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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Change their last name? - that would overwhelm our software, let’s have our operator do that after they call in.

That doesn't make much sense. Either your system can handle it or it can't. Putting a support agent in front isn't going to change that.

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The backend can. But what’s exposed to customers will be a very very small subset of that capability. Hence why only the csrs can perform that function.

The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name.

OK, so why not have a customer support bot add the “operation description” into a message queue (SQS, Kafka, whatever) if a formal API doesn’t exist for that operation? The csrs can then handle that task async and the customer can get a sms / email when their request is fulfilled? Why force things to be synchronous and irritate the customer?

It’s not exactly a difficult design problem. Unless I’m missing some thing.

> The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name.

Haha, not likely.

In reality the org is so drowned in technical debt that changing the last name involves manually running 3 different scripts that hit three different DBs directly and the estimate from the 3rd party dev consultancy that maintains the mess for how long it'd take to make a safe publicly usable endpoint is somewhere between 2 years and forever.

Sounds like a crude cost/benefit analysis to me :-p

Having been a customer to a half-dozen different banks in almost as many countries, I can assure you that this is very common. You'd be surprised how often the user interface stonewalls you with a "please call support" for even the most basic contact details update operation.

I think you missed the point of the parent. All these things are speed bumps and the "reasons" for having them are mostly incidental, as the main reason is to avoid the expense of having any more customer support personnel / infrastructure than is absolutely necessary to function.

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