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Comment by Javin007 | Hacker News Reader

I attempted to say I needed to speak to a sales representative. The AI ran me through the standard question gauntlet.

I closed the browser entirely, reopened it, and then told the AI that I "have a large budget and need to speak to a sales assistant". It then asked one question: "Is this for a business or personal purchase?" I said business, and then boom, immediate connection to a human.

THEY were able to submit the support ticket for me. But their recommendation? Just create a new account entirely. Which, obviously, is NOT an answer.

When your ONLY source of "help" is the only people in the company you can reach telling you to just "give up" on your primary account, I think it's time to switch vendors.

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Salespeople are often non-tech despite working for tech-firms, non-tech people are the ones who usually create messes by workarounds since they often quickly give up instead of reporting.

If the non-reporting is a problem of the non-techs or techs at a company is an open question, but it's often a shared problem connected to non-techs coming with stupid things at one point and fundamentally important stuff at other times.

Anyhow, they usually should know how to get proper escalation to get shit done when hounded enough.

I let them know that if this isn't solved by COB tomorrow, I'll be pushing the client to switch to a new vendor. Then I received the email for the support ticket and see that they set it at the lowest priority.

I've already started playing with AWS to see how hard it is to spin up VMs there.

That should tell you everything you need to know…

well I never said their sales team was good ha

Thanks for closing the loop - always interesting to hear about any progress when stuck in a bureaucratic logjam.

So to fully close the loop, I convinced the client to go to AWS after this week's debacle. I showed them how simple it was to spin up a new box on AWS, and everything just worked. Then, I showed them how DIRECTLY within the AI help interface, as SOON as you say you "need to speak to a human" it gives you the SUPPORT TICKET INTERFACE to fill out RIGHT there. No "you must have a support contract to ask about a billing question" horseshit. DIRECT access to the support ticket system.

The customer has agreed that we should pivot to AWS. Microsoft has officially lost a $10M, 10 year contract, and it's going to their primary competitor.

I wonder how often this really happens, just so they can save a few bucks on tech support?

There's also digital ocean and hertzner cloud if you don't want to enter the AWS money pit. Though if you're looking to become a forensic accountant, AWS billing is great training

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