

Ask HN: Why don't businesses call me when I'm having problems? - canterburry

A friend and I are brainstorming ways to fix customer service.<p>It seems to us that in today&#x27;s environment, businesses should already have all the information in real time to know when I&#x27;m experiencing a problem with their product or service. So...why is it I who has to call them? Why can&#x27;t they detect the issue, correlate it with my customer record and call me with the solution?<p>We are theorizing that either businesses aren&#x27;t listening to what their own systems are telling them, or there isn&#x27;t enough financial incentive to be proactive.<p>What are we missing?
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rainmaking
I agree that proactive service calls would be just awful. There is nothing I
hate more than being pestered, by anyone.

Having said that, it would be really good to have automatic systems that
detect problems. This is done by us with technology, but it could also be done
for brick-and-mortar business with some kind of standardized management
process.

Two applications come to mind:

(1) Have engineers fix things before the problem reaches the customer

This is what people really want: It just works, and they don't have to bother
with it.

(2) If the customer does call, and tests say things have gone wrong, he
immediately gets sent up the queue and the rep is warned that this person
actually is having legitimate trouble and needs to be given more attention and
goodies.

Danger: You need to constantly align your test systems with your customer's
experience. Wrong confidence is even worse than ignorance.

~~~
canterburry
Hopefully the ultimate fix would be your #1. However, a system like this could
actually help pinpoint areas of the application which may be the root of the
problem. If there are enough cases which all trigger based on the same pattern
they may point to a common root cause, no?

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MalcolmDiggs
I think we all want to avoid accidentally building "Clippy" the helpful
paperclip who wont shut up.

That is, there's a fine line between helpful and pestering, so I'd wager the
default thinking is: "Let's make it really easy for a user to ask for help,
but stop just shy of forcing it on them."

That being said, when _everybody_ is adhering to the default frame of mind,
maybe that's a sign that your product/service could be legitimately disruptive
(in a good way). I'd say go for it!

~~~
canterburry
Yes, we definitely don't want a Clippy but I hope today's machine learning
techniques are superior to whatever Clippy was running on.

This wouldn't even have to be AI driven. It could be as simple as setting up
rules manually to predefined patterns of faulty behavior.

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haney
Often times there aren't reporting facilities in place that are well connected
operationally with an outbound customer service system. At my company we once
had a bug that broke the sign up funnel for users, the engineers called to
follow up a fix things because the user had intent to perform a high value
transaction. For high volume businesses I'm sure there's a cost benefit
analysis of making the support investment. Customer service is undervalued by
too many companies.

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hobs
Many of them already know but dont have the staff to care about the number of
problems they have out in the world. (financial incentive)

Most business I know even know of the issues, but things are going along just
fine, and that particular issue may be not be easy to fix, and to say there is
immediate financial consequences by not fixing it may be hard.

------
giaour
I'd be surprised if that's not Amazon's next move with Mayday.

