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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible

Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies.

It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee.

Most importantly: People aren't paying Facebook. It's just not realistic to expect a free platform serving billions of users to have 100% perfect execution.

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A few years ago I bought a laundry washer and dryer set. They were nice, mid-range units and I was pretty happy with them. About a year after purchase, the plastic clips that held the handle on the dryer broke off. I called the phone number on my warranty papers and spoke to a human being in Tennessee. I told her what happened, and she asked me for the model number and my address. They shipped a replacement that arrived at my house two days later.

A mistake happened, the plastic was too weak (Or maybe I pulled too hard, I don't know!) but I was able to contact the company and get it fixed.

It doesn't matter what mistakes are made if there is a way to fix it. If these systems are automated, fine. But if a mistake is made, why isn't there a way to get it fixed? That's where humans come in.

btw, Alphabet's income is about 42 times that of the company that made my washer/dryer. How is it that they can afford phone reps when Alphabet can't?

How many of those washer/dryer units do you think they sold? Hundreds of thousands? If it's a super common model, maybe millions?

Google and Facebook each have 3-4 orders of magnitude more customers. I'm not sure manning phones is realistic.

Every problem looks daunting until you have the right incentives to solve it.

If the problem is too big for Google and Facebook to handle, maybe Google and Facebook shouldn't exist

There are good benefits of having centralised services though. I don’t like this either, but I don’t think the solution is as simple as “they shouldn’t exist”.

I think the issues come down to incorrect or misaligned incentives.

You have the choice to not use Google or Facebook. What I hear you saying is that you don't like the fact that I'm using Google and Facebook.

I think you're losing sight of the argument. People know Facebook and Google don't take customer service seriously, but then seem amazed when they have a problem and Google and Facebook won't solve it. Meanwhile, one side says that these problems could be fixed if big companies wanted to spend some money on it, and others who say it's not a problem because it hasn't inconvenienced them yet.

I can fully respect a smug "told ya so" attitude. But this "maybe xyz shouldn't exist" attitude irritates me. I accept there's a risk to using these low-touch services... and that's my decision, no?

Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents.

I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.

Employees cost more than their wage/salary. The numbers you provide accommodate poverty-level compensation. I don't think that would be better.

As a global company Facebook is not bound to pay US workers US wages. Around 300$/month is the Median wage for a call center job in India. They could pay ~3x as much and sill have plenty left over for the overhead involved.

Even just assigning call centers based on the callers country of origin would be dramatically cheaper than US wages for everyone.

Why would they pay out all their net income, provide better customer contact/service, and go from being massively profitable to break-even?

What’s in it for them to do that?

Even if they went 25% of the way there, does it make them a stronger company in the long-term? That they don’t do it suggests they don’t think it would.

25% would probably be vast overkill. The point is they could have say 100,000 people doing customer support without a massive hit to their profitability, especially if that support ended up increasing revenue.

In other words the real limitation isn’t their current number of employees or really their business model. They are simply acting like a monopoly which lacks competition. I am sure they think simply buying any social network that starts to get traction is cheaper than providing a better product.

I would say that “over $2 Billion/year” is a massive hit to profitability for any company, even if that is “only” 10% of the total income.

If your boss came to you and said, “Retric, we’re making the world better, but as a side-effect, we’re cutting your pay by only 10%,” how would you react? That’s probably close to how the board and shareholders would react to Google doing it.

That assumes having a large dedicated support staff had absolutely zero positives for the company. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely as even just the feedback from support calls is valuable information. Remember, Facebook etc is making money by directly selling advertising and individual support calls can be quite profitable for them.

Sometimes a support call from a tiny new account that costs them 2$ can be worth a new 20,000$+/month revenue stream. Or that same account can walk away with a bad taste in their mouth. Similarly, if their getting thousands of calls about something that’s often a fixable problem which they would otherwise never know about.

Which isn’t to say it’s profitable in the short or long term, just significantly less expensive than the sticker shock suggests.

I hear this argument all the time, but Facebook is one of the richest companies in the world so they could definitely afford to hire some more people that could look at complaints. They just choose not to because they don't care. If it suddenly would affect their bottom line I bet you they would hire people very quickly.

> Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled.

I think the problem here isn't that there was a mistake, but that de Zwart had no reocurse when it happened.

> It's not so much as a policy as a necessity. Facebook's number of users is counted in the billions. They have about 50,000 users for each Facebook employee.

So what? How often do things like this happen? If it happens enough that Facebook's customer support can't keep up, that suggests their automation needs some serious work.

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