I'll toot my own theory and it is that nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role.
They want to automate that all away as much as possible.
The future is everyone who isn't somebody chatting about how they run their application on X... because they're mysteriously banned form Y and Z and the next guy talks about how he was banned on X and is on Z now... simply for that reason.
I would support your theory. Support staff don't scale as well or as fast as the technology they're supporting does.
I have often wondered about that for Google. Sure, they have bucket loads of cash, but could they even feasibly stand up a large enough support staff to handle all their platforms? They have so many services, across dozens of languages, and serve hundreds of millions of customers in different timezones.
Also, why would they want to? They're saving untold amounts of money by pushing the problem onto the consumer, and if it works 99% of the time then it's probably good enough.
One of these days, they'll fuck up big time for many customers and get sued. They'll survive, but it'll cost a lot of money.
Especially for Google (and other life-or-death services for many people), the solution seems kind of simple: charge for support. Google terminated your GMail-Account because you logged in from Turkey? Pay $50 to get somebody to listen to your story and work with you on proving your identity. Would you rather change your email on all your accounts or pay $50?
Paying for the product isn't the issue, the company in the DO debacle was happy to pay - support is the issue. I pay Amazon to send me stuff, but I'd honestly be happy to pay them $5 to have my emails to support read & replied to by a person that doesn't have to rely on a low tier auto translate.
I understand that support is expensive, and especially for ad financed or cheap products, having an agent look into something can quickly cost more than you'll ever make off that customer. If the customer pays for support, support becomes a product and the company doesn't have to treat support as a profit-killer (that is, automate it, make it annoying for the customer so he avoids it, and staff it with the cheapest available labor creating a high fluctuation because of bad working conditions).
Best as I can tell they are a early stage startup surviving off startup credits from DO. Also $5 doesn't go far towards support costs. After a minute or two troubleshooting and they are already losing money.
The problem is if google is shutting down access for you how will you use the support provided by google apps. its a support chat you have to be logged in...
Doesn't have to be $50, but a few might make sense to to keep their support from getting clogged with stuff that could be googled. Some sort of "Rescue Me" emergency flare option.
It's billing for solving problems they have caused.
This is completely not Ok. If the idea is paid support for random problems, that's fine, if it's larger prices so it includes support, that's also fine. But if any company caused me a large damage and decided to ask money so they would reevaluate their actions, I'd go to the police.
>I'll toot my own theory and it is that nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role.
The crazy thing is that it's really not that expensive. AWS, for example, offers 24x7 support w/ <1 hour response time for production issues starting at $100 a month. At worst it's 10% of your bill.
It's very doable, but sadly even skilled management (in my experience) tends to avoid / flee support organizations due to their low prestige / resources pattern that is across a lot of industries.
I fear it is something very doable, but I'm not sure there are many in leadership that can.
Hi treis - All DO customers have always received free, 24x7 Support. Of course, we're working on being as responsive as our customers deserve. A few months ago we also implemented a new paid Premier Support tier which features a live channel with 30-minute response times.
I've heard people observe how many support lines have transformed into these impeccably polite, but completely unempowered people--which is more frustrating than being on hold or getting stuck in an automated menu loop because their protocol deflects any anger away from that person (which isn't fair in any circumstance) and leaves you helpless.
> nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role
It's not about money. I worked at a unicorn that paid very high wages for support staff AND allowed them to work remotely and asynchronously from anywhere in the world. If you lived in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe you'd make more than a local doctor just answering emails.
We still simply couldn't hire enough halfway intelligent people fast enough to keep up with the user growth. For each support person we'd hire, there'd be 10,000 new customers joining the same week. "Automating that all away" was the only tractable way to respond to people at all in a reasonable time frame. Obviously the support quality was awful.
I think it is about money... but also skilled leadership who understand how a good support organization works, how to find people and retain them.
I suspect though that due to the general trend to look at support as a "cost" most skilled leadership has moved on or just settled for poor support practices and etc.
Interestingly in my experience support teams that operate outside the home country of the company OFTEN have massive turnover issues, more than say domestic (wherever domestic is). There's a gap there that just never seems to fill in completely.
There is also something to be said for managing support in the sense that you don't have to talk to every 10,000 customers ;)
They want to automate that all away as much as possible.
The future is everyone who isn't somebody chatting about how they run their application on X... because they're mysteriously banned form Y and Z and the next guy talks about how he was banned on X and is on Z now... simply for that reason.