Out of all GAFAM companies, the only one I'd trust to actually handle digital support properly is Amazon. (Apple is also okay as long as you arrange an in-person/in-store thing.) The others just feel like you're dealing with a deliberately byzantine structure that's designed to oppose surfacing a support system at every point in the process. Facebook iirc has even gotten to the point that if you need certain kinds of recourse, it's quicker to just sue them in court than actually try to use their support systems.
Google and Microsoft just throw everything on their public help desk forums which are universally spammed with poorly researched answers that don't actually fix the bug (and LLMs just made that worse), since they create incentives to create low quality answers in the hopes that it gets approved.
It's so notorious that at least one GAFAM company iirc had an internal site whose main purpose was just "an engineer saw this for an individual, please get it actually fixed this time" (I think it was Google?) It meant the actual support avenue for "needs a human to look at it" became "post on sites GAFAM engineers also use casually", which is bad in an entirely new way.
It's disgusting and should really be regulated. It shouldn't take this much issue to get a human on the line to actually look at a problem/forward it to the right people. My country's ISPs have generally terrible support, but at least I have a phone number that ensures they'll look at things.
the only one I'd trust to actually handle digital support properly is Amazon.
I used to feel this way, but over the last couple years it's gotten exceptionally bad. It's true you can get someone on the phone, but I think at this point I'm somewhat convinced the front-line agents make up their own version of reality to pass along to you. The system might as well not exist.
An example: I had a package that was marked delivered but nowhere to be found. I called them and they told me the driver had done a "pre-scan" (or something like that), which marked it delivered but wasn't. They insisted this was standard procedure and not some kind of mistake of scanning the wrong package. I called again a couple days later and they were adamant the package was still on its way. After about a week of this, I finally got them to send new items. Eventually, a neighbor dropped it at our doorstep saying it had been misdelivered.
I have several other examples of this, but given the pressure Amazon is known to put on their employees, I'm not surprised agents are coming up with plausible-sounding answers just to get people off the phone.
kalkin | 10 hours ago
Reading this feels like some Kafka novel
cosarara | 15 minutes ago
If kafka was an LLM.
noirscape | 9 hours ago
Hardly surprising to be honest.
Out of all GAFAM companies, the only one I'd trust to actually handle digital support properly is Amazon. (Apple is also okay as long as you arrange an in-person/in-store thing.) The others just feel like you're dealing with a deliberately byzantine structure that's designed to oppose surfacing a support system at every point in the process. Facebook iirc has even gotten to the point that if you need certain kinds of recourse, it's quicker to just sue them in court than actually try to use their support systems.
Google and Microsoft just throw everything on their public help desk forums which are universally spammed with poorly researched answers that don't actually fix the bug (and LLMs just made that worse), since they create incentives to create low quality answers in the hopes that it gets approved.
It's so notorious that at least one GAFAM company iirc had an internal site whose main purpose was just "an engineer saw this for an individual, please get it actually fixed this time" (I think it was Google?) It meant the actual support avenue for "needs a human to look at it" became "post on sites GAFAM engineers also use casually", which is bad in an entirely new way.
It's disgusting and should really be regulated. It shouldn't take this much issue to get a human on the line to actually look at a problem/forward it to the right people. My country's ISPs have generally terrible support, but at least I have a phone number that ensures they'll look at things.
ollien | 9 hours ago
I used to feel this way, but over the last couple years it's gotten exceptionally bad. It's true you can get someone on the phone, but I think at this point I'm somewhat convinced the front-line agents make up their own version of reality to pass along to you. The system might as well not exist.
An example: I had a package that was marked delivered but nowhere to be found. I called them and they told me the driver had done a "pre-scan" (or something like that), which marked it delivered but wasn't. They insisted this was standard procedure and not some kind of mistake of scanning the wrong package. I called again a couple days later and they were adamant the package was still on its way. After about a week of this, I finally got them to send new items. Eventually, a neighbor dropped it at our doorstep saying it had been misdelivered.
I have several other examples of this, but given the pressure Amazon is known to put on their employees, I'm not surprised agents are coming up with plausible-sounding answers just to get people off the phone.