After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away."
This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same web page that you are, with no more ability to change anything than you have. And it will take 30 minutes to get one of them on the phone because "we are experiencing unusually high call volume" which translates as "the new vice president fired 10 more customer service agents to make his numbers look good."
If robots are involved it means "the new vice president wanted his numbers to look even better."
Companies have apparently run the numbers and decided it is cheaper to effectively ignore and dissuade dissatisfied customers than to try to resolve their issues. And since most companies insist on binding arbitration now, they're not even worried about class-action lawsuits.
> After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away."
Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.
As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace.
For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose issues make them fall outside the golden path of standard procedures: an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question, if you add up all cost associated from the employees involved, obliterating any margin from that customer. I doubt that AI will change this much. So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. The best you can hope for is that someone will create a ticket that someone else will look at at some point if a lot of similar tickets accumulate.
When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could.
Good customer service inspires loyalty to a company in a way discounts/advertising cannot. Their topline might not be the best, but they'll never go out of business.
I’ve been in the contact center consulting space for years and unfortunately, some industries just know there aren’t many alternatives or the effort to move somewhere is so high they really don’t need to strive to make the customer feel special or welcome.
Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them.
Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan.
The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.
I mostly agree with this. If you observe the KPI set used to run support teams, especially with large inbound you will see NPS used as a proxy for quality of resolution but folks mostly don’t respond to those prompts.
More interesting to support team managers are things like deflection rate (didn’t get to an agent) involvement rate (needed an agent) and eventually resolution rate (resolved issue). The last one in the absence of feedback is only a very weak proxy for a resolved issue.
If you consider customer support a cost center, you can guess how managers would optimize these numbers.
I don’t necessarily think there is much wrong with this - having a good product with excellent design, build and proactive support (docs, manuals, walkthroughs, proactive comms) - is likely very good for both customers and the business serving them.
It’s a vocal minority of the tech community that shares that opinion. The silent majority knows it’s just fud marketing. Personally when i encounter a customer support chat bit i immediately assume low quality services and products. When i meet a software engineer blown away but chatgpt’s “coding skills” i assume that engineer is not particularly competent. There are valid use cases and the tech has obviously got potential but we are not there yet.
Anyone who has ever interacted with a tier 1 customer service agent in an outsourced support farm knows the difference between that and a chat bot is negligible.
True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be.
I've tried Amazon's chat function and it's put me in an infinite loop on several occasions. I don't know why they didn't have an agent available (it was business hours). I was surprised that a company with Amazon's resources doesn't have a better handle on this, until I remembered that this is the company that doesn't let you say the reason is "wrong size" when returning clothing items. They're not stupid — they're trying to make things difficult for you.
I'm assuming that you're looking at it from the point of view of someone who only contacts tech support when human intervention is actually required.
And honestly, probably 90% of people are like this.
In terms of who actually takes up the majority of the support reps' time, however, is the 10% of people who are bored, lonely, genuinely mentally handicapped, whingers, and people who get really angry about some bizarre inane detail.
I'd honestly love it if companies weren't so allergic to offering good, paid support or just dropping troublesome customers so that the rest of us could get through quickly.
Every time I am forced to endure shitty hold music for an extended period of time, my thought is, “let the CEO sit on hold for ten minutes and see how fast this gets changed.”
What this means is I still want to believe that crap customer experience is due to a disconnected CEO, when we all know it’s a feature, not a bug.
There's been a pretty steady trend towards automation, chatbots, self-service, etc. replacing getting an empowered human on the line. Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more.
Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online.)
I tried to find people complaining about being left on hold by shopify support and got nothing on twitter. All the complaints are about the account payments being on hold, i.e. shitty but par for the course risk/compliance issues.
The remaining thread content is the sort of inference and speculation that anyone with the right political bent could have made, given a few hours to research the company.
This is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.
in theory: customer support automation frees up support workers from focusing on repetetive customer issues to being able to devote more time to those difficult issues, providing better service at lower cost
in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.
And here I am thinking that a place like HN can appreciate that Econ 101 axioms don't translate perfectly to the real world.
Moving call centre jobs to India and Philippines 20 years ago didn't exactly make those that lost their jobs more productive over the long run. The textbook says it should have, as American comparative advantage should be in higher value-added activities.
The only problem is that the textbook also thinks re-skilling is free, everyone has alternate options for employment, and the labour market re-balances instantly.
it could be good for humanity IF the societal and economic model for basic survival would evolve in tandem.
If we were moving towards UBI and made employment an optional thing then a world in which machines do most of the human work would be utopic indeed
But reality has evolved differently, and after the need for manual labour and craftsmanship got decimated in the last century, now software is pushing into the fields where all the people needing jobs who aren't needed in production ended up.
If we follow this train of thought, that we'd like to diminish the need for individual labour, without removing the individuals need to work as well, we'll just be enlarging the divide between affluence and utter poverty.
I very much disagree with this idea of productivity being good in and of itself. I don't think that is controversial here. To the contrary, I think your view is controversial.
>You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation
Since 2013 this site has not been the optimistic hacker/startup forum Paul Graham envisioned in 2007. For a decade it has just been a higher quality version of r/technology but with the same reddit-tier doomposting.
At least their chatbots might be better than the ‘humans’ we spoke to a few years ago at Shopify.
Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears.
We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!).
Long story short: these big e-shop hosters seem to share something in common - Twattery.
I have to echo your same sentiments. I swore off them a year ago when I provided support with step-by-step screenshots of how to produce my exact error, and even the error itself. The support told me it wasn't an issue and closed it.
It's nothing new - Outlook / Exchange and counterparts replaced secretaries. Intelligent IDES let me do the job of many. The list goes on. The rate of replacement may be great or greatly exaggerated. Taxing profits is the key. I'm not holding my breath.
>These job cuts, according to the employee, were driven not merely by a CEO’s misguided “bet,” but rather a shift towards replacing full-time employees with cheaper contract labor
Good Lord, how much cheaper can you get than Canadian labor? They already get paid poorly and earn about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts. I guess the lack of jobs is why they can pay so little, explains why so many Canadians flee to the US first chance they get.
>The employee’s Twitter thread also raised concerns about the well-being of Shopify’s workforce. Since the layoffs, remaining staff members have reportedly faced increased workloads without proportional compensation or benefits, leading to burnout, anxiety, and stress leave.
Companies who outsource customer support to cheap subsidiaries or bots have no respect for either their customers or their workers, both low and high paid, who will inevitably have to fix and respond to the crap coming their way. For me it has become the most important factor in not choosing to buy anything from a business. It is the canary in the coal mine for future degrading quality.
One great thing that came from the NFT gold-rush was that it exposed a lot of well-known figures as grifters -- Tobi, the Shopify CEO, being one of them. After that ordeal, this kind of thing doesn't surprise me in the least.
How I read all headlines like this now: "Shopify just opened themselves up to be less dominate (or non-existent) in the market."
The destruction of brands on the horizon is creating a ton of opportunity for new businesses to develop. One's that can only succeed if they reject the religion of "automate all the things with AI" and take a quality/human-first approach to running their business.
If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it.
However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work.
If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it and it's going to be a very long recession where nobody will win.
Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have made it to the top will continue to horde all the profits.
"The drastic changes in Shopify’s approach have led both employees and customers to question the company’s integrity and commitment to its original mission of empowering small businesses. Many see the company as straying from its roots, becoming more akin to the corporate giants it once aimed to oppose."
This seems to me like most start ups or companies as they grow and get big, they start out by disrupting and fighting the way things are done, mixing up the space and taking on 'the man', then they become that which they opposed and then pivot to act in the same way, until someone new comes along and the cycle repeats.
Not referring to Shopify specifically, it's surprising to see startups who are able to increase their operational capacity with their existing workforce by using AI... and instead of instantly having freely trained and ready to go employees to grow the business, instead work to shrink their workforce, instead of putting them to work on the new problems their eventual disruptors will solve.
Automation has always been a scary threat for losing jobs for the last 30-40 years. While LLM might be different, there's almost certainly even more in the next 5-10 years we haven't imagined yet.
It's probably enshitification. Short term higher profits.
Fire support staff and it tales time for the effects to manifest. Could be either internal support like secretaries, technical writers or external support, like, customer support.
Who was calling customer service to begin with? I’m not a user, but I suspect there’s more margin with customers who are large enough to have a firm or internal team handle Shopify for them, and that’s not the type of person (one would hope) that would call customer service unless there was an account-level issue. If that’s the case, then they are simply evolving away from the mom-and-pop priority that made it so popular to begin with :(
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|2 years ago|reply
This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same web page that you are, with no more ability to change anything than you have. And it will take 30 minutes to get one of them on the phone because "we are experiencing unusually high call volume" which translates as "the new vice president fired 10 more customer service agents to make his numbers look good."
If robots are involved it means "the new vice president wanted his numbers to look even better."
Companies have apparently run the numbers and decided it is cheaper to effectively ignore and dissuade dissatisfied customers than to try to resolve their issues. And since most companies insist on binding arbitration now, they're not even worried about class-action lawsuits.
[+] [-] LoganDark|2 years ago|reply
Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.
[+] [-] speleding|2 years ago|reply
For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose issues make them fall outside the golden path of standard procedures: an average call center employee can cost $30 for a complex customer question, if you add up all cost associated from the employees involved, obliterating any margin from that customer. I doubt that AI will change this much. So if you have a question that someone with HN-level IQ cannot resolve themselves then customer service cannot profitably help you. The best you can hope for is that someone will create a ticket that someone else will look at at some point if a lot of similar tickets accumulate.
[+] [-] sometimes_all|2 years ago|reply
Good customer service inspires loyalty to a company in a way discounts/advertising cannot. Their topline might not be the best, but they'll never go out of business.
[+] [-] nonstopdev|2 years ago|reply
Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them.
Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan.
The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.
[+] [-] martin8412|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lynchdt|2 years ago|reply
More interesting to support team managers are things like deflection rate (didn’t get to an agent) involvement rate (needed an agent) and eventually resolution rate (resolved issue). The last one in the absence of feedback is only a very weak proxy for a resolved issue.
If you consider customer support a cost center, you can guess how managers would optimize these numbers.
I don’t necessarily think there is much wrong with this - having a good product with excellent design, build and proactive support (docs, manuals, walkthroughs, proactive comms) - is likely very good for both customers and the business serving them.
[+] [-] ravenstine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moomoo11|2 years ago|reply
Just like how people go nuts over “insane” MRR/ARR while fueling unsustainable enterprises. I guess it’s one way to wash money.
[+] [-] sharts|2 years ago|reply
I’m not sure why people (esp. those in the tech community) think we have evolved the technology in any meaningful enough way to replace people yet.
How do we know this? Those same people would be against AI chatbots replacing their children’s teachers.
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
It’s a vocal minority of the tech community that shares that opinion. The silent majority knows it’s just fud marketing. Personally when i encounter a customer support chat bit i immediately assume low quality services and products. When i meet a software engineer blown away but chatgpt’s “coding skills” i assume that engineer is not particularly competent. There are valid use cases and the tech has obviously got potential but we are not there yet.
[+] [-] smeej|2 years ago|reply
True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be.
[+] [-] gnicholas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AussieWog93|2 years ago|reply
And honestly, probably 90% of people are like this.
In terms of who actually takes up the majority of the support reps' time, however, is the 10% of people who are bored, lonely, genuinely mentally handicapped, whingers, and people who get really angry about some bizarre inane detail.
I'd honestly love it if companies weren't so allergic to offering good, paid support or just dropping troublesome customers so that the rest of us could get through quickly.
[+] [-] mupuff1234|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpm140|2 years ago|reply
What this means is I still want to believe that crap customer experience is due to a disconnected CEO, when we all know it’s a feature, not a bug.
[+] [-] Der_Einzige|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetokeoverthe|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tempestn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online.)
[+] [-] topynate|2 years ago|reply
I tried to find people complaining about being left on hold by shopify support and got nothing on twitter. All the complaints are about the account payments being on hold, i.e. shitty but par for the course risk/compliance issues.
The remaining thread content is the sort of inference and speculation that anyone with the right political bent could have made, given a few hours to research the company.
[+] [-] cm2012|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RugnirViking|2 years ago|reply
in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
Moving call centre jobs to India and Philippines 20 years ago didn't exactly make those that lost their jobs more productive over the long run. The textbook says it should have, as American comparative advantage should be in higher value-added activities.
The only problem is that the textbook also thinks re-skilling is free, everyone has alternate options for employment, and the labour market re-balances instantly.
[+] [-] tempodox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krsdcbl|2 years ago|reply
If we were moving towards UBI and made employment an optional thing then a world in which machines do most of the human work would be utopic indeed
But reality has evolved differently, and after the need for manual labour and craftsmanship got decimated in the last century, now software is pushing into the fields where all the people needing jobs who aren't needed in production ended up.
If we follow this train of thought, that we'd like to diminish the need for individual labour, without removing the individuals need to work as well, we'll just be enlarging the divide between affluence and utter poverty.
[+] [-] xjapappy3311|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xDEF|2 years ago|reply
Since 2013 this site has not been the optimistic hacker/startup forum Paul Graham envisioned in 2007. For a decade it has just been a higher quality version of r/technology but with the same reddit-tier doomposting.
[+] [-] WhackyIdeas|2 years ago|reply
Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears.
We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!).
Long story short: these big e-shop hosters seem to share something in common - Twattery.
[+] [-] prayze|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frereubu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChumpGPT|2 years ago|reply
Good Lord, how much cheaper can you get than Canadian labor? They already get paid poorly and earn about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts. I guess the lack of jobs is why they can pay so little, explains why so many Canadians flee to the US first chance they get.
[+] [-] Barrin92|2 years ago|reply
Companies who outsource customer support to cheap subsidiaries or bots have no respect for either their customers or their workers, both low and high paid, who will inevitably have to fix and respond to the crap coming their way. For me it has become the most important factor in not choosing to buy anything from a business. It is the canary in the coal mine for future degrading quality.
[+] [-] dorkwood|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BigBalli|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rglover|2 years ago|reply
The destruction of brands on the horizon is creating a ton of opportunity for new businesses to develop. One's that can only succeed if they reject the religion of "automate all the things with AI" and take a quality/human-first approach to running their business.
[+] [-] kwanbix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malikNF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpflan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarjoura|2 years ago|reply
However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work.
If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it and it's going to be a very long recession where nobody will win.
Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have made it to the top will continue to horde all the profits.
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChildOfChaos|2 years ago|reply
This seems to me like most start ups or companies as they grow and get big, they start out by disrupting and fighting the way things are done, mixing up the space and taking on 'the man', then they become that which they opposed and then pivot to act in the same way, until someone new comes along and the cycle repeats.
[+] [-] j45|2 years ago|reply
Automation has always been a scary threat for losing jobs for the last 30-40 years. While LLM might be different, there's almost certainly even more in the next 5-10 years we haven't imagined yet.
[+] [-] rightbyte|2 years ago|reply
Fire support staff and it tales time for the effects to manifest. Could be either internal support like secretaries, technical writers or external support, like, customer support.
[+] [-] imafish|2 years ago|reply
Let’s free up some humans for other tasks. They weren’t performing the previous tasks that well anyway.
[+] [-] rglover|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrazyCatDog|2 years ago|reply