If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
Obviously, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service.
But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports. The business class bags get lost just as often as the economy class bags. The low-volume, high end luxury car will be in the shop more often than the mass produced car. The PC vendor can't help with your Linux screen tearing, whether it's a $300 laptop or a $6000 workstation. Sports events with the highest demand will have the most expensive tickets - and also the most queues, the worst toilets, and the most expensive food.
I find getting good customer service far from simple :)
>But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports.
But the premium seats at the airplane have better treatment than economy ones.
But when something goes wrong - like they lose your bag - you'll find the customer service is pretty much the same. Possibly there's an ultra-ultra-premium tier where things are different?
The real way money makes travel easier, in my experience, isn't that you can buy flights where they don't lose your bags - it's that a few hundred bucks to replace some lost clothes is a trivial matter.
More expensive customers then turn into pure profit but have a hard time going to a competitor who can't undercut you without the scale benefits you got from your cheap offering.
Also massive tax breaks due to "bringing internet to the masses" which your competitors can't get.
https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financia...
Their costs are mostly per line after all and so their cheaper offerings bring down their margins a lot.
Do you have a source that contradicts the number I provided? Because AT&T is getting wrecked right now by every publicly available number which contradicts both the spirit of your comment and explains why they might cut costs for customer support.
Their business wire line just wrote down nearly half of their previous year numbers.
By no metric I know of does AT&T have a high margin business
I said their $100/month line was high margin.
I am saying it is bullshit to refuse to do any better for your profitable customers.
Again their cheapest offering is very low margin but their high end one doesn't have much more costs associated with it.
If you do pay enough money for a product that can sustain good customer service, you won't necessarily get it then, either.
>If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
That "usually" doesn't kick in until you have a sales rep that is worried about loosing your business specifically. Then they'll exercise soft power to escalate your tickets. Because despite their profit margin, their customer service team is still under pressure to cut costs as much as possible.
And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them a lot more, and likely they wouldn't last long at this job even then.
A chatbot that had the nuances correctly distinguished would not be a concern but it's because the script is not well put together and most likely poorly applied with a bot that it's so painful.
You can't really get much further with this type of thing. LLM can potentially get you further.
Sure, but that's not really the topic, and without discussing the exact details we wouldn't be able to evaluate how easy it exactly is, because there's always things that could go wrong.
This is a naive model of why customers call for support that I used to also hold before I had to deal with customers.
I've helped my dad with customer service for a technical product he sells online and there really is nothing you can put in a one-page manual and there's no perfect UI that stops people from calling to waste your time if you make yourself too available.
Though working in Target over a summer was all it took to dispel the myth. Almost every question involved me going (in my head) "Not sure why you need me to do this, but okay, let's read the back of the packaging together so I can answer your question having also never encountered this product in my life."
I have worked at a dozen startups, good customer service is an early market requirement, you hire good support staff, give them direct connections to the dev, you make their manager on equal footing.
Once things are humming along and the product isn't such a tire fire, it's "Oh we can promote the good ones to a services department and then export the rest off shore to a company that dgaf"
It's just a matter of time, not money.
I can think of magazines and radio, but by definition they had localised reach, and there was no actual "users" that might need support, unlike many Internet ad-funded freeware.
Try contacting AliExpress support. You used to immediately get a human agent. Now you're trapped in LLM hell.
Because much of the Internet has scaled up drastically?
To your example of AliExpress, how many more users do you think they have now compared to a decade ago? How much do you think their support volume has increased? Therefore it's entirely natural that they've looked at avenues of cutting costs.
The only reason they are looking to cutting cost is to increase profit/user.
Yes, but when you're starting you're usually losing money in the short term and you need to leave a good impression while growing.