Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.
How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?
You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.
What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?
Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.
If firms had a base degree of customer support they were expected to provide, they would still exist. They would just not be as profitable, but customers would be better off.
I seem to remember there was a time when S/W was also designed with the aim to be easy to use, so that the need for support was reduced. It feels like the lesson learned was to keep costs low, not to ensure users were ok.
you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.
Sorry, you can't buy an iPhone because Apple has got too many customers.
Sorry, you can't have a GMail account because Google has too many customers.
If you could be profitable with 50 customers providing excellent support, you can be MORE profitable spreading that excellent support across a larger customer base.
Just because none of the big corpos choose to do this does not mean it isn't possible. It's JUST greed.
I can't tell you how many times I've experienced this with comcast. The last time I had to deal with it, was when I bought a new cable modem. I call in to provision it, the automated system assumes I have one of their modems and fails. For some reason I can't get technical support on the line and finally I resort to yelling 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally get someone on the phone.
The guy was able to solve the issue in 5 minutes flat. The problem with automation is it's only ever going to be able to handle the 'happy path'
The solution here is removing corporate monopolies and political power.
Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.