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Ask HN: As tech companies scale bigger, they scale down customer support

by 1905 on 12/9/23, 5:41 PM with 4 comments

• by muzani on 12/9/23, 10:35 PM

  Generally, it's not that anyone "scales down customer support", it's that CS doesn't scale as well as infra.

  Your tech stack will handle 100 to 1000 or even 10k users no problem. But let's say you have one CS ticket per 20 users. It goes to 50 or 500 easily. You spend 10 min on that ticket. Suddenly it's hours, then weeks for one person. Except the tickets come in faster than you can deal with them. At the same scale and a million users, that's 50000 hours spent on a ticket.

  Then you have to hire people. You have to train them. You have to hire people to manage them. Most of the people you hire for it don't care, it's just a job to them, not a career. It common for even tech companies to have a bulk of their staff just doing CS. One place I worked at had 200 people manning CS for over a million daily users and like 3 engineers.

  Now imagine Google or Meta's level where your monthly active users are in the billions and they're all using multiple products.

• by haltist on 12/9/23, 5:53 PM

  Because customer support is a cost center and big tech is in the business of profits. It is common and accepted because everyone agrees that making money is a good idea. If you're a shareholder of big tech stock you want the profit graph going up and to the right because that means your stock is a valuable commodity that you can trade for more money than you bought it for. This is all econ 101.

• by fwsgonzo on 12/9/23, 5:53 PM

  Levers. Each company has MBAs that can pull a certain amount of levers each quarterly. Every now and then, the quarterly lever is the quality of customer support, until there's nothing left.

  In theory, companies make room for others when customers get pissed off and move on. It's hard to move on from these tech giants though.

• by causality0 on 12/9/23, 6:01 PM

  The MBA's ideal world is one in which their customers despise them just enough they don't leave and do business with someone else. The more competitors they can absorb or destroy the larger an amount of hatred and therefore cash flow each customer can generate.