Comment by harha
5 years ago
I have a regular phone number in Singapore from a new range of numbers that doesn’t work with many services, even with some government services.
Customer care typically replies by having me first prove that the number is real (by showing a phone bill for getting an verification OTP, think of the irony) and then goes silent because they can’t work around their (human) robot way of thinking when something is unaccounted for in the handbook. (Already shifted a significant portion of my regular spend on groceries to a different provider, but they don’t seem to care)
It’s very frustrating because there are other ways to prove my identity (government even provides a digital Id / signature app) and contacting me.
Services should work with the minimal needed set of properties from the user, discord and slack are very annoying , there’s no need for all this hassle for a small question. I would spend the extra time looking for an alternative product where I can than signing up.
What happened to people caring where users drop off in the funnel?
Losing a user or customer once you’ve spent all that time, effort or money acquiring them by having barriers that don’t have any benefit is just silly.
On the other side of there are bots that impersonate users to send spam or raid servers to overrun moderation and “DoS” the server’s communication. Part of the value proposition of running on Discord or Slack is that they handle offloading a large amount of user verification/spam prevention and moderation tooling. The only one you really have to do is manage rules and have some sort of rotation so at least one moderator is online to handle potential issues.
Is this the only viable solution today? Fully opt in to a provider that isn’t user friendly?
For a free service maybe ok, but then you typically shouldn’t have the bot problem to such an extent if it’s small enough.
For a paid service: no way, please find a way around this or I’ll find a way around your service as soon as a problem pops up and causes me extra inconvenience just to sign up.