The problem that global companies like FAANGs have is that they aren't dealing with global scale properly. They have bugs or issues that affect 0.001% of people, but the results are catastrophic. But because everyone can't fathom the importance of P99999, no one in the entire org cares. But they really should because it's so catastrophic. I think there should be regulations that force these globally relevant companies to have proper customer support that will figure things like this out, because losing your entire digital library or history is malicious but no single person has the power to do anything.
"Rare" to a global company probably means 100,000 cases a year. I think they only way they will look into something like this is being forced by legislation. I think if a global company takes actions that removes you from their service, there needs to be a way to dispute this with an independent ombudsman that isn't paid for by the company. Otherwise it's simply not fair.
I'm not sure about "customer support" being the criteria. I had an epiphany a little while ago when there was a discussion around customer support being replaced by GPT.
There's litterally not much of a difference. Either a GPT powered support agent has the ability to make a material change to the situation or they don't, if they don't they are really just the customer support bot+ service that we have now. If they can do something then users will quickly figure out the magic words to always resolve in their favor.
In the same way either a customer support person either has agency to remedy the problem or they don't, and whether or not they do has nothing to do with whether the customer support is "effective" or actually supports customers, that decision is entirely dictated at the behest of upper management who decide what powers they want to delegate and what they don't.
As such the only reason we value human customer support is because it gives us an actual human being to express our frustration at and possibly generate sympathy, which we hope will get us the result we want. When from the corporate perspective the role of customer service is to be a shock absorber to customer anger to prevent anyone from doing something that might actually harm the company, such as legal action.
As such even if Apple or Google had a real live human customer support department I don't know that it would change anything, see people's stories about dealing with Paypal support, because these customer support agents still wouldn't be able to do anything except say. "Yep you're locked out. No I can't change it or tell you why, sorry."
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] threadThere's litterally not much of a difference. Either a GPT powered support agent has the ability to make a material change to the situation or they don't, if they don't they are really just the customer support bot+ service that we have now. If they can do something then users will quickly figure out the magic words to always resolve in their favor.
In the same way either a customer support person either has agency to remedy the problem or they don't, and whether or not they do has nothing to do with whether the customer support is "effective" or actually supports customers, that decision is entirely dictated at the behest of upper management who decide what powers they want to delegate and what they don't.
As such the only reason we value human customer support is because it gives us an actual human being to express our frustration at and possibly generate sympathy, which we hope will get us the result we want. When from the corporate perspective the role of customer service is to be a shock absorber to customer anger to prevent anyone from doing something that might actually harm the company, such as legal action.
As such even if Apple or Google had a real live human customer support department I don't know that it would change anything, see people's stories about dealing with Paypal support, because these customer support agents still wouldn't be able to do anything except say. "Yep you're locked out. No I can't change it or tell you why, sorry."