[kneebonian]

I'm not sure about "customer support" being the criteria. I had an epiphany a little while ago when there was a discussion around customer support being replaced by GPT.

There's litterally not much of a difference. Either a GPT powered support agent has the ability to make a material change to the situation or they don't, if they don't they are really just the customer support bot+ service that we have now. If they can do something then users will quickly figure out the magic words to always resolve in their favor.

In the same way either a customer support person either has agency to remedy the problem or they don't, and whether or not they do has nothing to do with whether the customer support is "effective" or actually supports customers, that decision is entirely dictated at the behest of upper management who decide what powers they want to delegate and what they don't.

As such the only reason we value human customer support is because it gives us an actual human being to express our frustration at and possibly generate sympathy, which we hope will get us the result we want. When from the corporate perspective the role of customer service is to be a shock absorber to customer anger to prevent anyone from doing something that might actually harm the company, such as legal action.

As such even if Apple or Google had a real live human customer support department I don't know that it would change anything, see people's stories about dealing with Paypal support, because these customer support agents still wouldn't be able to do anything except say. "Yep you're locked out. No I can't change it or tell you why, sorry."