Hacker News Reader

Comment by flerchin | Hacker News Reader

Yes we see this increasingly. Corpos would term this "self service", but it's outsourcing the workload onto the customers. As long as the customer's frustrations with that don't exceed the cost of the labor being saved, the corpos see it as a win.

What's not measured is that there's increasing frustration and poor service. The edge cases are not covered, because the edge cases are not profitable. I expect we will see demand destruction in certain sectors if this continues. Folks will just not buy products when they cannot be assured that there will be service alongside it.

View on HN

Self service is one thing.

But I'm seeing a lot of big corpo were paid $X for service S, and it was never rendered. Customer wants their money back, corporation doesn't want to give it.

In any other context, we'd call that "highway robbery", but for some reason for corporations, its fine. The article gives an example of it: ordered a coffee, it never came, no refund.

Regulatory agencies need to bring the ban hammer down on this, or forced arb. needs to be outlawed so that the people can class action it, or both.

I'm not sure if this translates to all industries but consider airlines. Everyone complains about service, but the marginal flyer only cares about price. There is no reward for an airline offering better service at a price in economy. Fully half the plane (and more on discount airlines) buy only based on price. The story is different in the front of the plane, where margins are higher and business travelers will end up being brand loyal (and are treated accordingly.)

In other products I can only assume there has been a similar race to the bottom. Why should I pay up for some service if it's a roll of the dice that I will be treated any better? Unless I really trust a brand, and I can't know, I 'm going to end up differentiating on price alone.

Wow so just like all the outsourcing nonsense that first started in the IT industry (and failed) and then crept into all the other industries (and are subsequently failing now) it was all done by stupid MBAs who couldn't think ahead past one quarter. The way that you explained the phenomenon makes me think that there is a business opportunity to capture customers by providing world class service.

Auto companies are relearning why it does not make sense to outsource anything that a customer sees or touches. That is your profound knowledge and any supplier that is incentivized to maximize cost per unit will not care one bit about providing anything more that the minimum needed to get the contract. The customer suffers until one automaker breaks the mold and start to differentiate themselves by building in house and having a tighter feedback loop to provide the best quality.

Here's how it went down at Tesla straight from the horse's mouth. I remember the skeptics thought he was crazy for bringing this in house but it seems to have worked out. [1]: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357

I think more likely the large companies which provide "self service" will continue to dominate the majority share of the market while leaving room at the edges for other companies to differentiate on customer service. You can see this in effect with FastMail and Proton Mail each of which offer a great product in their own regards, but also have the major selling point of being "Not Google".

FastMail and Proton Mail are still self service! But they do indeed have human fallback options where Gmail has _nothing_.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com