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
A great idea! I'd love to run stuff in this zone. Rotate through a bunch of errors, unavailability, latency spikes, power outages etc every day, make it a 12 hour torture test cycle.
The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up.
So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.
I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.
Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.
So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.
AWS has clear upfront pricing, but they're a large enterprise company so if you're a large customer, and you're not getting a discount, you're definitely getting screwed. No one talks about that because it's all covered by NDAs covering backroom deals, but you can be sure Netflix isn't paying list pricing for EC2 instances.
Having to convert between Reserved Instance families to save money, while tricking people into thinking that this is good for them, is a masterstroke of AWS' sales department. Wouldn't you rather be working on the product rather than optimizing RI counts?
I've never felt tricked by RI. Is there some value to a cloud provider if I commit to three years of an instance type that might night have much new adoption after 1 or 2 years? I suspect so. They seemed to price based on that. What's the "trick"? Standard a1.medium instance for 3 years runs $7/month. Not unreasonable
If you don't want to do that use savings plans.
If you like talking to sales people and negotiating discounts do that. But they haven't let those sales people shut down / mess up self serve, including options for discounts.
You can get pretty far with amazon's tiered pricing and savings plans / spot etc discounts.
My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.
there’s probably very little fraud with touchless payments like Apple Pay - most issuers require some verification to add the card to a phone in the first place. if that becomes a growing % of in person payments i don’t see the justification for high card present rates.
also some data suggests people have moved to more debit transactions during Covid over credit which are cheaper to process anyway and usually means less fraud - so maintaining a fixed processing rate means margins for processors are probably even better right now
I wonder if Apple and Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Stripe had just done something "anti competitive" and entered the payment space squarely themselves if rates would come down. They seem more consumer experience directed than other players.
The security they can deploy (apple pay seems pretty good now as long as card onboarding isn't broken) seems like they could drive down to basically low interchange?
It's not just enterprise - many small / mid size places are much much happier (myself included) with an invoice attached.
AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.
No insurance hassles - I did medical billing for a bit. The insurance co's basically just run around doctors because they KNOW folks give up. You could absolutely force the $40 extra payment if dr + patient etc proved it out / appealed it - but often not worth it. Also govt billing into central county system for the poor - ugh - the bureaucracy / overhead was a nightmare (always having to recertify to financial need / paperwork this and that - 50% of time was on stuff I'd consider no value add).
For a while I had individual insurance (prior to obamacare). Because it had pretty high deductibles, I would just do a private pay / cash doctor for primary care etc.
Some big wins:
NO discussion about whether something was covered or not! You want to get service, just call.
No crazy surprise bills - yes - I once tried to go to urgent care for something at the main hospital, but NO ONE would tell me what I would be charged as a cash pay client. Yes, it can be expensive to do cash pay, but with a doctor billing by the time you can basically predict / know your cost.
Service - you are paying by the hour. I never felt pressured out the door (no surprise). The service is good to great.
Convenience - I got someone close who used his downstairs as his office. Have a problem, go in and get checked out. Because you don't need the huge billing infrastructure I think you can get away with smaller office sizes. To pay for a full time biller you need a few doctors, who then need a receptionist etc etc.
Yep! There are a large number of benefits for both the provider and the patient, for purchasing elective procedures without involving insurance. It's kind of like how when you get a minor fender bender, it can be easier to settle things directly than to go through insurance. No overhead, like you suggest.
However, it's hard to replace insurance for nonelective/emergency procedures (heart attack, stroke, aggressive cancers).
Insurance-tailored billing systems are really geared towards non-elective procedures (that's where all the money is). When they encroach on the "normal" stuff, it feels invasive.
Advocating for the insurance infrastructure, there is a preponderance of medical waste out there. Doctors prescribe blood tests, urine samples, or MRI scans even though they aren't medically-necessary, just because the hospital group needs to make some money. When the patient is paying, they are on the lookout for medical waste, because they don't want to pay.
Of course, this means that there will be false negatives from the insurance carrier, when they try to clamp down on medical waste. The only loser in this game is the patient.
I've got the dual yubico key thing going. It seems to work fine. I don't need to pick overly complex passwords if I don't want to.
Google does this well. Yubico Security Key + they seem to monitor my logins / rate limits etc.
I deal as do many folks with relatively to extremely sensitive info (yes, also have stuff on auto-delete).
Complex passwords require a password manager - if those get updated and rooted then my yubico seems to save me again.
In fact, with yubico I have a few passwords I memorized that aren't TOO crazy long - with a 2FA hardware key you may be able to SIMPLIFY passwords and still have good security.
And the yubico is EASY! Clip it to your keychain and go.
Retail is crazy miserable for the person actually MAKING the product.
Getting INTO stores is hard. The store can dump product back onto you - so they have no risk. The price on shelf has NOTHING to do with what you get, if you are small you are already going through some intermediaries. Ie, person making product, packing, shipping to distributor (some make you pay cost to get it to them), then distribution costs then retailer markups then return handling yadda yadda. THEN retailers will ask you to run promos and give them discounts or they will drop you.
3%? EVERYONE would pay that. In retail I'd say person making product gets maybe 20%? 80% is taken by others?
That's awesome! However, it WILL result in stripe attracting a LOT of the crappy billers (ie, folks who mislead / make customer unhappy etc). If your business is < 1% refunds, no worry if fees stay. A fair number of business have just 1 or 2 refunds PER YEAR.
Other business obviously have MUCH higher refund rates (sneaky autobill businesses etc). For these loosing 5% on the refunds matters if they have a lot of refunds, so they'll be very tempted by no costs if you autobill and get caught. They'll just autorenew everyone, autosign up and then be VERY good about refunds to avoid chargebacks. Even if just 30% of customers don't catch a few months you end up with real money.
Of course, CUSTOMERS may hate these players, but stripe I guess is focused on what works for the businesses generating lots of refunds.
Having a disincentive for merchants to have many refunds makes a lot of sense.
The reasonable thing to do is to ramp up the fees based on the number of refunds. You want to push away the crappy billers, but not hammer developers that have the occasional bad release.
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.