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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

If buying a business would put Amazon in the position of having to introduce a new end-user customer support burden, then they are unlikely to do so.

Eero devices require this customer support, but that can be merged with their IOT support team for all other in-home objects. I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice because they know it’s the only way to get a physical foothold in our homes, with Kindle and Echo, and I think the burden of Eero support was worth it to them for the mesh networking technology that has been harvested for Sidewalk.

Slack customer support cannot be easily integrated with any existing Amazon support team that I’m aware of, and does not offer a world-changing advantage to that degree.

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> ... I think Amazon made an exception to their “user support is never our priority” choice ...

Amazon is virtually the singular FAANG company that not only has customer support, but has generally very good customer support.

AppleCare and the Apple store Genius Bar are readily accessible, too.

Doesn't amazon have relatively good customer support for retail? Or are you specifically talking about AWS here?

Not in my experience, at least in the relatively-rare occasions where exceptions happen. I had an order which Amazon claimed to have been delivered but wasn't, and it took several days and multiple interactions to resolve. Just figuring out a way to talk to a human felt like an ARG.

The take away is that your issue was resolved. While it might not have been a satisfactory experience, you received resolution.

If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.

The question was whether Amazon has "relatively good customer support for retail", which it doesn't in my experience.

If we move the goalpost to "have I been able to resolve problems", then yes — after 30 minutes of research into how to hack Amazon customer support in order to talk with a human, followed by multiple phone and chat interactions with generous on-hold time, I can share that Amazon support for retail technically exists and is excellent except when compared to 95% of other customer support experience I've ever had.

> If your issue was with your Gmail account or Facebook, you'd still be streaming into the void.

Ooof, I believe you. I'm Facebook-free, but maybe it's time to start looking for another email provider.

Amazon removed the ability to filter items only shipped and sold by Amazon.com. That is an anti customer move that squarely puts Amazon in the bad customer service category.

Yeah Amazon is really hit-or-miss.

I've had good experiences. But when you have bad experiences, they can be really bad. I ordered a TV on Amazon (Prime) and it was scheduled for delivery in 3 days. Because it's a large shipment truck delivery, they give you a window. Like Spectrum/Comcast. So I sat home all day and... nothing. I checked my messages and almost the exact time the delivery window was closing they left a message saying "could not deliver will try some other time" basically.

It took a month and about 15 customer service reps before a single person could tell me where my TV was. I'm not exaggerating. They had no clue what happened to a $1,000 purchase. It fell into their bureaucratic black hole like some scene from a Monty Python skit.

Maybe it was because you were trying to talk to a human in the first place?

when this happened to me, I simply filed the claim online and they resolved it, no need to talk to anyone

I have had good support retail side (granted, I'm not expecting much on my $20 item). On AWS I've had very good support.

Also paying user of google products and GSuite - support not great on the gsuite side, but retail order for Google Wifi etc pretty OK.

My support quality for a retail order from Google was 3 months of dead silence, followed by 10 of the replacement part all arriving at the same time

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