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by blindriver 393 days ago
There needs to be a better way to deal with trillion dollar companies that have the power to remove essential parts of your life based on bugs or incompetent processes.

Companies like Apple. Microsoft, Google, Meta, et al. have the money to spend on better customer support, but they don't because they have a monopoly. They know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do. But even worse, they have absolute and total control and then hide behind their lack of customer support.

I think there should be a law that states that once you become large enough or important enough, you MUST reach a certain level of competent customer support or you will get fined the amount of money it will cost to pay for this competent customer support.

The reason why they get around bad customer support is because they are large enough so that they can bully billions of people by threatening to cut off access. Talk to Youtubers that get mysteriously cut off with no customer support to talk to.

This is all because of customer support. Smaller companies need to invest in customer support because of competition but not these larger companies because they don't have real competition, and something needs to change to force them to do it.

1 comments

I can understand the problem from the viewpoint of the big companies. How do you provide personalized support to such a huge customer base? The solution of course is to charge for it! Say for instance, I got kicked of of "ogle", but its critical to all my billing etc because of email. Its free email, there are going to be cases when you get locked out (happened to me before with another email provider, THEY got hacked so locked ME out haha, only sentimental things were lost thankfully).

But what about a $100 recovery fee? Then the problem becomes "how do you prove its your account"? There's a wide variety of jurisdictions and id mechanisms, can "ogle" manage all that? I don't know, I'm not close to even talking about "faang" or whatever let alone work at one. So many transactions happen nowadays with these systems that are long strings of rube goldberg machines helped by "AI" that is actually not that intelligent. Is it financially possible to even run these megacorps without the ability to discard problem "customers"? Can you build customer support processes and staff at this sort of scale? Even setting up new billing for what was previously a free account seems sort of daunting.

I guess I'm saying that I'm not so sure that these megacorps "have the money to spend on better customer support," except in the apple case, their customer base is so "unfree" and high margin that I don't understand why they would have a problem, even if repairing an account required a fee for some sort of id verification which seems to be the crucial thing here. They are obviously well positioned with their per customer costs and apple id stuff.