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0 pointsasdff5y ago0 comments

That's just how customer support is these days it seems. Getting a hold of an actual human capable of doing the most mundane request other than linking to 'help' articles you've already read 10 times is impossible. What happened to emailing support and getting a reply prepared to move heaven and earth to satisfy you as a customer?

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kbenson5y ago

There exist companies that distinguish themselves on providing good support, and use it as a differentiator. They generally aren't number one in a market though, so don't look the the leader to usually be them (occasionally they are, when they have an equivalent or better product and also better support and servicing).

KronisLV5y ago

Perhaps it's because customer support nowadays works in tiers, much like Technical support does ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_support#Multi-tiered... )?

The people that link you to those help articles are doing so because they simply can't do anything else but to escalate - they simply don't know about the inner workings of the system and don't have the permissions to change the data in it.

Whereas the developers/maintainers who could do it would be overcome with thousands of such mundane requests to fix the data in some geospatial database, that they can't be bothered to do. Perhaps Uber doesn't even maintain the dataset for addresses themselves either, and is using a service from someone else, like Google.

This kind of makes you think that in this complexity of distributed, scalable systems with microservices, message queues and other systems, eventually the complexity will be too much to actually understand and maintain - be it because of a low bus factor and people leaving due to churn rate, or extremely high effort needed for maintenance.

bllguo5y ago

help me understand this attitude. unless I'm an enormous customer why do I deserve replies "prepared to move heaven and earth" in the first place? I guess it seems like naivete to me

asdffOP5y ago

Let me give you my latest anecdote. I order a can of paint from Lowes. They send me the wrong color. I reach out to their customer support. I ask them to send me the correct color of paint. They inform me that they don't have power to do anything as they aren't the correct team. I ask who the correct team is. They give me a phone number to call for a customer support line that closed three hours ago. I call the next day, and they tell me that they too are powerless to do anything and that I need to return the can of paint I ordered online to the brick and mortar store.

At this point, I don't give a shit about the $16 of paint, I'm not spending two hours of my day to return this can of paint at the lowes store on the other side of town. It's about the principle. A sane company would have replied with the first (and only) customer support team with something like "I'm so sorry! We are shipping you the correct color right now." That sane response used to be the norm 10 years ago, because a $16 loss on one can of paint is far less than losing a customer for life who will now make it their life's mission to deter friends and family from patronizing your business.

greatowl5y ago

But they know that you won't. Next time you need to buy a can of paint, you'll go back to Lowe's because you figure there's a 99% chance they won't mess it up again, and meanwhile the Home Depot is even further away and not really any better. Meanwhile, companies that provide "good" customer service are continuously preyed upon by customers who waste their time and scam them. Personally, if I were you, I'd just take the L on this one. Someday, someone will solve this problem by opening a business that offers absolutely no returns, no customer services, and charges 10% less. I will shop there gladly.

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