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Comment by kbrannigan | Hacker News Reader

How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support. Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

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 ?

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I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.

> I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?

I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin 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.

Vanguard does get some support right as they tier their support based on how much you're worth. Businesses need to focus on Lifetime Value of their customers and realize that some of their marketing budget would be better spent in support.

>Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

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'

It feels so degrading talking to the bot. Last time I did it I was trying to upgrade my service to take advantage of a 2.5GbE modem I bought and I almost said screw it because it was so frustrating with the long pauses after everything I said!

The company solves the happy path every time. Your problem is they are solving their happy path which is profit optimization. The system is not poorly designed, it is working as intended.

The solution here is removing corporate monopolies and political power.

Threaten to sue the company. The bots will connect you to a human lickety split.

Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.

That's not scale, Its profit margins.

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.

It depends more on revenues per customer.

If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.

But how else can they get an edge over any possible competition so that they can grow faster? Quarterly reports are coming faster and faster!

> you scale up support

you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.

If your maximum addressable market is “the whole economy,” as seen in SpaceX filings, then a city-sized call centre (distributed, of course) really is ‘t that much of an ask.

If you think you hit a limit where you can't support any new customer anymore, you just tell them you have no capacity at the moment. Like any normal practice does.

What's the support staff required for a few billion people?

Their problem, not ours.

And yet, building city-sized datacenters is somehow totally doable.

So you overextend, such that the quality of your support suffers? You can just call it what it is: greed. Have you considered that maybe a company shouldn’t have millions or billions of users? That’s a lot of eggs to put in one basket.

You mean like Microsoft, Google (GMail, YouTube, Android), Apple, Facebook, and others?

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.

None of those things sound terrible. I’d argue the world would be better off. The only real losers are those companies you mentioned :shrug:

All of it is greed. 100%.

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.

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