It's sad that "at scale" has become synonymous with "without human oversight". It used to be that businesses tried to scale up while providing a level of support for their customers that showed they were valued. As a user today it is so hard to get bug reports directed to someone that can effect change in the right part of the system. As a software developer, I absolutely love getting bug reports for something I can fix, and I know how to file a good bug report. I see this universally across virtually every online product I interact with, from online accounting software to online mapping products and various large tech company's email services. I'm a powerless, unimportant user, not worth listening to because my statistics are not those generated by millions of other people.
The thing that boggles my mind is the lack of formal escalation in modern support departments. It existed because it was a good model: it worked, while managing headcount and cost. Your front line people aren't trained or paid to know everything, but for God's sake have someone backstopping them up with deeper knowledge and access!
Spoiler: there is no such thing as “escalation” most of the time. CSRs at the same level escalate to each other just to make you feel good. My wife use to work as a CSR at Verizon.
When I was in college, I worked CSR for a software product, and we definitely had an escalation path.
My level, to any peers who might know about the specific issue, to our management, and then to engineering (if technical) or our support VP (if business). And it was critical, because inevitable engineering "Oh, that doesn't work that way, but we never wrote it down" or "Oh, I guess that would be a thing people would want to do."
Sadly, after the company was bought the system was collapsed down to the standard front-line-or-close.
For support where someone needs help yes there was a real “escalation path”. But when Karen called complaining about a policy, they were “escalated” to someone else telling them the same thing.
> It's sad that "at scale" has become synonymous with "without human oversight".
That’s exactly the point of scaling though. You’re using automation to replace a human component. It’s as true now as it was during the industrial revolution.
Unfortunately you can’t have it both ways.
Thankfully if you want to deal with humans then you can still buy from small independent outlets. But you then also have to accept that might come with a higher price tag too.
Honestly, I don't care if I have to pay an extra $5/month or more so that when that rare need to talk to a human comes up. The problem is that the automated system isn't doing the job that the humans did, and there's zero recourse. It's a disease infesting tech companies that needs to be addressed by consumer protection laws.
The thing is not everyone is willing to pay more. Some people can’t even afford to pay more. That’s how we ended up in this race to the bottom to begin with.
EU offers some protections here but not with services run outside of the EU.
The easiest way to "scale" is set your base value to 0. If you don't do it at all, it's easy to double it, triple it, increase it by orders of magnitude.
If your base value is 0, then the value to your customers is also 0. In theory, a company with good customer support should have a competitive advantage over a company with poor customer support. But in B2C industries, customer support always seems to be a race to the bottom.
