Just to give another perspective, I run a couple of small businesses with my wife and we handle support ourselves.
This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.
Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare. Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can.
Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.
Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is.
The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing if an interaction's cost outweighs it's value. Getting the balance right is tricky but worth considering some alternatives to just "putting up with it".
After all, "sure, I'm selling at a loss but I'll make it up on volume!" is not sustainable for too long (unless you are a tech company... just kidding).
> A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing
I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did too much hand holding students would disengage mentally and start having more problems instead of fewer.
I’ve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason they’re skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)
I once ran an ecommerce site, and due to a bug every customer saw a fairly cryptic error message. It was something along the lines of "You must login to perform that action". Our site didn't have a login system.
By fixing that bug, conversions went down. We literally did an A/B test to prove that giving the user a stupid error increased revenue. We even played with the text of the error to maximize revenue.
We never figured out why, but my hypothesis is the user has to feel like that are making progress through the task they are trying to achieve. Getting a pointless error, and then getting past it, gives them a sense of achievement. They're then happier and more invested in your product when it comes to plugging in a credit card number...
Interesting. This sounds like its related to triggering "system 2" as Kahneman would call it in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the
CRT [Shane Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test]. Half
of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out
gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font
induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story:
90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made
at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion
dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read
this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.
Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2
[slow, conscious, laborious thinking], which is more
likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System
1 [the immediate, unreflective thinking by which we make
most of our minute-to-minute judgments].[1]
The under armour website is terrible with coupon codes. Some of the time, it does not work and you get a cryptic error and have to wait on hold to even chat with a customer service rep to decode the message for you and tell you what you need to add/remove from your cart to make it go through. Worst of all, these are not random codes I picked up off some deal site, these are codes they emailed to me directly.
It's absolutely awful from a customer experience standpoint. But, I believe I end up buying more from them because when it does work I feel like I need to buy everything I've been thinking about because I don't want to deal with that hassle again anytime soon.
If this is the same sort of thing that was happening on your site, this would only work if your product is not available elsewhere for a similar or better price. In the case of under armour, their products are available elsewhere, but not in the same variety and not with the same discounts.
Was this typo intentional so readers don't just disengage and skim through your comment? ;)
That's interesting, though. I wonder why more accurate instructions resulted in more problems. I know you mentioned 'disengagement,' but wouldn't more detail and accuracy make it easier to do the exercise(s)? Or does it make the students just zone out and type the lines out without thinking?
(I know I certainly was guilty of that the first time I went through the Linux From Scratch book.)
> I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?
Wouldn't it be better to handle both types of cases properly?
Instead of spending "hours with mentally ill people" (your terminology), why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"? You already provided details, but I can't see how you end up losing so many hours! There are techniques for handling these cases, my friend.
Your oscilloscope product looks fantastic, and the price and terms you sell it for tells me you are an interesting and valuable human being. I'm just pressing you about the other side of your story because I feel there might be a better way to handle the difficult cases that you somehow aren't aware of because you are too fundamentally helpful and an undiscriminatingly good guy. Or something.
>That doesn't make sense. You are in favour of systemic obfuscation and low quality support to discourage people who don't have problems from taking up the time of support staff? Even though the barriers make life hell for people with legitimate problems like the guy whose $1.5m inventory was destroyed?
I'm never said I'm personally in favour of that approach, I just saw a lot of comments talking about how terrible it is without any consideration of why certain companies might not want to make support accessible. As you said, an ideal solution would redirect people who don't need customer support elsewhere, but I couldn't imagine this is easy for an organisation the size of Amazon. I hope they can work out a better balance in future.
>If that's an unrealistic expectation, could you provide more detail about how it is unavoidable to spend "hours with mentally ill people"?
Just to clarify, I'm not talking about garden-variety depression/anxiety but people with serious issues that lead to them being completely isolated from regular society.
Honestly, we try to avoid dealing with them altogether. If someone sends us 12 messages in a row at 4am asking for information about a product, we don't respond in the morning. I have done in the past and learned the hard way that it is a bad idea.
Of course, this is not possible for a business like Amazon with tickets and phone support.
I worked AppleCare tech support and there were people who would call in to talk to people or troll, perhaps they were ill, but they would call repeatedly and there problems were largely made up.
Eventually they become known and are handled separately because they would fake problems and drive people insane.
> why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
The joys of having a quasi-monopoly.
Amazon does't need be be any better - they have all the customers, so merchants have to put up with that if they want access.
I suspect that you are assuming that people in general think rationally and behave according to set scenarios. Unfortunately that is not a reality. If you were able to invent such effective system of triaging and funneling, I think you would become a billionaire in no time.
> Instead of spending "hours with mentally ill people" (your terminology), why not perfect the art of triage and funnel people without problems appropriately?
"Hello...? Is that Gmail? I was just calling to let you know that I don't need Uncle Franks email anymore. He comes up whenever I press "F" for frank, but he's dead now so it doesn't make sense. Auntie Anna sees the same, so it must be a problem with your computers or something. Whenever I type Frank in on the Chrome he pops up on everything!"
And? Either you tell the user to remove Frank from the address book or if that is not possible (ie, autocompletes use addresses from all emails and there is no way to exclude addresses) and then you have an actual bug report.
I'm really curious what sort of support the retro video game business needs. My (clearly naive) assumption is that it would be as simple as sending them the cartridge and telling them to have a great day, but if you're meeting so many seemingly unpleasant people it seems to be a lot more than that.
Could you share more about the sort of issues you face?
So sometimes discs won't load or cartridges won't read in their console, or they're unhappy with condition - sometimes this is as simple as apologising and accepting a return, sometimes people aren't happy with that and just want to kick up a stink. More often than not, the people kicking up a stink return a perfectly working product, and they just wanted to make sure we'd accept it by them being as foul as possible.
Sometimes we'll get people just asking for more information on an item we sell.
Usually you can tell whether or not these people are actually interested in the product or not by how they ask the question. If they're asking about a specific detail (for example, if they're looking for a particular serial number range on a console), they'll usually follow up if you give them a positive response.
People asking less specific questions (such as asking for "more photos") are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions. You can waste literal hours serving these customers and in the process lose thousands of dollars worth of actual sales.
The worst group are just really badly socialised people - often people with serious mental health or drug-related issues. If you engage with them, they will demand massive amounts of your time and have absolutely zero concern for your feelings (let alone your business goals). If they feel you have slighted they, they will respond in the most foul and violent way possible.
Just today, my wife was publicly berated by an incel-type guy because she didn't respond to a message he had sent over a week ago. There are at least 2 other occasions I can think of in the last year where this happened.
I think the thing to remember is that the average HN reader (and, by extension, most people that the average HN reader knows) is educated, values their time, and is socialised well enough to the point that they can hold down a job and maintain basic interpersonal relationships. The type of person who contacts customer support for products that shouldn't really require support are absolutely not like this. Mostly it's just people that don't value their own time (or the time of others), but multiple times every week we'll come across people with _serious_ social issues (I don't mean socially awkward, I mean "unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult") and no-one to talk to about it.
The amount of people that seem "unable to regulate emotion like a healthy adult" as you say is surprising.
I used to work at a call center job many years ago, and the amount of people who just seem unable to act like a decent person is astounding. I had to leave the job after a few months for my own sanity.
I know its somewhat biased since obviously a call center position will deal with many unpleasant people, but it worries me how it seems like there is an overall decline in mental health of the general population
You're optimistic if you think there is a decline. I think it's a constant percentage, unfortunately.
I think we're now just uncovering the amount of people suffering from these issues. Before they would just be disregarded entirely and wouldn't even have access to various things, so they'd terrorize only people around them.
Thank you for these details about the difficulties in handling support requests from people with underlying socialization and/or mental health issues.
As someone who is mostly emotionally and cognitively balanced and who has been trained to communicate in order to reach mutually satisfactory outcomes, I don't even think to consider that some people are too maladjusted to use support resources (i.e. communication) in productive ways.
This compassionate comment and its parent mean a lot to me as someone who struggles with regulating emotion. I just wanted to point out that it’s some of us on HN too, and it’s not always the ones you might expect. I have a job, friends, and supportive family. But a swirl of feelings can overwhelm me without warning, and the memory of all the times I’ve failed to reach help before can stop me from trying again. I was hospitalized this year with suicidal thoughts and a diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features.” I expect to continue succeeding on the outside, but the internal battle is far from over. Again, I want to stress that most people can’t even fathom that anything is wrong with me. I have a good job, talents, people who care about me. But there’s some defect in my makeup (nature or nurture, who knows?) and your willingness here to be more aware of people like me is really heartening.
Note for the concerned: I am receiving treatment and a number of people in my circle are aware of the struggle, so this isn’t a cry for help. I just thought this might enrich the discussion for anyone not familiar with these things who would like to understand them better.
Ha I get you I’m trying to sell a PlayStation on offer up right now and “buyers” are toxic even for one item. Idk why you do this to yourself I’d go nuts
That is exactly why I prefer eBay to sell stuff. I happily give up the 10% sellers fee for not having to deal with countless potential buyers acting entitled, trying to negotiate or telling me how they could get the same item new for about half my asking price.
> People asking less specific questions (such as asking for "more photos") are often just bored and have nothing better to do and will either disappear or ask more questions.
Or maybe the photo is the easiest way to confirm if you have the version that the customer is looking for. I know because I have done that. And yes, if you don't have the right version it might look like I never intended to buy.
Really though, if you don't already have detailed pictures posted that show the state of the product from all sides then that's something I'd consider a problem with your used games business.
I trade in games as well and like any collectible, often sell items that are rare and expensive. As an individual doing this for a hobby, my margins are usually small, so selling an $400 console for $50 or so profit can go south pretty quickly if there is a dispute.
Because buyers are often collectors as well, they sometimes have unrealistic expectations for the condition of 25-30 year old hardware. A seller once had a concern with a power supply that was genuine, but worn in a way he was unhappy about. Once returns and replacement were completed (thankfully I had another), I now risk a loss, or worse, a dispute where I end up with neither money or the item.
Another time I sold a month of Xbox Game Pass I had received as a promotion. It was well under retail, but when the customer received it, it wouldn’t activate. I spent at least a week on chat with Miscrosoft support trying to resolve the issue. When it was finally resolved and the account credited, the buyer informed me they were a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber and the pass was prorated to 20 days, but they were expecting a month. No amount of explanation of what they purchased being different from what they expected would satisfy them. What I thought would be a simple $5 transaction turned into a significant stressor, and even offering a refund didn’t stop the persistent badgering. When platform reputation is on the line it’s no longer about the dollar amount of the transaction, but how it might impact future transactions.
Most of the time things are very transactional and I try to undersell and over deliver. One time in 20 or so
As I said later in that paragraph, reputation on social trading apps. I’m an individual seller that mostly does it to fund my own hobbies. I don’t do enough volume to easily average out a negative review.
Sometimes people just want to vent. There was a host on a podcast who admitted to venting to a company. He bought an item. It arrived and worked as advertised, but he was thoroughly underwhelmed by the product.
The podcaster emails the company talking about his dissatisfaction. The response was something like, "We understand your frustrations. Even if there's no issue, you can send it back for a refund." The podcaster realized that nothing was actually wrong. The product worked as advertised. It didn't break. It didn't arrive damaged. There were just unfulfilled expectations. I want to say that he responded by thanking them for their time but a refund wouldn't be necessary.
This guy inadvertently took up support time for an issue that wasn't really an issue. If you mix this scenario with entitled people or hobbyists who are very particular about minor details, sellers may spend lot of time on supporting very few customers.
Whilst dealing with unsavoury people obviously isn't ideal, and I certainly don't envy your position. Is this not just the cost of doing business in that specific industry?
Typically you'd just raise your prices to factor in support costs. You'd have different margins for each industry.
Realistically, the reason you're unable to raise your prices is because you're stuck competing with companies that simply don't offer customer service themselves, and hence would undercut you.
If there was an appropriate amount of public outrage (and ideally legal repercussions) toward businesses not offering sufficient customer support, then your competitors would also have to increase their prices. You'd be no worse off, and general customer satisfaction would improve across the board.
The issue is not so much about offering _customer_ service. Genuine customers will only ask for help when they actually need it and do it in a way that respects everyone's time.
Instead, it's more about taking time away from your business to deal with people who have no intention of buying from you but are just bored, lonely or mentally ill.
While the latter group might only represent 25% of the people who contact you, attempting to fulfill their needs is literally impossible and will eat up as much of your productive time as you allow it.
Online reviews (which basically represent the "appropriate amount of public outrage") have only made this worse. If one of your non-customers feel slighted, they will drag your name through the mud in the foulest way possible.
The whole "Karen" meme didn't come from nowhere (although in our case, it's usually 30-something single men).
All your argument is based in the idea of making live more difficult for consumers and easier to business. That seems the wrong way to tip the balance.
Are not going to be business better equipped to deal with unruly customers than mothers/grandfathers/teenagers having to spend time of their private lives navigating hostile interfaces designed to make them give up? Does not this incentivize bad businesses selling counterfeits/damaged goods with the hope that will not be returned?
For many transactions, the only customer support I need is an automated shipping confirmation, automated tracking, and maybe (or maybe not) a way to return/refund.
I buy a fair number of items on AliExpress and banggood. I don’t want “good customer service” bloating the costs. (Ironically, I still get good service on the 1% of transactions that go wrong, even when I can’t really prove anything. I bought two nice lipo chargers and got sent one. One email and remedied in a couple of weeks.)
I've never had a good customer support experience on AliExpress. Mostly because the only times I've needed "customer support" was when I've been sent fake items (specs grossly and explicitly misstated, usually, often with clear intent to deceive), and that is something AliExpress sellers will absolutely never admit to doing in my experience. Best case they politely say there's no problem, worst case they throw racial slurs based on your presumed nationality based on the destination country (which isn't even correct for me, ha).
In those cases, AliExpress will seemingly randomly decide for or against you randomly, even when you file a dispute with clear photographic and video evidence. I've had it go both ways.
90% of the time it's fine, though, and the cost savings outweigh the loss from fake goods. But I'd certainly not call the AliExpress CS experience "good".
I think the main problem is the stigma of using the mental health services, lack of access to therapists and generally useful things like mindfulness, some basic CBT principles are not being taught in schools. Many people view companies customer support as their "safe space" where they can vent their frustrations and problems and these days a valuable customer service operator needs to have training in psychotherapy, to know how to defuse people and steer them to having a mindset where they could feel comfortable to seek help.
With someone who will keep everyone busy with meaningless work at all times. Took years of painful effort for her to accept “no” without a complete meltdown.
On the flip side she will let her bosses do the same. 20 hour days, 7 days a week. She kept at it until she ended up in the hospital. I had to threaten to destroy her work computer for her to finally back it down to 18 hours a day six days a week.
I also came across people who would report bugs that don't exist. The team would spend days trying to track down the problem user is reporting, but the problem was never there. One case I remember user would claim that he paid for an item, but it is not visible on his account and he would keep asking for a refund, but when checked the items looked as they should. We asked him to send some screenshots and apparently he had photoshopped the items out from the screens. He stopped asking when we told him that our support member would like to access his desktop remotely to fix the problem.
20 years ago at Radioshack, I had a customer try and return a nice stereo. About 300 dollars or so. No receipt. So only store credit for last sell price.
Was in system but last sell price was $1.97 (we no longer sold it)
So “hours” of digging and endless questions on “you sure you got it here?”
Well she had gotten RadioShack and Frys Electronics mixed up. Apparently same store in her mind.
> "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.
Agreed with all your points except they really should have some `if (claim > minForHumanAgent){ bypassAutomatedHandling(); }` logic for millions of dollars.
This comment feels so ... wrong. As a society, so many of our institutions seemingly prioritize attention or outcomes effectively in exactly this fashion, but seeing it in code makes it that much more cold and ruthless.
This might surprise you, but companies don’t really care that their employees have to deal with shitty customers. It’s not necessarily that they don’t care about their employees, they might even have strategies and support staff to help with the stress, but they don’t care in a way that outsourcing it because of shitty customers ever plays in to the equation.
At enterprise size you automate your support to save money. Even outsourced a call Center is expensive, and Amazon’s shitty algorithmic support isn’t.
I know, because we do this in every enterprise sector, including the public sector. The “advantage” amazon have is that it doesn’t really cost them anything because they have a monopoly. In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support. They didn’t always have this mind you, they used the same automated systems for years, until they realised just how many billions they were losing to Microsoft because Microsoft sells enterprise customers of a certain size a direct 24/7 phone line to Seattle if an issue is of high enough priority. Now, Amazon offers something similar.
>In areas where they see actual competition, like in selling cloud to enterprise customers, they have excellent support
I'm less inclined to believe that is because of competition and not because of the fact enterprise SaaS always has great support. If you are spending thousands, you will almost always have someone dedicated to your account. Likewise there are very few companies with razer thin margins that have excellent support.
I recently had an issue with my Smart Thermostat - where there is plenty of competition (Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee) - I called support and only got someone after 90 minutes of waiting, who was ultimately unhelpful. I spoke to my building who contacted their support line (the building installed the same, non-smart, thermostats as well), and the issue was solved in the same day by a trained technician in a little over an hour.
Nice looking board, but I agree, you should charge more. One market to consider is automotive scopes- since it already can interface with a phone, putting different connectors on there and with a case would suffice for most uses. Compare to a Pico scope for the market leader in this segment. It definitely doesn't need to be a 100% finished consumer product (that's already covered), you wouldn't be selling to hackers but the mechanics who use a scope are by and large the technically sophisticated ones. Just a thought, it looks like a great product, I'm buying one just to hack into a portable scope so I don't have to deal with getting out my rigol for basic auto work.
Edit: it certainly doesn't need to be battery powered either, conveniently cars have 12v battery power avaliable (although it is quite dirty, so input protection is required). I'm on my phone RN, otherwise I'd pull up the schematics, it might already have adequate input protection.
Honestly, I designed it when I was a student because there was nothing usable at the low-end of the market.
While I could possibly charge a little bit more for it, I don't think the specs justify a $50+ price point (as-is), and for a lot of people that extra $20 makes a big difference.
There were some thoughts a while back of making a higher-end product to fill the $50-$80 gap, and possibly even a stripped down Labrador to sell around the $20 mark. Looking at the Amazon charts, a lot of people are buying knockoff DSO138s to save literally $5-$10 and are left with a really poor quality product.
Have you considered a bundle that includes a case? I don't do a lot of maker/tinkering stuff so having the chip loose or on a breadboard wouldn't work for me in most situations. But I do sometimes have a need for an oscilloscope or multimeter, and would gladly pay ~$50 for one that had a case and some basic/standard connections, especially if it's supported by open software like yours.
This looks great! I'm going to buy one because of the price point (I wouldn't at $50, but maybe plenty of others would).
Is this useful for a hobbyist? Everyone I've talked to said "get a proper oscilloscope, anything less is a toy" but I have neither the space nor the need for an oscilloscope. I have a Saleae Logic analyzer, but yours looks more featureful.
This is a little off-topic, but since we're already on this: I just wanted to say "great job" on the Labrador. I don't even need one (I have benchtop scope, power supply, signal generator, logic analyzer, etc. already, and a couple of Bus Pirates) but couldn't resist ordering one just to acknowledge the awesomeness of your work.
It doesn't have an isolated ground (the focus was on size and cost), but this shouldn't be an issue. All spec-compliant USB ports contain self-resetting overcurrent protection - in practice this is almost always via a PTC resettable fuse on USB GND.
For what it's worth, I haven't had a single complaint related to the grounding in 3 years.
Ok, but how would you (for example) measure the voltage difference over a current-sensing resistor that is positioned at the high-side of (say) a 48V rails?
(If ground was decoupled, that would be simply a matter of attaching probe and scope ground at both terminals of the resistor.)
> Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
Let's screw people with real concerns and real business so Amazon can save money on customer support seems a horrific justification. That is basically making all small businesses guilty of wasting Amazon time and burden the small businesses with the burden of proving that they are not.
How do you know so well the internal statistics for Amazon if you are just a seller? Cannot your kind interpretation also be based in wrong assumptions?
Who has more resources to deal with this situation Amazon or the little business? Amazon does this bullshit because it has power to abuse, not because it is a reasonable relationship with its providers.
This is an absolute pleasure for our USB oscilloscope business - intelligent, reasonable customers ask for help with a problem they have, we help them solve it and both parties move on with our lives.
Our other business - dealing in retro video games, is an absolute nightmare. Almost all support questions we field come from people who have no intention of solving a problem. Most are just anxious people who need a little bit of reassurance, but plenty expect us to do pointless busywork, want to vent emotionally at someone who can't fight back, or just generally want to smear shit all over the walls because they can. Either way, because they don't want to solve a problem, they just keep up eating up your support time and emotional energy in an extended loop for no gain - we're talking upwards of 80% of your support resources if you let these people have their way.
Having to deal regularly with the type of person that the average HN reader would never come across in their lifetime, I can understand why organisations like Amazon would set up these bureaucratic support "walls" and/or outsource all support to a Filipino call centre staffed by people that don't even know what Amazon is. The systems are designed to make getting support hard, because most people contacting consumer support literally don't even have a problem that good support staff could solve.
In this instance, they've clearly made an error in requiring the user to navigate an automated system when the dollar value is in the _millions_, and I understand why the average HN user would be pissed off by a system like this, but I don't think the solution to the problem is as simple as "provide good, human support to everyone" - it creates as many problems as it solves.