I've been going back and forth on writing about this, on screaming into the void or something, but it does feel like we're moving into a world where you can't talk to people anymore if you have a problem.
It started a few months back with a booking for a trip that I had issues with. I tried to look for a contact email or phone number for booking.com. There isn't one. You can contact the property, you can try and get in touch with your bank but if there is a problem with booking.com, there's no one you can contact, not that I could find at least, I'm more than happy to be proven wrong. The contact us page has only links to other issues and their FAQ, but no one can tell me why after I changed my email account on my account, I'm getting confirmation emails and notifications to my old email account.
Moving on.
Airbnb - same sort of moronic chatbot that can't help you with anything. You can contact the property or the person you wish to book with, but that's about it.
Gmail? Well, you're not paying for this, so why do you want a contact us page? What if you do, who do you contact then?
Google Cloud? Apparently it doesn't matter if you pay, you still have to roll the dice on Twitter/HN/Reddit to get someone to "call a guy".
Twilio? They don't have a contact number (is this what irony is?), same "chatbot" as Airbnb.
Outlook? I was in the middle of writing an email, logged into my account and when I tried to send it, I got a warning saying that my account is suspicious and that I need to verify it. So now I needed to go to another machine, I couldn't sign in anymore on the one I was writing the email on. On the new machine I had to provide a phone number to verify my account, a new phone number. How is this verification? If someone took my account and they have access to my account + password, you giving them carte blanche to provide ANY phone number, doesn't secure my account. On the part of why I was using an outlook email account - you can't complete Microsoft certifications and use another account as a certification email address...
Pearson Vue - I'm emailing their support back and forth to get a refund for a deposit I had to pay on an exam. Apparently, their automated system showed that I did not take part in the exam. However, they did take a picture of me, I had my passing certificate, I had gone through their verification and they had harvested all the data they could about me, yet in all of this, there wasn't some sort of flag to say "Took Test y/n".
Where are we going with this? What sort of systems are we building where we are gleefully cutting out services in order to maximize profits. I understand that we somehow all agreed that customer service and support is something you shouldn't expect from free things. But what about the stuff you do pay for? What about the automation of EVERYTHING because companies are so obsessed with not hiring 10-100 people for support that they create these hell-holes where you can easily end up locked out of your account even when you have the same system, on the same network and the username/password/2FA available?
Are we really accepting this? Is this really normal behavior?
I for one will go out of my way to book trips directly with the people/companies I will be staying with. I'm tired of your poor excuses for "removing friction", I'm tired of the excuses saying "well, how are you going to support 1 billion users?" I don't know. You figure it out. If you can't do it, shut down your service. Charge money. I really don't care. I'm tired of being the one that has to answer that question, I don't run the company.
What I'm curious is what have been your experiences with these systems. What do you see as ways forward. How can we organize so that we can demand proper service, so that we can demand human supervision to these systems that are automated to hell.
For companies that don't provide that I guess for now the solution is to not do business with them.