It’s been a rough week in the major dailies for Big Tech customer service departments.
First, the New York Times’ Tripped Up column put Lyft on blast Thursday for poor communications with a rider who was banned from the app for no apparent reason and couldn’t get an explanation for the decision.
Then, on Monday, a double-barrel of bad press.
The Washington Post reported on Facebook users unsuccessfully fighting with the Meta unit to regain access to their hacked accounts, a long-standing problem that doesn’t appear to be getting any better. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal found Amazon—a company “defined by its obsession over customers”—has seen its stellar consumer satisfaction figures sag a bit, with analysts and former employees hypothesizing that service slippage might be partially to blame.
The dispatches shine some dim light on a still-salient but frequently overlooked aspect of Big Tech operations, one that feels all the more consequential given the industry’s recession-induced angst.
While some Big Tech giants retain reputations for strong customer service—chief among them: Amazon, Apple, and Samsung—too many tech companies remain disappointingly uncommitted to consumer-facing assistance. A Protocol-commissioned Harris Poll survey published in September showed only 7% of respondents said the tech industry provides the best customer service experience. By comparison, the financial services, health services, travel and hospitality, and retail and consumer goods industries each earned 10%-plus of the vote.
In a blog post earlier this month, Gergely Orosz, a former Uber and Skype employee and the author of the popular blog Pragmatic Engineer, attributed Big Tech’s low customer service ratings to a few symptoms and causes.
Orosz wrote that an overreliance on machine learning often led to unnecessary actions on accounts, such as suspensions or fraud alerts (see: the Post’s Facebook report). At the same time, the everyday proliferation of bugs chipped away at the user experience.
These problems are often easy enough to fix—with the right investment in customer service. But Orosz argued that some tech companies bent on maximizing business impact see customer service as a financial loser, particularly when it involves labor-intensive call centers. As a result, they lean heavily on chatbots, help pages, and other impersonal tools to solve routine problems. Orosz cited Google as a prime offender in this regard.
“Most of Big Tech is going down the same path Google has chosen,” Orosz wrote. “Build self-service systems and minimize the customer support surface. Even when offering customer support, limit the surface area, and have no incentives for engineers to tackle one-off customer problems.”
Orosz went on: “And you know what? Not investing much in customer support is profitable. Google, Meta, and other companies following the self-service automation model are doing great profit-wise. So much that companies which have historically offered good customer support are cutting down on these costs.”
Analysts at Gartner backed up Orosz’s observation earlier this summer, publishing forecasts that show “conversational artificial intelligence” products, such as voicebots and chatbots, will reduce call center labor costs by $80 billion by 2026.
While the financial case for scaling back on customer service might be sound, a few arguments remain for a reinvestment in some personal touch.
The same Protocol-Harris Poll survey showed 70% of respondents still preferred “real-time communication” as their method of connecting with customer service, compared to 7% choosing chatbots. About 90% of respondents deemed video conferences and phone calls as “very useful” or “somewhat useful,” compared to 74% of respondents using chatbots.
I would also argue that customer service will take on greater importance amid our current tech malaise.
Whereas consumer tech once felt fresh and exciting, we’re now entering an era of comparatively stagnant development. Smartphones, apps, and social media have reached a maturation point, while newer tech like virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and all things Web3 still feels years away from going mainstream. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson explored this theory last week, positing that the tech industry is “experiencing a midlife crisis.”
In the absence of novel products, we rightly expect that our established, incrementally improving tech will work seamlessly. And when it doesn’t, easy fixes should be a phone call or expeditious email away.
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Jacob Carpenter
