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Ask HN: Why don't businesses call me when I'm having problems?

3 points by canterburry ↗ HN
A friend and I are brainstorming ways to fix customer service.

It seems to us that in today's environment, businesses should already have all the information in real time to know when I'm experiencing a problem with their product or service. So...why is it I who has to call them? Why can't they detect the issue, correlate it with my customer record and call me with the solution?

We are theorizing that either businesses aren't listening to what their own systems are telling them, or there isn't enough financial incentive to be proactive.

What are we missing?

8 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] thread
haney
Often times there aren't reporting facilities in place that are well connected operationally with an outbound customer service system. At my company we once had a bug that broke the sign up funnel for users, the engineers called to follow up a fix things because the user had intent to perform a high value transaction. For high volume businesses I'm sure there's a cost benefit analysis of making the support investment. Customer service is undervalued by too many companies.
giaour
I'd be surprised if that's not Amazon's next move with Mayday.
hobs
Many of them already know but dont have the staff to care about the number of problems they have out in the world. (financial incentive)

Most business I know even know of the issues, but things are going along just fine, and that particular issue may be not be easy to fix, and to say there is immediate financial consequences by not fixing it may be hard.

MalcolmDiggs
I think we all want to avoid accidentally building "Clippy" the helpful paperclip who wont shut up.

That is, there's a fine line between helpful and pestering, so I'd wager the default thinking is: "Let's make it really easy for a user to ask for help, but stop just shy of forcing it on them."

That being said, when everybody is adhering to the default frame of mind, maybe that's a sign that your product/service could be legitimately disruptive (in a good way). I'd say go for it!

canterburry
Yes, we definitely don't want a Clippy but I hope today's machine learning techniques are superior to whatever Clippy was running on.

This wouldn't even have to be AI driven. It could be as simple as setting up rules manually to predefined patterns of faulty behavior.

rainmaking
I agree that proactive service calls would be just awful. There is nothing I hate more than being pestered, by anyone.

Having said that, it would be really good to have automatic systems that detect problems. This is done by us with technology, but it could also be done for brick-and-mortar business with some kind of standardized management process.

Two applications come to mind:

(1) Have engineers fix things before the problem reaches the customer

This is what people really want: It just works, and they don't have to bother with it.

(2) If the customer does call, and tests say things have gone wrong, he immediately gets sent up the queue and the rep is warned that this person actually is having legitimate trouble and needs to be given more attention and goodies.

Danger: You need to constantly align your test systems with your customer's experience. Wrong confidence is even worse than ignorance.

canterburry
Hopefully the ultimate fix would be your #1. However, a system like this could actually help pinpoint areas of the application which may be the root of the problem. If there are enough cases which all trigger based on the same pattern they may point to a common root cause, no?
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