alt Hacker NewsPeople demand free support.
When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some.
Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.
Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training.
Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap.
In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share.
The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)
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Microsoft is a company that has very little right to complain about support costs. They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software and updates that required support in the first place. Nobody wants to call Microsoft for support. They do it because they've been forced to, usually by Microsoft. This kind of support can hardly be called "free" because even when Microsoft isn't charging customers to speak with the person on the other end of the line the customer has already paid in time and suffering (and sometimes lost data)
If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.
You wrote all of that in response to the title, without reading even one paragraph of the article? Wild. The article is not about support chatbots.
My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.
Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different companies working in different directions. Maybe Microsoft customer support is a bad place to measure these things because of the size, but around here quite a few banks have tried outsourcing their phone support to everything available and have come back because it cost them customers. Even customers who never phoned them.
That being said. Your example of customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. Once (if?) AI voice chat is good enough to replace chatbots we may not even realize we're talking with an AI unless it tells us.
If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. More often than not, I'm calling to do the company the favor of reporting an unaddressed failure mode in their service, often with technical details that would help them quickly identify and fix the cause (and reduce their support call volume)... if only that information could be delivered to the right people.
I don't have infinite time or patience, though. When blocked by a moat of hold times, chat bots, first level support scripts, etc, I will give up.
Yes, calls like mine are in the minority. But they are especially valuable, and I think well worth their share of the costs you describe.
Maybe companies should be identifying customers with above average tech skills, and routing them to better support channels next time they call.
Maybe we need shibboleet.
I don't know what the best solution is, but there must be a better way to do triage than funneling everyone into a flowchart of counterproductive misery, as is widespread today.
> People demand free support.
> When I worked at Microsoft
Last I checked the common nicknames were "Microslop" and "Winblows"
Maybe if Microslop spent more time improving their product they'd spend less money and time on support.
Sorry, I have no empathy for a multi trillion dollar company that's shoving things down our throats. I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience as an employee but my feelings about a mega corp are very different. It's like watching someone wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills
Why not charge for support?
And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.
> When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some.
This doesn't seem like a bad thing when it comes to aligning incentives (assuming customers actually want a product they don't need help to use).
The support cost is why I email support to unsubscribe me from newsletters I haven't signed up for, instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. I then mark the email as spam anyway in gmail.
It's petty, but I haven't found a better disincentive.
Curious, why was it $20?
I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?
> Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training.
I often wonder that if you paid $60K for a top quality support person instead of $30K for two average people (or even $20K for 3 bad people) then the following might happen:
- you would get better support calls
- happier customers
- longer tenured employees
- all of the above would lead to a reputation as a company with AMAZING support
One company whose software I used had an annual support contract. If you did not renew that contract, every time you called support they would ask for a credit card number. If you found an actual bug, the card would not be charged. If it was a user error, the card would get charged.
This seemed pretty reasonable to me.
>Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.
Same in the ISP space. ISP's with low margins often lose multiple months of revenue on a single support call.
Why are you talking about support? The article has nothing to do with that.
People prefer a pricing model in which support appears free. Free support (that is good) creates the sense that the company stands behind the product and service, and leads to good reviews, so it is a win/win.
The article isn't about customer support.
Ir is just imagination to not consider the legal trouble od not providing proper support or even worse, improper support
Software scales. Customer support doesn't. SaaS companies do not want to deal with customer support at all. It's only gotten worse with AI agents.
It's incredibly frustrating to spend a good 10 minutes navigating a website's complex web of menus to get a phone number (I think they deliberately try to hide it...). Then spend another 5 minutes listening to bots telling me to press 1 for English, only to fall into the wrong menu where the bot repeats some useless information I already know, say goodbye, then hang up.
Having a bot say to me: "we care about your concerns, and we value your business" is absurd and oxymoronic.
Compare this to say Chase, Amex, or Geico. I call, someone answers within 2 minutes and addresses all my problems/concerns in fluent English. I'd happily pay a premium for that.
>People demand free support.
Ok, SaaS it is then
>People demand to pay once and that's it.
Ok, ads, you got it.
>People demand no ads.
Ok, chatbot support then
>...
The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them.
All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business.
Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live.
He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button.
And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password.
And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link".
I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible.
I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.