[silisili]

On one hand, this makes me incredibly sad. It means that all of us, as consumers, agreed we'd rather save a buck than get acceptable service.

On the other hand, as someone who did customer service in my younger years, 95% of calls were PEBKAC, so it's essentially a giant money drain for things of no real concern to you as a company.

I've often wondered how successful it would be to charge $3 or $5 per call, refunding the money in cases said call was needed.

[postpawl]

The worst customer service is usually for things where you don't have a choice, like when your mortgage gets sold to a new servicer.

[CamperBob2]

In principle I agree with the concept of charging for support and refunding if the issue is not at the customer's end. I'd certainly be fine with that myself, even if it cost $50 or so to get a responsible human on the line when there's trouble with a service like banking, payments, or business-critical SaaS providers.

I think Microsoft tried that at one point, but they didn't stick with it for some reason. Maybe it leads to a lot of knock-down, drag-out arguments about whose fault something is.

[FateOfNations]

The problem is dealing with those other 5% of calls. If you are in a 5% situation, you're seemingly SOL these days.