Comment by PebblesHD
2 years ago
No information given about the actual activities ongoing here so I’ll focus on the service providers behaviour directly.
Given the meteoric rise of companies charging for services with no support of any type available for consumers other than hoping for traction on social media, how do we legislate to basically enforce some alternative to ‘computer says no, just make a new account and hope it doesnt happen again’. This seems like something consumer protections agencies should be all over.
Australia’s consumer protection body is actually quite active in enforcing our rights when dealing with these sorts of things. Does America not have a similar agency or has it been captured by the companies it’s supposed to regulate?
These companies are collecting sizeable profits and part of the way they’re achieving this is by simply disregarding all the support and engagement processes ‘normal’ businesses have to have claiming their scale makes them impossible. That should just not be an acceptable answer as far as consumer remedies are concerned.
Payment processors are a natural monopoly and as such they should be regulated like utilities, i.e. not allowed to deny service without good reason. Unfortunately the government rather likes having a way to destroy the livelihoods of undesirables without any of that pesky due process.
The payment networks (Visa/MC/etc.) may be monopolies but there are ton of processors (Stripe/Paypal/etc.). Sure, all the smaller processors "suck" but somehow they worked before Stripe was founded.
isn't the reason that stripe grew so quickly was because these smaller processors don't really work that well?
i also keep hearing that there's a ton of choice but whenever it's brought up, true alternatives to PP/Stripe are rarely actually given
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You have hundreds of choices to take credit cards online. You can just go the traditional method and get a merchant account and payment gateway.
All of them are at the whims of the main networks, however. The policies they set trickles down to affect everyone (see for example how damn hard it is to take payment for porn).
Payment processors are not a natural monopoly, especially not online ones
We need some new snappy word to describe what service providers are doing.
I know you could probably say that its just some other existing legal construct which we should just enforce, but the point is that the media needs some snappy new very specific word to talk about to make politicians pay attention.
Things like swatting, phishing, slamming, gaslighting and boofing we all know about and are easy to write articles on with decent enough SEO.
So what is the snappy new 21st century term for this, so that we can complain about it and write blogs and articles about it and demand politicians do something about it?
Every business wishes it could be a vending machine. Strip out all employees and customer service and damn the consequences if your soda gets stuck.
Too many people and businesses have been relying on these vending machines, partially because they have no other choice. Everything has been hollowed out, every store runs on a skeleton crew. You know this if you’ve walked around a store wondering if anyone even works there. I never noticed this until I traveled to other countries and found businesses that actually felt like they wanted to please me instead of feeling like I was expected to be grateful that BigBoxStore (tm) exists.
"Deaf corporations" since they cannot hear, "Divine corporations" since they won't listen to you, "Nosumers" as the opposite of prosumers and a nice play with no-sum (you heard it first here)
I like the brainstorming. "Deaf corporations" I think nails the concept and is easy to understand. I don't think its quite snappy enough to roll off the tongue or the keyboard though.
(Although if we don't come up with anything better off the cuff, we could just start calling them "deaf corporations" and then someone moar cleverer might come up with something better later)
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Some more brainstorming:
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"Support Void", "Voiding", "Customer Voiding"
Tossing all customer support requests (and sometimes customers themselves!) into the void.
Pros: Sounds snappy and dramatic. Has humorous resonance with voiding your bowels.
Cons: Meaning not immediately clear. Sounds active when the problem is really more passive.
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"Customer Neglect", "Customer Disservice", "Customer Ghosting"
Opposite of "customer service."
Pros: Meaning is more obvious because of its relation to Customer Service.
Cons: Not quite as snappy.
"Ghosting" is well understood and does describe how the company is behaving.
How about "Support Ghosting"?
Kafkaesque
Does America not have a similar agency
It does, but it's still newish, and faces a lot of opposition from both politicians and businesses.
In 20 or 30 years, once the various lawsuits and codes get sorted out, it might work. But it's still in its toddler phase, and everyone is seeing if they can push the baby over.
The Federal Trade Commission seems relevant. I've not tested them on these "no support; no recourse" situations, but have had good results for other issues.
Anybody thinking of the "Better Business Bureau" should note that the BBB is not a government organisation and behaves more like a Better Extortion Bureau: paying members can keep their good rating by unilaterally declaring a claim has been resolved (often requiring claims to be reasserted multiple times), while non-members or non-paying members cannot even contest claims via the bureau.
We also have an issue of enforcement, I'm not sure if you know... but many, if not all of these behaviors could be acted on with existing legislation. Anti-trust at the federal level and a multitude of state laws on paper make it illegal to do this type of behavior.
The problem is that it's really hard to take action on large corporations. As a consumer, if I wanted to seek remedy for say, false advertising of ingress protection on a phone, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Without a significant war chest it's almost impossible to hold most companies to account as an individual, and the agencies supposed to be enforcing these issues either won't or can't enforce the laws on the books.
The Aussie government has the same new account cycling that corporate culture does. It's just that the gov has call centres and support staff.
Do you think there's any incentive to fix these problems when the constant inconvenience and technical gremlins can be more easily and excitingly solved with biometric IDs and whatever else?
Let's be honest, the Australian government may clamp down on corporations, but it plays the same game and doesn't care for anyone's dissent in the long run.
Not sure if anyone has experimented with this but I wonder if there is a solution but it's just relatively unused. I've heard suing the company (or in most cases, taking them to arbitration) works and often times the company is the one paying for the fees (because that's how arbitration works).
The claim that scale makes support impossible is ridiculous. Just make support a paid service and it'll easily pay for itself and scale proportionally. The will is simply not there