[slx26]

The right balance is "as much human customer service as people asks for". If your tech is good enough, lots of people will prefer it in most cases. And yet, there's people who will always prefer talking to a human, and people that would rather not talk to a human, but really have to because the other alternatives have already failed. And you have to care about those cases.

In a way, I understand that being in the customer service side you will often feel people are just being lazy and asking for help without even trying by themselves. And yeah, this is a poor use of resources. And yeah, it annoys me too. But trying to solve this by making it extremely hard to get help from another human is not ok. I don't know what's ok, but this is not. It's the general debate of "if you leave your door wide open, someone is gonna thrash the inside, if you don't, that will become less likely, but you will also add friction for those that really have to come inside". And there's no such thing as safe mass surveillance, so...

[mchusma]

But human support is not free, and that is the point. Yes, everyone wants 24/7 support in the channel they want, with someone in country, highly trained to answer all their questions.

Can you have this? Sure! It's expensive though.

In reality, there are tradeoffs. Paid support plans solve some of this, allowing customers to self select into buckets. However, this is problematic as when something is going wrong they typically don't want to pay more.

In general, I think there are free lunches to be had. Good documentation that is well structured and browseable, and staying away from the phone are generally good. (Phone is both synchronous and typically more time consuming, although not always).