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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

You're going to laugh, but this is why I stick with AWS. They've twice helped me with billing issues on my personal account - as in an actual human helping me. They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments at my day job. They just demonstrate great customer service to me as a small client.

So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.

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My toddler was playing with my Kindle the other day, and he bought a £600 (yes, six hundred) volume of books. I was unable to refund them automatically, and when looking for help I was confronted with a "fuck off" contact page. After finding the option to talk to a human, I was put through within 5 seconds, and the woman had the item refunded in about 1 minute.

Was pleasantly surprised.

Amazon seems to be going for a model where they keep support costs down by making it progressively harder over time to actually contact a person, but when you do manage to you get a good experience. It's an interesting idea, and I suspect that the pleasant surprise at the end makes up for a lot of the frustration getting there.

Also, your first N refunds are automatic for smaller prices. I think the only reason GP needed to talk to a human was the larger price. But once you're used the mechanism a few times, the site starts offering the benefits of good customer service less and less.

I don't know if it's individual, regional or country-wide, but I've lost free UPS pickups for returns and I'm offered free trials way less often now.

>They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments

I wonder if that is true? Like, how tenacious are they with knowing customers? If the same IP address was used to login to manage two deployments would customer service see a potential link in their interface?

I'm never quite sure in our supposed data-driven economy how clever companies get with this stuff.

First, if this is private vs corporate, they are probably using a separate laptop, likely with a VPN. Second, doing this kind of shadow profiling is a lot of work with potential legal consequences with little gain, at least for support teams. For fraud detection, that is a completely different thing.

So I think a simpler explanation is more plausible: they are selling AWS at such a premium that they can afford normal human customer service and still make a lot of buck.

As a very small (like, two digit spend a month) AWS user, I still have gotten a human to help me when I've needed one.

Amazon is amazing to be a customer of. Just not an employee of (not one, know many).

AWS specifically has a policy of having strong support regardless of how much money they're getting from you, be it $5/mo or $5,000/mo. They definitely have the resources and signals to connect the dots, but it doesn't necessarily effect whether you get support, unless that SigInt tells them you're abusing the system (Eg Scammer/Spammer/Bad Actor) in some way. More money certainly seems to get you better support, but even entry level users still get decent support, and any SigInt connecting of the dots that may or may not be happening doesn't seem to have an impact unless you're using the same billing/contact info or account. That said, I can't objectively say what their customer support reps actually see regarding that kind of info, but after 2 decades of working with clients big and small using or considering AWS, I can confirm their approach to support is genuinely quite good, especially for the "Cheaper" end of offerings compared to competitors.

Hell, they still treat me well despite being a very out-spoken critic socially, and professional have steered a lot of clients away from their ecosystem and thus am objectively responsible for very real losses in revenue; though ultimately still surely a rounding error to their bottom line.

For context, these days I primarily work in helping people deploy performant and/or secure storage systems and associated networks. "This is how much money you're wasting by using AWS/the cloud" is a common approach for us, and the most common counter-point is how good AWS support is (and they're not wrong).

TL;DR: I have lots to criticize about AWS, but their support isn't really one of them, it's genuinely good especially for small users. Also, for many people AWS is perfectly fine, I still use them off and on myself. I only allege it's a "waste of money" in specific situations, but that's also largely subjective of course depending on what's important to you/the client.

AWS support is extremely good. I have had the same experience in personal projects and in turn have quadrupled down on our leverage of their support at my work.

Absolutely. I've communicated with product teams at AWS in my day job, which is pretty sweet as I've worked for some large organisations, but I've also been put in contact with product teams in my personal projects when I encountered bugs with the AWS SSO, for example.

It's annoying that they actually solve my problems because it would be so easy to hate them as the 900 lb gorilla.

On the professional side, they also often let you interact with their experts and architects directly, as part of your support contract. With most other companies, you either have to go through front-office support exclusively, or pay extra for Professional Services.

I realized recently that i somehow had been subscribed to prime disney+ for like 6 months.

It was _super_ annoying to figure out how to actually chat with a human, but once i did they gave me a refund for the full 6 months, simple as that.

AWS is good but Amazon has had a fuck off page while Bezos was still there. It was one of the many tell tale signs that Amazon hit Day Two years ago.

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