It's rather simple. If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it. Especially if you pay nothing and the product business model is ad-based.
If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
In my experience, paying a high price is no guarantee you'll get particularly good customer service.
Obviously, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service.
But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports. The business class bags get lost just as often as the economy class bags. The low-volume, high end luxury car will be in the shop more often than the mass produced car. The PC vendor can't help with your Linux screen tearing, whether it's a $300 laptop or a $6000 workstation. Sports events with the highest demand will have the most expensive tickets - and also the most queues, the worst toilets, and the most expensive food.
I find getting good customer service far from simple :)
It obviously depends on the category of the "thing" we're talking about - and you can only compare it ceteris paribus with other things.
>But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports.
But the premium seats at the airplane have better treatment than economy ones.
If you buy a premium seat with free food and lounge access, you'll get free food and lounge access, yes. As I mentioned, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service in that sense.
But when something goes wrong - like they lose your bag - you'll find the customer service is pretty much the same. Possibly there's an ultra-ultra-premium tier where things are different?
The real way money makes travel easier, in my experience, isn't that you can buy flights where they don't lose your bags - it's that a few hundred bucks to replace some lost clothes is a trivial matter.
High uptime and support availability costs a lot. Something the general internet population doesn't think about when comparing prices with municipal broadband.
Their consumer wireline business is mostly regulated and has strict margin caps.
Do you have a source that contradicts the number I provided? Because AT&T is getting wrecked right now by every publicly available number which contradicts both the spirit of your comment and explains why they might cut costs for customer support.
Their business wire line just wrote down nearly half of their previous year numbers.
By no metric I know of does AT&T have a high margin business
By being cheaper for cheap customers by having razor thin margins and they don't complain since it is cheap.
More expensive customers then turn into pure profit but have a hard time going to a competitor who can't undercut you without the scale benefits you got from your cheap offering.
Also massive tax breaks due to "bringing internet to the masses" which your competitors can't get.
The problem is that it enables products of such low quality they arguably should not exist in that form. Try reporting something scammy or harmful on Facebook. The report will be ignored because it would take away too much profit. (Too much for what? We don't know. Maybe FB could not exist in its current form if there was not-horrible "customer" service. Well, maybe it should be a little different then.)
A prime example: you can get systematically harassed by nation state actors (in practice Russian trolls) and their useful idiots, and big tech will do absolutely nothing even after documenting and reporting all of it.
> If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it.
If you do pay enough money for a product that can sustain good customer service, you won't necessarily get it then, either.
>If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
That "usually" doesn't kick in until you have a sales rep that is worried about loosing your business specifically. Then they'll exercise soft power to escalate your tickets. Because despite their profit margin, their customer service team is still under pressure to cut costs as much as possible.
Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much
time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well.
Humans cost a lot.
And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them a lot more, and likely they wouldn't last long at this job even then.
The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service so people don't have to talk to customer support (pit of success, yada yada). This is an iterative process and requires people who form a cross-functional team willing to speak up. I don't see how it is possible in an assembly line kind of environment but for small teams, I am sure it is doable?
> The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service so people don't have to talk to customer support
This is a naive model of why customers call for support that I used to also hold before I had to deal with customers.
I've helped my dad with customer service for a technical product he sells online and there really is nothing you can put in a one-page manual and there's no perfect UI that stops people from calling to waste your time if you make yourself too available.
Though working in Target over a summer was all it took to dispel the myth. Almost every question involved me going (in my head) "Not sure why you need me to do this, but okay, let's read the back of the packaging together so I can answer your question having also never encountered this product in my life."
> The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service
Sure, but that's not really the topic, and without discussing the exact details we wouldn't be able to evaluate how easy it exactly is, because there's always things that could go wrong.
Isn't the issue that even the scripts aren't up to scratch.
A chatbot that had the nuances correctly distinguished would not be a concern but it's because the script is not well put together and most likely poorly applied with a bot that it's so painful.
There's no guarantee that the money you pay will continue to be invested in customer service.
I have worked at a dozen startups, good customer service is an early market requirement, you hire good support staff, give them direct connections to the dev, you make their manager on equal footing.
Once things are humming along and the product isn't such a tire fire, it's "Oh we can promote the good ones to a services department and then export the rest off shore to a company that dgaf"
Were there entirely ad-powered business models with customer facing support before the Internet?
I can think of magazines and radio, but by definition they had localised reach, and there was no actual "users" that might need support, unlike many Internet ad-funded freeware.
> You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed.
Because much of the Internet has scaled up drastically?
To your example of AliExpress, how many more users do you think they have now compared to a decade ago? How much do you think their support volume has increased? Therefore it's entirely natural that they've looked at avenues of cutting costs.
If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.