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0 pointsrsj_hn4y ago0 comments

> Is it just too expensive to do that? Even for a billion dollar business?

It's not about the size of the business, but whether this is a good way for them to spend money or not.

Coffee shops will often not get back to you within 48 hours depending on the comment you make and how busy they are. It's really a judgement call, as large number of comments are basically spam, but you can't reply with "this is a silly comment" or "this is an unreasonable request on our time", so it's best to just ignore.

For a big business, where individual judgement is replaced with a set of procedures and institutions that try to encode judgement, they most surely will offer some level of support with an SLA that guarantees someone will get back to you in a well-defined period of time.

But you usually have to pay extra for that, and that's a pretty sensible system, since leaving comments is free and there is no way to know how serious you are about the comment and how badly you want it responded to. E.g. worth paying, say, $10? $5? $1? There is some intersection of supply and demand for real support at which a certain price results in you getting answers, but in those situations where that price is not zero, it's not the size of the business that matters, but the shape of those supply and demand curves. And the size of the business, in my experience, will tend to shift the supply curve farther away from "free", because that answer will be an official answer of the business and it may take a lot of time for the poor support guy to track someone down and get an official answer, and in some cases it may be a lot of work to get that answer if the bureaucracy is complex and knowledge is stovepiped. This is why you see tiers in support, and the time required to get someone knowledgeable is often much longer as you climb that support chain and escalate your question. All of that ends up costing quite a bit to a big firm.

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chrischapman4y ago

Thanks. That was a really good explanation and covered all the bases. Makes you wonder if there's a business case for implementing a one-off payment mechanism for response time. For instance, 'free' means "we're listening but probably won't respond" while '$1' means "we're listening and will respond within a week". Just a thought.

rsj_hnOP4y ago

It would be an interesting experiment, but there are also big upfront costs. I think it might be more useful as a poll to let firms know if they should offer support, rather than an actual a la carte model, because the costs of support are include large fixed costs.

I've been on the other side of this, advocating for our internal support team to handle questions about a service we were releasing. Today there is great temptation to rely on social media, etc, and not have a real support service.

For me, it took over a year of lobbying, meetings, etc, just to get the go ahead. Here are the things I had to do:

- gather data on how important it is to provide support by giving examples of customer issues that need support to resolve. - lobby multiple managers - get this into planning docs so it can be funded - create a dialogue tree for support to handle, with triggers for escalating - find actual devs (other than me) to do tier 3 support when support can't help - do regular training sessions for the support staff - build internal tooling for them to use to help look up answers - hold regular meetings that I came to believe were nothing more than reassuring the support staff that we hadn't abandoned them.

And still, after all this, they ended up cancelling the project after a few years in operation when support got new leadership that didn't favor supporting the service. At that point I was too exhausted to go back and fight the battle again.

It is expensive to have someone provide you with answers. I mean, really expensive. And no one wants to do it, because the downside -- publicly embarrassing the company, setting wrong expectations about what the person on the other end of the line can help you with, etc, are all pointed at the person in charge of support, whereas the upsides -- "helping customers" -- is not something anyone in the company uses as a KPI. It rarely gets noticed in terms of an individual's career path.

After that experience, I really understood the moat of luxury brands. Being able to be a company that excels in non-tangible things such as quality that goes above what the rest of the market can provide or great personalized service is incredibly hard and beyond most companies. There is a whole infrastructure behind you that must be maintained and great vigilance is required to keep that customer experience high. It's something that has to be in the corporate DNA, in the sense that leadership is imbued with this as a motivating factor that colors most of their decision making. That's just not gonna be the case for a very big company, and certainly not a monopoly or market hegemon.

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