we're getting to the point where the only reasonable answer is to regulate this, as the tech giants have well demonstrated that their only concern is to do the bare minimum trust & safety work that's beneficial to their business. users are an afterthought at best.
if you provide identity services to more than 100k people or w/e, you need to have a defined dispute process, served by humans with the power to do shit, with legal recourse in the event that they fail to do so. the "run a flag up the pole on social media, hope you're important enough or friends with the right set of people if you want shit done" approach is terrible.
the inevitable "but that will be vulnerable to fraudsters" backlash is stupid--the existing systems are too; fraud prevention and such isn't something you can ever do perfectly, since it's inherently adversarial. the problem we have now is that EVERYONE is treated as if they're a mastermind professional fraud network from the outset, and this does seemingly little to prevent actual bad actors. Twitter's trust and safety team is an even more egregious example, where they very effectively and immediately suspended my attempt to create a single parody account, immediately suspended it again after unsuspending it, and said any future attempts to reach them would be blackholed because the first unsuspend request was still open (there's, of course, no way to see that ticket or respond to it--all you get are email notifications stating that the reply-to discards all inbound mail). this, of course, does seemingly nothing to deal with actual bot networks, since those are run by sophisticated actors who've figured out how to game the system.
something like Estonia's digital ID system is perhaps best, with, importantly, built-in protection against tracking: I should be able to generate an ID that a company can verify, but all they should be able to glean from that is that I have an ID and that I've authorized X other IDs for that company--it shouldn't be something that's traceable back to who I actually am or trace my actions across companies, which is very much not the case (and is something companies very obviously take advantage of for adtech purposes) for the de facto standard of using mobile phone numbers.
I agree; there's no way any of this will be resolved in our favor without regulatory intervention. There's no profit motive for service providers to get this right and businesses have very effectively insulated themselves from existing dispute resolution mechanisms such as chargebacks, and in the US, litigation.
Allowing companies to charge their customers $50 to resolve account access issues would only give companies an incentive to make 'mistakes' so they can earn $50 by spending a few minutes 'fixing' the error.
Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.
Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high.
Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.
Cell phone companies do handle this, you can do things like sim swaps etc with a real person - but you are usually paying $50 - $100 per MONTH with them. And even there plenty of folks have complained of having 2FA codes stolen as a result of this convenience.
If they could charge $50 or $100 to provide paid support (a situation that is actually very COMMON at the enterprise level) for at least some people this will be worth doing. Then the business case is there to staff / resource etc the fix.
Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.
But keep on banning paid support and you'll keep on getting no support.
Access to online services, ranging from email to AWS, is now a vital component of contemporary life. Email is no longer a toy and losing access to a key email account can cause emotional hardship and severe financial losses. Access to paid online business services, such as Google advertising and cloud computing, is a vital component of modern business. Loss of access to these services will lead to severe financial losses and can lead to complete destruction of businesses.
It is unacceptable for service providers to damage peoples' livelihoods because the account in question is free or is used by a small business that doesn't spend >10k$ a month.
It is not reasonable to demand that customers pay $50 a month to protect themselves against capricious account closures. That is merely another way of a service provider saying 'nice email account you've got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.' That's called extortion or even racketeering.
Alphabet's net profit for 2019 was $34 billion USD. The can afford to treat their customers financial interests with respect, and if Alphabet won't do that voluntarily, then it's time for governments to force them to.
> Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.
What if they lock you out? You make it sound like it's some transparent and easy to understand process based on publicly available rules, and it's just user violating some obvious documented rule, therefore locking himself out.
But maybe you just travel to africa for the first time, and they just decide that now you can't login, because "suspicious activity". Bye.
If they wish to reduce support costs, one other way is to make the service better and more predictable. Maybe add a checkbox to opt out out of this "you're too stupid to keep your credentials safe" banning system, or something like that.
> Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.
Google made over $6 billion in profit in one quarter this year. YouTube had revenue over $5 billion in one quarter. They announced a $25 billion stock buyback.
Google doesn't offer support because they choose not to.
I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this.
Back of the napkin math -
* Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each product they use. That's 0.25 tickets per user per quarter.
* Consider Google has ~10billion monthly productuser combinations (9 products have 1B+, most have significantly more)
That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day
* If we consider an average ticket take ~3 mins to resolve, thats ~155k hours a day
* If we take an employee being productive for 7 hours a day, that's 22k employees
* If you take a 1:10 ratio, that is 2205,220 and 22 - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line managers.
* Take the cost to be an average of 30k,60k,150k and 300k for each of those layers, thats ($661, $132M, $33M, $6.6M) which totals to ~$833M per quarter
* The real world costs for this will probably be anywhere between 2X to 3X of this because all of these people come with other costs like infrastructure, tooling, space, etc. So we are looking at ~$1.7B to $2.5B.
One might be tempted to say that money can be saved vs my estimates but keep in mind the challenges of localization, time zones, compliance etc is also significant and will probably mean an even larger expense.
So yeah, it would be ~40% of the quarterly profit.
Sure this is an expense so tax etc can be changed but my argument would be that we are severely underestimating the complexity and challenge at each step.
So yes, I do think it will never make economic sense unless you are on the platform with sufficiently high spend. Just like every single other economic system we have out there.
The context here is providing support to unlock accounts that have been wrongfully closed. The number of support incidents per user per year for this specific problem is likely to be at least one order of magnitude lower than one incident per year. Using your estimates as a base, the cost of this service would be no more than 250 million.
For Google, as a company that has recorded a yearly net profit of over $35 billion, this is chump change. The fact that they could afford to offer some customer service regarding such a critical issue as restoring access to lost accounts, yet choose not to, smacks of corporate entitlement.
Another way to look at it is as just the cost to make that remaining profit, and that the cost has been externalized so far.
If people had utterly insisted on decent customer support from day one, companies like Google would have found a way to grow as big as they can while still providing support.
Maybe don't try to impose your preferences on other people; a lot of people would rather have a free service with no support than pay for support. It seems incredibly entitled to expect more from a service you're paying nothing for.
I know its not a popular opinion but as someone who comes from a non-western-rich country Googles business model is amazing for what it offers. Do they mess up a lot, for sure. But overall the fact that they can use capital expenses from big markets to deliver things globally has been positive for most people I know.
That aside, the business model has established that you can get great service if you spend $xM+ or $xxM+ per month (whatever the number is) - its just that we expect the same for a much lower cost.
Haha.. that is true. Guess they are not "best in class" for this one. That being said, I do genuinely wonder if there are any companies which have managed to do customer service at such a scale. Amazon is probably the closest but that is different because the average revenue per user is >> that of Google.
Along those lines, possibly the more constructive way to view it is:
Google has the scale of, and is acting like, a utility.
eg power, water, gas.
But without a legal obligation to fix problems for their
users, they don't even attempt to.
The "But it costs people $0!" is correct, if it's that's not thought through.
In it's position as a utility, some people have (perhaps unwisely) managed to lock themselves out of a (critical) personal account.
With the corresponding problems that then occur when any other utility stops working.
The suggestion to allow people to pay for support in some situations - eg like those locked out of a critical personal account - would be one approach to solve the problem.
Because at the moment, these people have no recourse. :(
Which when it happens with any other utility, becomes a legal problem. eg Customer contacts relevant Ombudsman / gov oversight body to get it rectified
I was thinking about for free services... having to provide free human support for free services is going to make it impossible to support any free service.
They would actually provide support? That's amazing! Right now, the solution is to contact them through social media campaigns and hope the right people step in to fix.
$50 could be steep for many and trivial for others, but that's a different discussion.
How about I deposit $50, if they agree it's their fault, they give me the $50 back and fix it. If they don't agree it's their fault, they keep the $50 and fix it. If they don't agree there's a problem, I get $40 back.
If they keep my $50 and I still think they're wrong, an appeal process is available, etc.
Instead forcing companies to provide a free human based support channel for billing- and authentication issues related to paid services is a better option.
I believe it would take most companies very short time to invent working solutions to problems.
if you provide identity services to more than 100k people or w/e, you need to have a defined dispute process, served by humans with the power to do shit, with legal recourse in the event that they fail to do so. the "run a flag up the pole on social media, hope you're important enough or friends with the right set of people if you want shit done" approach is terrible.
the inevitable "but that will be vulnerable to fraudsters" backlash is stupid--the existing systems are too; fraud prevention and such isn't something you can ever do perfectly, since it's inherently adversarial. the problem we have now is that EVERYONE is treated as if they're a mastermind professional fraud network from the outset, and this does seemingly little to prevent actual bad actors. Twitter's trust and safety team is an even more egregious example, where they very effectively and immediately suspended my attempt to create a single parody account, immediately suspended it again after unsuspending it, and said any future attempts to reach them would be blackholed because the first unsuspend request was still open (there's, of course, no way to see that ticket or respond to it--all you get are email notifications stating that the reply-to discards all inbound mail). this, of course, does seemingly nothing to deal with actual bot networks, since those are run by sophisticated actors who've figured out how to game the system.
something like Estonia's digital ID system is perhaps best, with, importantly, built-in protection against tracking: I should be able to generate an ID that a company can verify, but all they should be able to glean from that is that I have an ID and that I've authorized X other IDs for that company--it shouldn't be something that's traceable back to who I actually am or trace my actions across companies, which is very much not the case (and is something companies very obviously take advantage of for adtech purposes) for the de facto standard of using mobile phone numbers.