Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

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To be honest, I'm actually slightly sympathetic with the companies here.

My brother used to do tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something that everyone can easily self-service, yet some people insisted on speaking with a human for it.

And it's not like the work flow was any different. He'd just get their username or e-mail and trigger the password reset e-mail, and they were happy and that was the end of the call.

I was at my father-in-law's place once and overheard him calling his cable company to pay his bill when he could have done it online in a fraction of the time.

Sure, there are people with weird edge cases that definitely need a human, and you should be able to get one when you need it, but I forgive them for making it slightly difficult when so many people insist on a human when they don't.

Except that the same shit happens on ubereats/instacart/doordash driver apps where basically everything is self-serve except for a few critical interactions which basically always require a human. I can assure you no driver wants to talk to a human instead of pressing the button in the app. Still have to go through the same “no, it's not that, please connect to a human. No, it's not that either. No, you're not helping, please get a human agent” every time something unusual happens.

> Except that the same shit happens on ubereats/instacart/doordash driver apps where basically everything is self-serve [...]

That the password-reset was self-serve yet made up 80% of calls was Sohcahtoa82's point. Users that only call in unusual/exceptional circumstances can, by their nature, make a small minority of calls despite being the majority of users.

I don't think you read my comment correctly, or misunderstood something.

The entire experience of fulfilling an instacart batch is a series of self-serve interactions; anybody who struggles with the basics won't be finishing the background checks to get started with the app, let alone completing enough batches to get out of new-user jail.

It is not an uncommon occurance for someone to order a single thing, and that thing to be out of stock, but such a scenario requires dancing with the llm every time before finally getting to a human where you can start the process of getting an impossible-to-complete order cancelled.

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