The Uber thing happened to me too. What happened was that there was another person nearby also hailing an Uber and he took my car by mistake. The Uber driver is supposed to check ID but that check consists of asking, “Are you so and so?” Not much of a fail safe. But the Uber had my destination not his, so that trip terminated a few blocks away. I got billed anyway.
I’ve had the opposite experience. When I interact with a robo–customer-service rep, I find it easy to push it to its limits and figure out what it can or cannot do. However, I get frustrated when I’m transferred to a foreign call center where the human agent follows a script yet seems to have little real knowledge of the product or service I’m calling about. I have spend many aggravating hours on such calls.
I do believe AI will greatly improve the customer service experience in the coming years. Unfortunately, that will likely come at the expense of customer service representatives themselves, as many of those jobs could disappear.
What they are doing, however irritating, may be optimal, given the alternatives. As Michael and Omar's comments show, dealing with incompetent humans may be at least as frustrating — and competent humans are expensive.
…and just as ATMs (unlike Obama’s claims to the contrary) ultimately resulted in more bank tellers in the U.S., not fewer, using AI for a portion of customer service is by no means guaranteed to reduce the number of customer service representative jobs permanently.
And it *will* almost surely result in some new higher paying, higher value-added customer service jobs (because more productive) working in conjunction with the AI software.
> The natural reaction to both incidents is to be angry. That would be the appropriate response to a human being who claimed to be responding to a message he had not actually read, but software is not a human being to be angry at.
No buts, be angry; in fact be more angry a human designed the system to waste everyones time
A lot of the price advantage offered by Amazon and the like comes from automating tasks that used to have a human involved. In many cases this is fine, but Amazon and Uber and all these other companies deliberately make it hard for their customers and business partners to interact with a human when there is a problem. That may save them some money in the short term but it seems to me it does so at a potential longer term loss of revenue as people who have been impacted by their lack of human response look for alternatives.
Of course the defense against that for many of these companies is that they have become de facto monopoly providers
Or that a competitor offering better service would have to charge enough more so that customers would not think the better service was worth the cost.
That’s the problem. Should I be angry at them if they are failing to provide service I wouldn’t be willing to pay for?
The intermediate position, suggested by the blog commenter I quoted, is that I should be mad at them for the dishonesty, for pretending I was interacting with a human when I wasn’t.
There exist services whose business pitch is providing a better experience than directly self-publishing on Amazon, they're called publishers. I get the impression that there's a spectrum of how much services they provide/how selective they are/how much money they take.
I have published five books with publishers, have now switched to self-publishing. That saves me the time and effort of finding a publisher willing to publish my book and dealing with them and lets me set lower prices for my books. Editing, in particular copy editing, is useful, but I have an editor in-house — my daughter. I've gotten better covers produced by fans of my books, once via a contest on my blog and later by one volunteer artist, than from publishers, with the exception of the Baen cover for _Harald_ which was pretty good.
I've had positive experiences with both Amazon and Walmart when there was a problem with a product I ordered. In all cases, they've had an automated process for reporting the problem, with a selection of good choices for what went wrong (wrong thing delivered; doesn't work; never arrived; etc.). They sometimes ask for the broken/wrong item to be returned, sometimes tell me to toss it or donate it to charity.
My most recent experience of this kind was a few days ago, with Walmart. Their UI wasn't quite as polished as Amazon's - we'd gotten as far as setting a date for Fedex to pick up the wrong item I'd received; then they changed their minds and said "don't bother". I suspect this may have been a check for whether I was for real. (If I'm willing to produce the wrong item, still in its unopened package, I'm probably not lying. ;-)
Ouch. I got terminated in Oct 2023. Lost 4 years of work and over 200 books. Gone in an instant. Tried three times to get my account back from robo-support and eventually gave up. I have NO IDEA what my breach allegedly was...I was heartbroken for months. I blogged about it too. (Found this post as I have a Google Alert set up on "Amazon KDP Terminated"). Good job with Uber and the refund. Hello from Bonnie Scotland from an SJ-native. :)
While still biased to the left, it is less woke than the others (certainly than Google Gemini) and sometimes with just a bit of prompting can be downright classically liberally sane… 😏
Unrelated, but this reminded me how I got banned from Lyft in 2016 when Trump was elected. I had responded to some email from Lyft mourning his election with something like "guys, you're a ride sharing app, I don't really care about your politics". To this day I can't get a Lyft account. I use my husband's.
There was a scam operating on Uber a few years ago (and may still, for all I know) where drivers accept the ride but never show up to pick you up (they drive withing a few blocks of you then park and wait). They're hoping you cancel the ride. If you cancel, they still get paid some portion of the fare and don't have to take you anywhere. This seems to be more common at airports, where it's easy to idle near the passenger (and appear to the Uber software that the driver "arrived") but somewhere difficult for a pedestrian to reach easily.
You write: "The natural reaction to both incidents is to be angry. That would be the appropriate response to a human being who claimed to be responding to a message he had not actually read, but software is not a human being to be angry at."
Do you think the software programmed itself? The software does what it does because some human programmed it to do so, at the behest of some other human being with decision making authority. I'll call that human the CEO, but it might well have been some decision maker at a much lower level.
That person almost certainly behaved this way because they believe, probably accurately, that there's more profit to be had by mistreating customers. This pattern is why I laugh angrily when folks influenced by Chicago School economics laud free enterprise to the skies, generally while insisting that governments can do no right.
I get it. The discipline of free enterprise will prevent this sort of thing. Competitors will instantly arise as soon as anyone discovers a better way to make money. Therefore your experience didn't happen. Neither have my similar experiences.
Of course the problem here is the major waste of customer time here is pretty much an externality. Companies quite legally waste lots of peoples time - customers, prospective customers, innocent bystanders, you name it. The economically best use of *your* time is deleting their advertising emails, being woken up by their phone bots, and dealing with bots programmed to discourage. This is of course especially true if they are monopolies or near monopolies. (How many competitors does Amazon have in the relevant field, and how many of them has Amazon purchased. Of those, how many are still operating under their prior names, now reduced to brand names? did you check whether they even have competition. )
Meanwhile, if you believe economic theory, you can wait patiently for a competitor to arise. Perhaps it will even happen within your lifetime.
Meanwhile, I can see plenty of people to be angry with. I'll start with the actual CEO, whether or not they made this particular decision. I'll follow up with anger at politicians which allow this sort of thing to be and remain legal.
Their behaviour isn't likely to kill anyone, so a violent response is probably immoral as well as illegal.
But I don't use Uber - those paying attention have long been aware of their growing reputation for all kinds of unpleasant behaviour. Lyft's got less of a bad reputation; I'll give them some benefit of the doubt. But Uber's executives have demonstrated themselves to be the kind of people who'd be unable to imagine any moral problem with charging customers for rides that never happened, let alone having a "dispute resolution" process that never fixes anything.
If it's impossible for them to treat decent people decently, because they can't afford the human staff, then they have a really bad business model - bad in the ethical sense, not the financial. Given stories of mistreatment of employees (Uber, Amazon), mistreatment of drivers (Uber), and apps programmed to give different responses to LEOs than other potential customers (Uber), I'd say your understanding response is misplaced.
The cost in time to a customer is not an externality, any more than any other dimension of product quality. And Uber's dispute resolution process did in fact fix the problem, refund the charge, both for me and for Stephen, as described in his comment.
The argument that it is in the firm's interest to take account of such costs to their customers does not depend on competitors — the less attractive the service the less they can charge for it without losing customers. In the case of Uber they do in fact have competitors — Lyft as you mentioned, Bolt in some places, and taxis. KDP is competing with publishers, B&N, and a variety of Ebook and self-publishing firms.
Isn't there a genuine externality in the broader degradation of social trust and solidarity from regularly trapping people in opaque and adversarial systems, though?
Long-term, a society where basic daily activities regularly subject people to baffling ordeals like yours will be a society where everyone is angrier, more reactive, less rational and less agentic. It will be marginally harder to govern, with higher healthcare costs, shorter lifespans, more learned helplessness, less capacity to reason, and more aggressive default interactions. Some people will be late to work because they were dealing with Uber's madness, some people will be overwhelmed and shirk other life tasks, some people will give up on their $23 but maybe not make rent that month.
All of that chaos incrementally increases the crappiness and unpredictability of life for all the rest of us peons, too.
*sigh* I wish I could edit immediately after posting. I see multiple errors above, mostly involving connections between paragraphs.
Your problem was time wasting, but not an externality, in that you were a customer of both dodgy firms. The general policy of "waste everyone's time" I see increasing every year, began mostly with the externality form, but it's now made most customer support extremely unpleasant if not useless.
The waste everyone's time philosophy seems to have been tried out on non-customers, determined to be justified and legal (spam spam spam spam) and only then moved on to actual customers.
Human beings wrote and maintain the software, and executives who decide to deploy it should take responsibility for the results. Every system needs an adequate response to mistakes. This argues for getting angry.
There are also reasons not to be angry. Automated systems can be gamed and cheated, and I expect that such exploits often try to pass for these sorts of exceptional situations. While this does not excuse bad responses by programmers or executives, it helps to explain it.
Ideally a system would learn from experience and accumulate precedents like common law. But that is complicated somewhat when explicit changes are made to address a problem but make the old precedents obsolete.
Many years ago when those voice menu systems first showed up, they were terrible at voice recognition. I discovered that many of them interpreted multiple "0" in succession as "Speak to a human now!" After a while that stopped working and I saw an article claiming the voice recognition systems could detect stress and that if you cussed at them like you meant it, you'd get a human. That also worked for a while.
I wonder if cussing in software would do anything similar.
The grocery store self-scanners are terrible if you have produce or several of one item, especially when they shrink wrap tuns cans together with no separate label. I've given up on the for anything but what I can carry in my arms.
This stuff will be great someday, but it's sure primitive now.
I came up with a variant of this. When I called the local phone/cable company for tech support I used to be put into a maze of "voice mail hell" which seemed to be designed never to let you talk to a human being. So I told the answer-'bot that if it didn't put me through, I'd recycle it for beer cans.
The 'bot didn't know how to parse that, so it connected me to a human.
I got a telemarketer in trouble once, or at least I can dream I did. Answered the phone and it was a robo call, which is illegal in California. (Based on where I lived at the time, this was 1986-1991)
I cussed at it and hung up. Tried to make a call a couple of minutes later; it was still yammering away, and not only was this illegal in California, it was immoral, since its refusal to hang up made it impossible for me to call 9-1-1. So I cussed some more and hung up.
Several days later, same robocall. This time I let it yammer and left my name and phone number. Got a call back on a Friday evening, perfect timing. Said I was really interested, but I was going out for the night and away for the weekend, could I call him back? Schmuck gave me his phone number and name.
I called PacBell on Monday. He sniffed his nose and told me there was nothing he could do about it. I hung up and called the PUC as a last ditch attempt to get some action. Got some woman with a burr up her butt about PacBell. I explained the illegal x 2 robocall, she said call PacBell. I said I did and was told there was nothing PacBell could do. Oh man, did that light a fire!
"Oh they did, did they? We'll see about that!" She told me to stay on the line, called some executive VP, had me repeat my story, and spent a minute chewing him out. I guess her Monday was more fun than she'd expected.
The telemarketer called back a couple of days later, I started with "I called the PUC" and he hung up.
I doubt much really happened if he was still in business two days later. But it's about the only time I've ever gotten satisfaction from PacBell or any government, and I can still imagine the telemarketer getting fined for not hanging up when his victims hung up, since that can have real consequences.
I wonder if they stopped letting the system bail out after cussing or multiple zeroes because it cost too much? What other reason could there be - this is an “improvement”?
If companies take that logic to its ultimate conclusion, they may compel us to mirror it by finding ways to harm the company that are illegal but hard to catch you doing. And the marketplace would collapse. I don't want that, but rational behavior by both sides seems to be leading us there.
People get mad, but do they get mad enough to be motivated to plan and commit a crime? I feel skeptical. Dealing with Amazon and google can be unpleasant, but it’s still better than doing without. Switching to a competitor and/or complaining loudly on social media seem doable, actual monkeywrenching, I doubt.
Is this an entrepreneurial opportunity? Is there some way to allow complainers to pay the salaries of their intermediaries more directly, so that customer satisfaction goes back on the margin where it motivates companies? Make complaining a profit center, but one that gets more profitable as it becomes more effective at solving problems. Like the better business bureau, but one that works? And works for pay?
Would Google pay attention if their customer satisfaction stats and horror stories were public knowledge? How much does it really cost to pay someone to listen to my problem and try to at least document and publicize it?
Could a sort of informal court of annoyances, one with no enforcement power beyond public derogation on social media, harangue companies into behaving better?
I wondered about that. What if I could pay $1 to talk to a real human about some problem? But I don't think the incentives are very good.
* I don't have any choice in which human takes my call.
* They don't have any choice in whose calls they take.
And if I don't like their advice, do I rate them and decrease their chances of taking further calls? If they don't like me, do they rate me and decrease the chances of me getting a higher rated rep?
You could have tips.
Do you get a refund if the fault was Amazon's? Who decides? Amazon's won't like reps who decide Amazon was at fault. Callers won't like reps who take Amazon's side.
$1 for 5 or 10 minutes to get something resolved first time is sure better than half a dozen calls over several days. But Amazon has no incentive to fix their problems.
Maybe an auction. Show the next ten callers waiting for a rep and how much they bid to get there. Bid more and you jump the queue.
The grocery self-scanners I have experienced all had a hovering human ready to come fix problems. I’m not sure their experiences get re-integrated into the system well. And it may be that in that circumstance, the customers need adjusting as much as the system. And the machines can’t sell beer without the hovering humans, as it's too hard for them to figure out if someone is really the proper age.
This is similar to my recent experience with AliExpress and Paypal.
I ordered a couple of items on AliExpress. I've done this before and never had a problem.
I get various notices about the package's progress, through customs, etc. I'm told it's been delivered. Nothing is here. Often they use US Mail for the last stage, so I thought maybe they had delivered it to the Post Office, but it hadn't made the last leg, yet.
Ultimately, no package. I check their website. They have a photo of the item in my post box. BUT, the US Post Office sends me a notice every single day of expected deliveries and this was not one.
So the last stage was not by US Post, but the delivery company had put a non-US Post parcel in my US Post box which is illegal. I imagine the US Postal Delivery Driver then, quite rightly, removed it.
Confused?
Well, I tried to explain this to AliExpress, including using their online Chat which claimed to be a human and claimed to have escalated my complaint.
They refuse to refund my money because there's a photo of the package in my US Post Box. They completely ignored the fact that their package was not authorized to be in a Post Box and should have been dropped on my doorstep.
So I went to PayPal through which I had paid. They were waiting on "documentation" from AliExpress. "Oh, there's a picture o f it in your Post Box, so sorry." Never mind that that was an illegal delivery.
Sigh. It was only $10 total, so I let it go (though clearly not emotionally) and resolved to never ever order from AliExpress again.
For folks hwo might think someone stole the package; I've never lost a package in 27 years of living here.
But this does not bode well for future customer support. IF it's outside the parameters their software knows about, you're screwed.
I believe that Amazon began using a more primitive form of AI way before they admitted it. I haven't had many problems with Amazon, but when I do I always went to the chat function first. That worked seamlessly about 3/4 of the time, but then I got transferred to an actual human.
Then some years back I started 'feeling' that I was interacting with software, not humans. So I began corresponding in ways that would bollix the software, mostly usng accurate but unusual words to describe my problem.
By doing this I 'learned' how to present my problem in such a way that would maximize what I got from the software. By now it's second nature. You can't 'talk' to them the way you would a human and get what you want. You have to figure out what the 'machine' is looking for and respond to that in a way that gives you waht you want.
For insrace, you don't change the way you present the problem to 'help them understand it better' the way you would a human. Pound the same phrases until it gives up.
My last interaction with humans at Amazon was nearly as frustrating as your dealing with automatic systems.
They read from scripts, follow flow charts, and only occasionally can they help (with little things, sure, but big things outside the lines, forget it).
Since I will have a book ready to be self-published in a few months, let me ask you: If you were self-publishing for the first time, would you still go with KDP? If you use a different company, does that make it harder to sell on Amazon? Thanks.
It was a few years ago, but my memory is that I could get a print copy up with Barnes and Noble but not a kindle on Amazon. Checking, the print copy is still up with B&N but they don't have an eBook of it. I think their eBooks are Nook not Kindle.
I would still go with KDP — in other respects they are very convenient. I'm about to put up a 3rd edition of _Hidden Order_, after discovering that I somehow left a chapter out of the second edition, so I will see how easy it is now.
If you were opening a hamburger joint, and could pick a busy intersection in Los Angeles or New York or you could put your hamburger stand in the middle of the forest in Alaska, which would you do?
Same answer for KDP, if you're a fiction author (indie and new) and you're not in KDP's Kindle Unlimited, you might as well invisible and have never written it.
Source: I run an agency that does Amazon Ads for indies (another Amazon scam, a 30 billion dollar a year "search tax" as Seth Godin says).
Actually, all the remaining physical-book publishers insist that their writers agree in writing never to make their books available on Kindle Unlimited. Because if they did, KU would soon be the only publisher left standing. The left would love that.
The Uber thing happened to me too. What happened was that there was another person nearby also hailing an Uber and he took my car by mistake. The Uber driver is supposed to check ID but that check consists of asking, “Are you so and so?” Not much of a fail safe. But the Uber had my destination not his, so that trip terminated a few blocks away. I got billed anyway.
Did you dispute the bill? With what affect?
Yes, I protested and got a refund. But I immediately called another Uber and I had that bill to show.
Did you have the same experience I did — the substance of your protest ignored at the first round, only recognized at the second?
Yup
I’ve had the opposite experience. When I interact with a robo–customer-service rep, I find it easy to push it to its limits and figure out what it can or cannot do. However, I get frustrated when I’m transferred to a foreign call center where the human agent follows a script yet seems to have little real knowledge of the product or service I’m calling about. I have spend many aggravating hours on such calls.
I do believe AI will greatly improve the customer service experience in the coming years. Unfortunately, that will likely come at the expense of customer service representatives themselves, as many of those jobs could disappear.
If these companies prioritize efficiency over effectiveness, why don't we observe negative outcomes impacting them?
What they are doing, however irritating, may be optimal, given the alternatives. As Michael and Omar's comments show, dealing with incompetent humans may be at least as frustrating — and competent humans are expensive.
…and just as ATMs (unlike Obama’s claims to the contrary) ultimately resulted in more bank tellers in the U.S., not fewer, using AI for a portion of customer service is by no means guaranteed to reduce the number of customer service representative jobs permanently.
And it *will* almost surely result in some new higher paying, higher value-added customer service jobs (because more productive) working in conjunction with the AI software.
> The natural reaction to both incidents is to be angry. That would be the appropriate response to a human being who claimed to be responding to a message he had not actually read, but software is not a human being to be angry at.
No buts, be angry; in fact be more angry a human designed the system to waste everyones time
A lot of the price advantage offered by Amazon and the like comes from automating tasks that used to have a human involved. In many cases this is fine, but Amazon and Uber and all these other companies deliberately make it hard for their customers and business partners to interact with a human when there is a problem. That may save them some money in the short term but it seems to me it does so at a potential longer term loss of revenue as people who have been impacted by their lack of human response look for alternatives.
Of course the defense against that for many of these companies is that they have become de facto monopoly providers
Or that a competitor offering better service would have to charge enough more so that customers would not think the better service was worth the cost.
That’s the problem. Should I be angry at them if they are failing to provide service I wouldn’t be willing to pay for?
The intermediate position, suggested by the blog commenter I quoted, is that I should be mad at them for the dishonesty, for pretending I was interacting with a human when I wasn’t.
There exist services whose business pitch is providing a better experience than directly self-publishing on Amazon, they're called publishers. I get the impression that there's a spectrum of how much services they provide/how selective they are/how much money they take.
I have published five books with publishers, have now switched to self-publishing. That saves me the time and effort of finding a publisher willing to publish my book and dealing with them and lets me set lower prices for my books. Editing, in particular copy editing, is useful, but I have an editor in-house — my daughter. I've gotten better covers produced by fans of my books, once via a contest on my blog and later by one volunteer artist, than from publishers, with the exception of the Baen cover for _Harald_ which was pretty good.
For what it's worth, they don't all do that.
I've had positive experiences with both Amazon and Walmart when there was a problem with a product I ordered. In all cases, they've had an automated process for reporting the problem, with a selection of good choices for what went wrong (wrong thing delivered; doesn't work; never arrived; etc.). They sometimes ask for the broken/wrong item to be returned, sometimes tell me to toss it or donate it to charity.
My most recent experience of this kind was a few days ago, with Walmart. Their UI wasn't quite as polished as Amazon's - we'd gotten as far as setting a date for Fedex to pick up the wrong item I'd received; then they changed their minds and said "don't bother". I suspect this may have been a check for whether I was for real. (If I'm willing to produce the wrong item, still in its unopened package, I'm probably not lying. ;-)
Ouch. I got terminated in Oct 2023. Lost 4 years of work and over 200 books. Gone in an instant. Tried three times to get my account back from robo-support and eventually gave up. I have NO IDEA what my breach allegedly was...I was heartbroken for months. I blogged about it too. (Found this post as I have a Google Alert set up on "Amazon KDP Terminated"). Good job with Uber and the refund. Hello from Bonnie Scotland from an SJ-native. :)
Did you shift your books to B&N or some other provider?
Not yet. If I do bother re-publishing physical books, I'll likely use BookVault to get them distributed...
You should try arguing with ChatGPT instead
While still biased to the left, it is less woke than the others (certainly than Google Gemini) and sometimes with just a bit of prompting can be downright classically liberally sane… 😏
Unrelated, but this reminded me how I got banned from Lyft in 2016 when Trump was elected. I had responded to some email from Lyft mourning his election with something like "guys, you're a ride sharing app, I don't really care about your politics". To this day I can't get a Lyft account. I use my husband's.
There was a scam operating on Uber a few years ago (and may still, for all I know) where drivers accept the ride but never show up to pick you up (they drive withing a few blocks of you then park and wait). They're hoping you cancel the ride. If you cancel, they still get paid some portion of the fare and don't have to take you anywhere. This seems to be more common at airports, where it's easy to idle near the passenger (and appear to the Uber software that the driver "arrived") but somewhere difficult for a pedestrian to reach easily.
You write: "The natural reaction to both incidents is to be angry. That would be the appropriate response to a human being who claimed to be responding to a message he had not actually read, but software is not a human being to be angry at."
Do you think the software programmed itself? The software does what it does because some human programmed it to do so, at the behest of some other human being with decision making authority. I'll call that human the CEO, but it might well have been some decision maker at a much lower level.
That person almost certainly behaved this way because they believe, probably accurately, that there's more profit to be had by mistreating customers. This pattern is why I laugh angrily when folks influenced by Chicago School economics laud free enterprise to the skies, generally while insisting that governments can do no right.
I get it. The discipline of free enterprise will prevent this sort of thing. Competitors will instantly arise as soon as anyone discovers a better way to make money. Therefore your experience didn't happen. Neither have my similar experiences.
Of course the problem here is the major waste of customer time here is pretty much an externality. Companies quite legally waste lots of peoples time - customers, prospective customers, innocent bystanders, you name it. The economically best use of *your* time is deleting their advertising emails, being woken up by their phone bots, and dealing with bots programmed to discourage. This is of course especially true if they are monopolies or near monopolies. (How many competitors does Amazon have in the relevant field, and how many of them has Amazon purchased. Of those, how many are still operating under their prior names, now reduced to brand names? did you check whether they even have competition. )
Meanwhile, if you believe economic theory, you can wait patiently for a competitor to arise. Perhaps it will even happen within your lifetime.
Meanwhile, I can see plenty of people to be angry with. I'll start with the actual CEO, whether or not they made this particular decision. I'll follow up with anger at politicians which allow this sort of thing to be and remain legal.
Their behaviour isn't likely to kill anyone, so a violent response is probably immoral as well as illegal.
But I don't use Uber - those paying attention have long been aware of their growing reputation for all kinds of unpleasant behaviour. Lyft's got less of a bad reputation; I'll give them some benefit of the doubt. But Uber's executives have demonstrated themselves to be the kind of people who'd be unable to imagine any moral problem with charging customers for rides that never happened, let alone having a "dispute resolution" process that never fixes anything.
If it's impossible for them to treat decent people decently, because they can't afford the human staff, then they have a really bad business model - bad in the ethical sense, not the financial. Given stories of mistreatment of employees (Uber, Amazon), mistreatment of drivers (Uber), and apps programmed to give different responses to LEOs than other potential customers (Uber), I'd say your understanding response is misplaced.
The cost in time to a customer is not an externality, any more than any other dimension of product quality. And Uber's dispute resolution process did in fact fix the problem, refund the charge, both for me and for Stephen, as described in his comment.
The argument that it is in the firm's interest to take account of such costs to their customers does not depend on competitors — the less attractive the service the less they can charge for it without losing customers. In the case of Uber they do in fact have competitors — Lyft as you mentioned, Bolt in some places, and taxis. KDP is competing with publishers, B&N, and a variety of Ebook and self-publishing firms.
Isn't there a genuine externality in the broader degradation of social trust and solidarity from regularly trapping people in opaque and adversarial systems, though?
Long-term, a society where basic daily activities regularly subject people to baffling ordeals like yours will be a society where everyone is angrier, more reactive, less rational and less agentic. It will be marginally harder to govern, with higher healthcare costs, shorter lifespans, more learned helplessness, less capacity to reason, and more aggressive default interactions. Some people will be late to work because they were dealing with Uber's madness, some people will be overwhelmed and shirk other life tasks, some people will give up on their $23 but maybe not make rent that month.
All of that chaos incrementally increases the crappiness and unpredictability of life for all the rest of us peons, too.
*sigh* I wish I could edit immediately after posting. I see multiple errors above, mostly involving connections between paragraphs.
Your problem was time wasting, but not an externality, in that you were a customer of both dodgy firms. The general policy of "waste everyone's time" I see increasing every year, began mostly with the externality form, but it's now made most customer support extremely unpleasant if not useless.
The waste everyone's time philosophy seems to have been tried out on non-customers, determined to be justified and legal (spam spam spam spam) and only then moved on to actual customers.
> *sigh* I wish I could edit immediately after posting. I see multiple errors above, mostly involving connections between paragraphs.
You can. Click on the three dots icon in the upper right-hand corner of you comment.
“software is not a human being to be angry at.”
Human beings wrote and maintain the software, and executives who decide to deploy it should take responsibility for the results. Every system needs an adequate response to mistakes. This argues for getting angry.
There are also reasons not to be angry. Automated systems can be gamed and cheated, and I expect that such exploits often try to pass for these sorts of exceptional situations. While this does not excuse bad responses by programmers or executives, it helps to explain it.
Ideally a system would learn from experience and accumulate precedents like common law. But that is complicated somewhat when explicit changes are made to address a problem but make the old precedents obsolete.
Many years ago when those voice menu systems first showed up, they were terrible at voice recognition. I discovered that many of them interpreted multiple "0" in succession as "Speak to a human now!" After a while that stopped working and I saw an article claiming the voice recognition systems could detect stress and that if you cussed at them like you meant it, you'd get a human. That also worked for a while.
I wonder if cussing in software would do anything similar.
The grocery store self-scanners are terrible if you have produce or several of one item, especially when they shrink wrap tuns cans together with no separate label. I've given up on the for anything but what I can carry in my arms.
This stuff will be great someday, but it's sure primitive now.
I came up with a variant of this. When I called the local phone/cable company for tech support I used to be put into a maze of "voice mail hell" which seemed to be designed never to let you talk to a human being. So I told the answer-'bot that if it didn't put me through, I'd recycle it for beer cans.
The 'bot didn't know how to parse that, so it connected me to a human.
I got a telemarketer in trouble once, or at least I can dream I did. Answered the phone and it was a robo call, which is illegal in California. (Based on where I lived at the time, this was 1986-1991)
I cussed at it and hung up. Tried to make a call a couple of minutes later; it was still yammering away, and not only was this illegal in California, it was immoral, since its refusal to hang up made it impossible for me to call 9-1-1. So I cussed some more and hung up.
Several days later, same robocall. This time I let it yammer and left my name and phone number. Got a call back on a Friday evening, perfect timing. Said I was really interested, but I was going out for the night and away for the weekend, could I call him back? Schmuck gave me his phone number and name.
I called PacBell on Monday. He sniffed his nose and told me there was nothing he could do about it. I hung up and called the PUC as a last ditch attempt to get some action. Got some woman with a burr up her butt about PacBell. I explained the illegal x 2 robocall, she said call PacBell. I said I did and was told there was nothing PacBell could do. Oh man, did that light a fire!
"Oh they did, did they? We'll see about that!" She told me to stay on the line, called some executive VP, had me repeat my story, and spent a minute chewing him out. I guess her Monday was more fun than she'd expected.
The telemarketer called back a couple of days later, I started with "I called the PUC" and he hung up.
I doubt much really happened if he was still in business two days later. But it's about the only time I've ever gotten satisfaction from PacBell or any government, and I can still imagine the telemarketer getting fined for not hanging up when his victims hung up, since that can have real consequences.
I wonder if they stopped letting the system bail out after cussing or multiple zeroes because it cost too much? What other reason could there be - this is an “improvement”?
My guess would be that too many people figured out the trick and workloads on the humans started noticeably increasing again.
If companies take that logic to its ultimate conclusion, they may compel us to mirror it by finding ways to harm the company that are illegal but hard to catch you doing. And the marketplace would collapse. I don't want that, but rational behavior by both sides seems to be leading us there.
People get mad, but do they get mad enough to be motivated to plan and commit a crime? I feel skeptical. Dealing with Amazon and google can be unpleasant, but it’s still better than doing without. Switching to a competitor and/or complaining loudly on social media seem doable, actual monkeywrenching, I doubt.
Is this an entrepreneurial opportunity? Is there some way to allow complainers to pay the salaries of their intermediaries more directly, so that customer satisfaction goes back on the margin where it motivates companies? Make complaining a profit center, but one that gets more profitable as it becomes more effective at solving problems. Like the better business bureau, but one that works? And works for pay?
Would Google pay attention if their customer satisfaction stats and horror stories were public knowledge? How much does it really cost to pay someone to listen to my problem and try to at least document and publicize it?
Could a sort of informal court of annoyances, one with no enforcement power beyond public derogation on social media, harangue companies into behaving better?
I wondered about that. What if I could pay $1 to talk to a real human about some problem? But I don't think the incentives are very good.
* I don't have any choice in which human takes my call.
* They don't have any choice in whose calls they take.
And if I don't like their advice, do I rate them and decrease their chances of taking further calls? If they don't like me, do they rate me and decrease the chances of me getting a higher rated rep?
You could have tips.
Do you get a refund if the fault was Amazon's? Who decides? Amazon's won't like reps who decide Amazon was at fault. Callers won't like reps who take Amazon's side.
$1 for 5 or 10 minutes to get something resolved first time is sure better than half a dozen calls over several days. But Amazon has no incentive to fix their problems.
Maybe an auction. Show the next ten callers waiting for a rep and how much they bid to get there. Bid more and you jump the queue.
The grocery self-scanners I have experienced all had a hovering human ready to come fix problems. I’m not sure their experiences get re-integrated into the system well. And it may be that in that circumstance, the customers need adjusting as much as the system. And the machines can’t sell beer without the hovering humans, as it's too hard for them to figure out if someone is really the proper age.
This is similar to my recent experience with AliExpress and Paypal.
I ordered a couple of items on AliExpress. I've done this before and never had a problem.
I get various notices about the package's progress, through customs, etc. I'm told it's been delivered. Nothing is here. Often they use US Mail for the last stage, so I thought maybe they had delivered it to the Post Office, but it hadn't made the last leg, yet.
Ultimately, no package. I check their website. They have a photo of the item in my post box. BUT, the US Post Office sends me a notice every single day of expected deliveries and this was not one.
So the last stage was not by US Post, but the delivery company had put a non-US Post parcel in my US Post box which is illegal. I imagine the US Postal Delivery Driver then, quite rightly, removed it.
Confused?
Well, I tried to explain this to AliExpress, including using their online Chat which claimed to be a human and claimed to have escalated my complaint.
They refuse to refund my money because there's a photo of the package in my US Post Box. They completely ignored the fact that their package was not authorized to be in a Post Box and should have been dropped on my doorstep.
So I went to PayPal through which I had paid. They were waiting on "documentation" from AliExpress. "Oh, there's a picture o f it in your Post Box, so sorry." Never mind that that was an illegal delivery.
Sigh. It was only $10 total, so I let it go (though clearly not emotionally) and resolved to never ever order from AliExpress again.
For folks hwo might think someone stole the package; I've never lost a package in 27 years of living here.
But this does not bode well for future customer support. IF it's outside the parameters their software knows about, you're screwed.
I believe that Amazon began using a more primitive form of AI way before they admitted it. I haven't had many problems with Amazon, but when I do I always went to the chat function first. That worked seamlessly about 3/4 of the time, but then I got transferred to an actual human.
Then some years back I started 'feeling' that I was interacting with software, not humans. So I began corresponding in ways that would bollix the software, mostly usng accurate but unusual words to describe my problem.
By doing this I 'learned' how to present my problem in such a way that would maximize what I got from the software. By now it's second nature. You can't 'talk' to them the way you would a human and get what you want. You have to figure out what the 'machine' is looking for and respond to that in a way that gives you waht you want.
For insrace, you don't change the way you present the problem to 'help them understand it better' the way you would a human. Pound the same phrases until it gives up.
My last interaction with humans at Amazon was nearly as frustrating as your dealing with automatic systems.
They read from scripts, follow flow charts, and only occasionally can they help (with little things, sure, but big things outside the lines, forget it).
Since I will have a book ready to be self-published in a few months, let me ask you: If you were self-publishing for the first time, would you still go with KDP? If you use a different company, does that make it harder to sell on Amazon? Thanks.
It was a few years ago, but my memory is that I could get a print copy up with Barnes and Noble but not a kindle on Amazon. Checking, the print copy is still up with B&N but they don't have an eBook of it. I think their eBooks are Nook not Kindle.
I would still go with KDP — in other respects they are very convenient. I'm about to put up a 3rd edition of _Hidden Order_, after discovering that I somehow left a chapter out of the second edition, so I will see how easy it is now.
Thank you. I'll probably try KDP.
If you were opening a hamburger joint, and could pick a busy intersection in Los Angeles or New York or you could put your hamburger stand in the middle of the forest in Alaska, which would you do?
Same answer for KDP, if you're a fiction author (indie and new) and you're not in KDP's Kindle Unlimited, you might as well invisible and have never written it.
Source: I run an agency that does Amazon Ads for indies (another Amazon scam, a 30 billion dollar a year "search tax" as Seth Godin says).
Actually, all the remaining physical-book publishers insist that their writers agree in writing never to make their books available on Kindle Unlimited. Because if they did, KU would soon be the only publisher left standing. The left would love that.