[0gs]

it's hard, but not THAT hard, to find a few dozen people who can deal with large volumes of support tickets every day. so for a company like anthropic, you'd use a customized claude to triage and then those few dozen people spend all day actually caring about solving users' problems. a contract with fin fka intercom (lol) to offload this is a step in the wrong direction imo, but then nobody pays for support so it's hard to turn it into a revenue stream.

[adampunk]

I'm sorry but a few dozen people actually caring about the problems of a billion users is a fart in a windstorm. You might as well hire a half-dozen to care, or none, for all the work you'll do. You'd need a dozen people just to design a scheduler for handling tickets only to watch that catch fire too.

I don't get it. None of the hyperscalers have human support teams at scale because it's obviously infeasible. Why, just because it would be nice, do we take leave of the requirement that something actually be possible before demanding it.

[0gs]

oh i think i agree, with the economics tech companies (all companies, really) and their users currently accept/demand.

but if caring about and solving customer problems was an actual income driver for a company, it could be very different.

i don't think that's going to happen, because i think most users (like Anthropic's) will continue to refuse to pay >$0 for support -- or to claim that their subscription payment should somehow also cover support, which is ridiculous, since they can see with their own "eyes" how little support their "compute subscription" gets them -- and thus companies will continue to invest ~$0, if not less, in meaningful support models.

it still blows my mind that nobody is willing to try charging people an extra $20 a month for unlimited support calls. most customers are DESPERATE for people to talk to about their problems.

instead, they all just try to winnow the cost down as low as possible, and then point to the expense to explain the degradation of service.

[0gs]

also, remember that MOST of those "billion users" generally don't have problems that require product support expertise every day. if each of them were still paying a retainer for access to high-touch support, all kinds of crazy fun stuff would be possible.

[sfifs]

Not infeasible, just allows lower net margins.