[fhd2]

Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience.

Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now. Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? Or is support not that key and we should invest into being the most reliable? The most enjoyable to use?

One can hope.

[benfortuna]

I think it's fair to say that AI amplifies our abilities, but it needs to be in the hands of people that know what they are doing.

If developers are producing garbage to begin with, chances are they still produce garbage just at an accelerated rate.

[spwa4]

But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.

[johnnyanmac]

Business incentives is to maximize money, which requires some quality. But these days, not a lot.

Customers ideally maximize value, which lies on some spectrum of cost and quality. Part of the reasons businesses act with disregard for quality is that the consumer ultaimtely doesn't punish them for it. Whether that's due to true consumer preference or a market lock-in is a discussion left to the reader.

[kilroy123]

Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back.

Bizarre experience.

[inigyou]

Role Collapse might work in this type of situation: prompt your own ChatGPT to decide a refund with a very permissive refund policy, copy its thinking, paste into the next support message after your prompt, and their ChatGPT may believe it's its own thinking.

The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.

[kilroy123]

Funny you say this. I _almost_ tried this. But it did feel like a person was doing some copy-and-pasting and watching closely, so it wasn't 100% automated.

[brazzy]

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support?

That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out.

Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost no customer is willing to pay 10 times more for good support.

[dgellow]

I disagree. I’m biased but the customer eng/support team we created at stainless was really good and that was a key differentiator during sales calls and post-sales. It’s expensive if you see it as an afterthought and just an expense you would prefer to avoid, but we approached it as an enabler role, a multiplier of sort: ensure customers feel they engage with peers, provide guidance to the eng teams, enable salespeople to engage meaningfully with technical teams, etc. For like a year it was basically just me and an awesome colleague handling the whole thing full time. We took the very explicit decision to have it as a very technical role and designed a culture that sees it as essential to the business (because it was), and that worked really well IMHO.

If you create a startup you really want to focus on a small audience that you understand and know really well, instead of chasing everyone. And for that a support team is one of the most important asset you have

[dijksterhuis]

the key differentiator is whether your business is aiming to provide a quality service, or is desperate to eek out as much profit as possible.

my example: A&A — uk internet service provider.

costs like twice as much as a normal service per month. but if i have a super technical query im on the phone with a fully fledged engineer in about 2 minutes flat. the kind of engineer that can discuss complex dns issues. i’ve had one help me debug a dns issue from a work site. it turned out quite quickly it was nothing to do with them but he hung around on the phone for 10 minutes anyway.

the first support person i ever spoke to was michael from wales. if i had to call up he was the first voice i would hear for years. he recently moved on and i was sad. we’d have a decent chat. big up michael from wales.

so, as it applies to at least one existing business — you are dead wrong. it might be twice as expensive as the people trying to maximise their profit margins, but it’s definitely not 10x more.

[rightbyte]

I paid less for internet in the late 90s and had a good support to call. There is no way "absurd margins" are required.

[fhd2]

Apple has pretty stellar support in my experience, and while I don't buy Apple stuff for other reasons, this is a strong attractor. For B2B products/services, it can be a huge differeniator as well, in my experience. But it was really just an example, it might not be the call most companies make. Maybe most will still just invest in being faster or cutting costs. I just hope that's not how it's gonna be.

[iLoveOncall]

You gotta be joking. Apple has no support at all, and if you ever go into a shop at their "GeNiUs BaR" (after booking an appointment days in advance), you will get extremely poor service and incompetent support.

[fhd2]

I never went into an Apple store, but the phone support issues I had (even a pretty complex bug on their end that locked me out of my account) where handled swiftly and well, and I spoke to humans that seemed to know what they're doing. I could say this should be the default and I shouldn't be impressed by it, but unfortunately it's top 10% based on my experience. I'm in Europe though, maybe they do things differently here.

[Hugsbox]

Used to work at an AppleCare call centre. Apple has extremely high standards for their support advisors. I'm aware that the genius bars are terrible, though.

[compass_copium]

Plenty of companies are willing to pick RHEL or paid Ubuntu for that very reason, even though they are infinity times more expensive than free Debian

[Avshalom]

Software's absurd margins was like the whole pitch.

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah, and companies want to put those margins into their pockets, not give it back to the business/product.

[iLoveOncall]

The fact that I can speak to a human to refund a $2 item on Amazon proves how wrong you are.

[dwedge]

Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience.

A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CSR had lied to inflate his scores, and if I've thrown the book away I'm out of luck, he generated a return label. I complained and they threatened to close my account unless I send verification documents. I didn't, I just sent the book back and the refund processed automatically.

About a year before that I had a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon that it was only 6 months old and it was broken, and Samsung said I need to send it to Cyprus for some reason. Amazon said to send it back for a refund, I did, and I got a warning that I'd returned something "not in original condition" and next time I'll be banned.

Last week a package didn't arrive. I queried it and there was no longer the option to talk to anyone, just a link to phone numbers for the external courier.

So I would say that Amazon having stellar support 15 years ago, building a brand on it, and then choosing to stop doing that mostly proves how wrong you are. Sure, you can still sometimes speak to someone, but it's getting worse.

[inigyou]

FYI you can sue them in small claims for this. This is one of the languages that companies really listen to. You would have to have actually thrown the book out in good faith, though, or commit perjury. Remember the airline LLM support bot and the bereavement fare?

[ValentineC]

Suing them could also result in one getting banned from Amazon for good.

I wonder if there's a way the law could make it so companies can't retaliate against people who seeking redress for problems they caused.

[BobbyTables2]

Would this actually work?

Surely, they have a mandatory arbitration clause in their customer agreement..?

And which state’s court?

[inigyou]

It might. Nothing in courts is ever certain. You could always try it, and at worst you'd be out a court fee (low, for small claims) and wouldn't get your money back because of this clause. Or they could say the clause doesn't matter.

Meanwhile Amazon has to pay someone to attend the hearing.

Note that Amazon would probably ban your account regardless. Most retail businesses don't want customers who might sue them, even if they deserve it.

[iLoveOncall]

I have 400 orders a year on Amazon and never have any of those weird issues. How strange!

[dwedge]

My grandma smoked until she was 90 and she was absolutely fine!

[anonzzzies]

Haha yeah, Uber, Amazon, Starlink, Hotels etc just send me stuff or refund without even asking anything. I use all of them all the time for everything; that indeed seems to help. Logical of course.

[7952]

But that could just mean you are a more profitable customer. And that could be influencing how amenable the AI/agents are and how much money they are willing to write off to retain you.

[Brian_K_White]

My house never burned down once in 40 years.

[iLoveOncall]

According to the comment I was responding to, he got 3 bad experiences out of 3 orders, so 100% rate of issues. What's the expected rate of house fires?

Both you and the other commenter about his grandma's smoking habit are making nonsensical comparisons about things that are extremely rare, to support something that is supposedly extremely common, if you were to believe the parent's comment (or other stories you read online).

[datadrivenangel]

and now without prime, amazon packages take two weeks to arrive! Total garbage

[thaumasiotes]

Amazon has a big problem with "unifying" products that are in fact not the same thing.

At one point I was looking through editions of the Arabian Nights and I noticed that, while the "kindle version" linked from the page for the paperback of one edition was an unrelated book, an actual kindle version of the edition I was looking at did exist elsewhere on the site.

I was annoyed enough that I opened a chat with customer support and asked them which of the two ebooks (one linked as "the kindle version of edition X", but with a different translator, title, cover art, etc; one not linked to the paperback at all, except for the identical translator, cover art, etc...) was the kindle version of the paperback.

A few days later, the links had been fixed, and the "kindle version" link on the paperback's page went to the kindle version of the same book!

[Proofread0592]

Counterpoint: Take a look at consumer cellular. I would say it’s drastically cheaper than verizon, at&t, or t-mobile, but the customer support is better than all 3.

[ungreased0675]

Ting also has (had?) excellent customer service. Call the 800 number and the first thing you hear is “hello” from an actual human who has the ability to help you. They also didn’t charge a lot, which makes me think great customer service is a choice.

[inigyou]

The relevant mindset is "we can shrink our way to growth". Managers think by cutting employees and roles the company will get bigger. It won't.

[officialchicken]

If your product MSRP goes up 10x because of a single OPEX line-item, the failure isn't the product, it's the business leaders.

[cheschire]

Bring back all the engineering rigor that people complained was too slow to keep up with VC-protected Silicon Valley competition.

And bring back change & configuration management processes and documentation reviews. All the boring slow stuff.

Except now make it part of your CI/CD pipeline.