting a way to donate 0-100% to charity transparently would be a great extension.

If it's an iterated game, there don't seem to be bad incentives. If it's one-off, sure, but very little gets accomplished in a single message and reply.

The simple math around this is the incredible asymmetry of the entire customer base of these companies, compared to the number of employees. It might seem obvious to us (or at least it does to me) that a multi-billion dollar company like google should have a set of operators prioritizing calls, particularly for the ones that really do need human attention - but, when you have billions of people using your service, if just 1 percent called you in a year, that's still 10 million+ calls you would have to triage.

An eye opener for me, was when I finished Diablo, and watched the credit - and saw the many, many, many pages of customer support staff for that application. It looked like they numbered in the hundreds - and, all to serve just 4 million customers that had each paid $60.

There is no way that Google/Facebook/Twitter/Linked in can handle incoming voice for all their free users.

Google doesn't even handle calls/customer support for paying users. Google Adwords/Adsense support is completely automated and also completely useless.

Except for, you know, everyone who purchases Google Apps and has 24/7 phone support...

But Google Apps has been around since 2006. They only added 24/7 phone support last year.

Google has no credibility regarding customer service, both online and by phone.

This completely depends on the type of business. For us, all tech support calls are considered sales calls because we charge for tech support.

"People get aggressive or aggravated; people are depressed or crying. It’s just hard talking to customers" - these people tend to be the ones happiest to pay tech support, because you solve their problem and prove that you care. If you are a small business, especially one selling higher-priced services, make it a core part of your business to provide personal service.

This is also one thing I love about new start-ups: I can call/skype the founders and have the most interesting and insightful conversations while testing out their product and this has sold us on many services.

Having said that, with my ISP they provide a chat app so I will always use this instead of calling them, as it keeps a historical record of our conversations and technical problems so I don't have to repeat myself.

They said it: Facebook has one worker for every 300.000 customers, witch is exactly what lets them provide their service "free" or cheap(you pay with your personal information).

A significant part of the population(more than 10%) have real problems in their life. The median number of friends per American is 0.7, one of the lowest in the world. People need someone to hear them, they will use anything as a excuse for calling.

So you go to the bank and you see people talking about their lives most of the time. It makes it human contact, but is very expensive, in money and in time, as it makes other people wait.

If only 10% customers called facebook for support over their lifetime, that means 30.000 customers per employee to handle!!

What NYTimes expects? Multiplying the labor force(and cost of facebook, Google, Amazon,vimeo...) by 100?.

> The median number of friends per American is 0.7

I think you might have gotten a bit confused here. I don't understand how a median can be a non-integer.

Strictly speaking it can be with an even number of elements in the sample but yeah, your parent probably meant mean number.

But even then, it can't be a non-half integer multiple.

Those people are NOT customers. Customers by definition are paying for a product or service. Their customers are the advertisers. And I'm guessing it's at least somewhat easier for those people to get someone on the phone.

Can you share with us the source of the 0.7 mean friends for Americans? I'd never heard of a number that low, and some quick googling suggests the number of "close friends" is reported to be around 7-9:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/10891/americans-satisfied-number-...

As most of these companies are Web-based and use automated systems for support, it makes little sense for them to implement call centers with live operators.

It's not an issue of scalability IMHO (although it's harder to scale telephony than text), but a matter of cost: human phone operators are much more expensive.

They could create better automated voice replies, though - in fact, I believe that will be the case soon, what with voice recognition and TTS getting a lot better every day...

Facebook providing phone support to their users would be like a corn farmer providing phone support to their corn stalks.

The weird thing is that sometimes it does work.

I called Yahoo on the 4th of July 2006 because of a password problem relating to my Flickr account, and Ronald answered after two levels of voice menus (the number I used: 408.349.1572). I doubt they still offer this sort of service (having a phone bank of people dedicated to customer problems, let alone being paid to work on holidays).

As crappy as it is on a user side, vendors that offer pay phone support have a pretty good business model. I'm willing to bet that a company with a lot of nontechnical customers (such as Intuit or similar) makes as much or more money on it's paid phone support and consulting than on actually selling their software.

But in reality, the invasiveness of phones is a liability. Being able to barge your way into absolutely anything else the person is doing (no matter how important) via phone is somehow tolerated as not rude, when in any other circumstance it would be.

That's what silent mode and voicemail is for. For the caller, there is plausible deniability that they were interrupting anything, so it's up to the recipient to manage phone availability.

When I was interviewing at tech companies in NYC, I was surprised to find one well-known one that simply had no phone number.

I'd wanted to call them back after my interview, and realized I'd never been given any phone number for anyone. When I went back, I discovered that, with 20+ employees, they literally didn't have a phone in their office. People have their personal cellphones whenever they need to receive calls.

I'd stopped having a landline ten years ago, but I had no idea businesses could do it too!

I don't know one NYC startup with which I have any association that has a landline. In one company in particular, even HR uses their personal cell phones (reimbursed by the company, naturally.) I interviewed at a few places a while back where I didn't speak to anyone until the actual interview. I love it. When you call me, you're demanding me to drop everything and deal with your problem. To me, phone calls are exceptionally intrusive. Of course in a sales environment, intrusions are vital (that means someone wants to buy something, usually.) Still, I'm glad to see the death of the business landline. Now if we could only kill off the fax machine..

What do you still use the fax machine for?

HR uses it. Insurance companies are still stuck on faxes.

Makes sense for consumer based products, when you think of how much cisco phones cost. For enterprise solutions, obviously, not so much.

Phones makes people feel better - and if your clients are worth enough, and you can control the volume, it's a good idea. Heck, even Google offers to let you call them for $2.

Huge productivity benefit to not having a phone on your desk: not having to deal with voice mail.

Agreed. I don't miss having a phone on my desk at all.

Customers expectations have changed as well, when I started my business 14 years ago I would get daily calls from customers. Now it's not unusual to go a whole month without a call.

the companies they refer to are primarily getting their income from ads, most likely a very low income per customer. So a single phone call would properly cost more than their average revenue per customer.

I'm really interested in the Facebook message they describe in the article. Anyone have the number they are referencing?

Perhaps they called the number listed in the box on the right hand side of the article?

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