Comment by thow-01187
5 years ago
No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google/Facebook run.
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
> Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
Microsoft (used to?) pick up the phone if you called about an issue with Windows. If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license.
Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they definitely drove the average tech support load to much less than one call per machine.
> If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license
That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your OEM, not Microsoft.
> the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
All these companies will continue the race to the bottom unless you twist their arm. For PR, sounds like a nice job creator to me!
> Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
For any support issue? Given the realities of running a business over the Internet today, that would be a waste of resources and needlessly expensive.
But I do agree with you in principle though: I think there should be a legal requirement that anyone with a dependent business relationship to a service provider should be legally entitled to human review of any automatic suspension decisions within a single business day. This shouldn't affect long-tail businesses because when there's a strong dependency relationship there's definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from which presumably a small fraction would pay for the requisite support costs.
These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?
I think they would require a customer service team at least an order of magnitude larger than that to properly deal with things.
Baby steps. It's not the magnitude but the attitude.
Well, TBH, it's really "$10 from 100M sales + $0 from O(7 billion) sales."