Gregory's Servertl;dr — Customer support systems are often inefficient by design. In normal times, this saves companies money. During crises, these deliberately engineered inefficiencies cause the systems to collapse.
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56 comments
 Today, people across the United States are struggling with air travel disruptions and air carriers are overwhelmed. We have once-a-decade severe weather events coincident with peak season for holiday travel. Given this, perhaps it is unavoidable that reservations departments for carriers such as Alaska Airlines are experiencing hold times over nine hours? No. It's not unavoidable at all. All of this is happening because companies have made choices that allow it to happen. Airlines can't foresee precisely when they are going to have massive travel delays due to nationwide severe weather, but it's certain to happen. While it may be impossible to meet staffing demands for such events, they reduce staffing needs by an order of magnitude with effective online rebooking systems. Instead, carriers are slow to automatically rebook, online rescheduling is glitchy, and many website users get messages telling them they cannot rebook online and must call instead. Whether this is managerial incompetence, cost-saving measures, legacy software systems, or something else, I don't know. *There's something darker going on as well.* Some of the inconvenience that US travelers are suffering is built into the system on purpose. Sales platforms are convenient by design because companies don't want to lose sales. Customer service platforms are inconvenient by design because the sale has already been made. Inconvenience makes people go away– and making people go away saves money. Here's an example. As I mentioned, the hold time today for rebooking assistance with Alaska Airlines is over nine hours. While call-back technology is readily available, #AlaskaAirlines is not offering call-back; you have to stay on hold the entire time. Causing failures to compound, modern cell phone systems are not designed for calls of that length and frequently drop before an agent is reached. Here's the ugly secret. The Alaska Airlines MVP line, reserved for their frequent fliers, does offer call backs. I just got off the phone with them. The wait time was about six hours, but I was able to do something else in the interim and I was not driven insane by their corporate theme music. So there's no technological reason why Alaska Airlines doesn't offer callbacks on their standard customer service line. It has to be a conscious choice. Why would firm chose to make life so uncomfortable for their customers? While I can't prove this, I strongly suspect that the system is deliberately designed to be inefficient for the tier of customers who call the standard service line. Why? Because calls take a long time, and agents are expensive Some of the airlines are now charging to speak to a live person. Last fall, for example, the American Airlines luggage office was closed by the time my flight landed and I had to pay American twenty-five dollars to be told that they had lost my luggage. But (as you see from my grudge revealed above), people resent being charged to talk to a live person. An alternative to charging is to make it difficult and inconvenient. By introducing sufficient friction into the process, corporate customer service systems can induce customers to either (a) use the often-clunky online resources that are available or (b) give up on whatever they were trying to do. Either way, that's money saved. So, we see two things happening here. First, corporations are stratifying their customers by the value that they provide to the company. Second, they are deliberately introducing frictions for the less-valued subset of customers, in order to minimize service interactions with these individuals. This leads us to the problem that has broken air travel today. When hold times are twenty minutes, getting a call-back is a perk. When hold times are nine hours, it is a necessity. But by design these callbacks are not available and instead we get a catastrophic system failure, where the hold times connection durations that another technology, cell phones, are not engineered to provide. The result? Travelers around the country stranded, missing holiday celebrations with their families, and unable to obtain assistance from the airlines in any way. That's the story here. Mechanisms that create frictions in normal times cause system failures in abnormal times—precisely when those systems are needed the most. And worse yet, such mechanisms are often there by design. This is the nature of corporate customer service in 2022. Fixing the broken link to post.news: https://post.news/article/2JLOZ1nlM24Gp17piulQlclYI6m @ct_bergstrom would be curious to discuss this in the context of healthcare and health system collapse because this fails perfectly or maybe parallels exactly what is happening in healthcare right now. @Tnicholsmd @ct_bergstrom As an economy, we continue to underfund services that are not only societal goods in "normal" times but critical and essential in times of stress (which are all-too-common). Resilience and robustness require surplus capacity. Yes. And I think what's so interesting to me about this example is that it's not a matter of underfunding resilience. It's a matter deliberately engineering fragility because it turns a profit most of the time. Thank you. This is helping me so much to clarify my own thinking. @ct_bergstrom @jallepap @Tnicholsmd it's like what's been done to our medical system. Engineering things thus is great for maximizing returns, but not so great for dealing with unusual spikes in demand. @ct_bergstrom @jallepap I think that’s exactly right. We find and run emergency departments on the thinnest possible level of resilience to maximize profits for all involved. But we fund other emergency services via government funding to have optimal staffing at all times (fire, EMS, etc). I truly cannot fathom why others couldn’t possibly imagine this also being a good idea for medicine. @ct_bergstrom I just edited mine and it still shows your reply. @ct_bergstrom @jimvernon Edit and "delete and redraft" are different. If you're posting through an app, it may not have the edit function yet, but I think most servers have it on the web client. @cnsyoung @jimvernon Thank you. It's not present on the web client for fediscience.org but I sure would love to have access to such for situations like this. @ct_bergstrom Interesting -- it's there for me on the browser (I'm also on fediscience) but it's not on Tusky (Android app) @ct_bergstrom Anyway also wanted to say this sounds like it's needlessly frustrating and I'm sorry your family (and so many others) are having to deal with it. Travel is stressful outside of holidays but it seems especially shitty when companies pull this stuff during times when people would at the very least probably prefer to be on the phone with the families they're trying to visit or something rather than on hold/reconnecting with a service agent. @ct_bergstrom in government service design I’ve seen this referred to as “rationing by friction” eg this fantastic thread on the bird site by @allafarce: https://twitter.com/allafarce/status/1055519056806068224 But yes it’s very much deliberate. One of my new years project ideas is actually to lobby the 🇨🇦 gov to mandate that airlines offer call-backs; there’s no excuse at this point to not, and the human cost is so high. Precisely. "Rationing by friction" is a great term. This is a major issue in (1) research grant applications and (2) journal submissions. And wonderful about your idea for lobbying CA. @leigh @ct_bergstrom @allafarce Good term, “rationing by friction.” Happens in corporations too. If a department wants to ban something but they know they can’t get away with it, they allow it but require a VP signature. Still too much of it happening? Require a senior VP or an executive VP signature instead.  @leigh @ct_bergstrom @allafarce Predicted "excuse": "But the staff shortages... 😫" @ct_bergstrom Edit comment aside, I thought I was going to disagree with your take on corporate customer service, but you make a good point about being able to automate much of it. So much of what we call in for could easily be done by the customer instead of an agent.  @ct_bergstrom At what point are customers going to decide that airlines just hate them? Part of what has made moving to Winnipeg so difficult is that the pandemic has left air travel in Canada in tatters. So what was once a nice and central location is now just inconvenient to everywhere. @ct_bergstrom this reminds me of a fact my niece learned in business school: Costco makes shopping at their store time-consuming on purpose. They want to discourage customers from just popping in to pick up an item or two, because large shopping trips are more efficient and therefore more profitable. The time you spend waiting in line for a cashier at Costco is built in by design. @jik Wow. Do you know if this is written up anywhere? It's a fascinating example. @ct_bergstrom this isn't exactly what my niece told me but it's close... @ct_bergstrom Thinking more about this I'm not sure it's quite the same. Costco customers keep coming back, so... Perhaps making people wander the whole store forces them to discover "deals" that on the whole they end up being happy with, so ultimately maybe both Costco and its customers get what they want?  @jik @ct_bergstrom Supermarkets are incredibly devious and time wasting by design. Things from moving the locations of things regularly so you're forced to browse. The attempts to manipulate us to squeeze every last penny is exhausting. (I wonder how much energy it actually costs us and how much of our lives it consumes in hours?) @fifilamoura @jik @ct_bergstrom The milk is at the back to force you to walk through the store even when you just need a gallon of milk for the kids. @jik @ct_bergstrom The first part of what you wrote is more or less correct; the second part is not. Costco absolutely does not want customers waiting in line at the checkout. At some stores there’s even a giant board with cashier scores for speed.  @ct_bergstrom There is also the fact that in many sectors there are effective monopolies, where only a few large corporations own a massive market share and they all agree (without communication) to the same anti consumer business practices so their is no choice the customers can make by taking their business elsewhere. So much for the free market fixing problems like it’s proponents say, because of effective monopolies that have been allowed @ct_bergstrom Last year around this time when Alaska had storm/COVID delays/cancellations and multi-hour phone delays, they actually offered a call back. IIRC, I got mine about 9 hours later. Maybe not such a great idea to allow a few companies to dominate air travel, ie an oligopoly. Also, why not rebuild the passenger rail network? @ct_bergstrom @ct_bergstrom this is possibly an already-thought & unwelcome response i do believe (not unlike “just in time” inventory mgmt), this corporate behavior is fixed & permanent. i mean… all they have to do during an emergency is… wait. they can wait you out, & with time, the problem passes or is replaced by a different problem i’m sorry your daughter got caught in this mess, & that she won’t be where she wants for the holiday. i’n also sorry for the frustration you’re experiencing Yeah, that's probably right as well. And I want to stress that (1) there is nothing any reasonable airlines could do to get everyone where they wanted to by Christmas this year and (2) the individual agents working for Alaska are wonderful almost without exception. The problem is that a system is designed to make things mildly uncomfortable during normal times makes things miserable during difficult ones.  @ct_bergstrom @histoftech as someone who used to design those customer “support” systems with a fair bit of friction on them (for banks) and has to use them I must say I’m sorry 😔 @ct_bergstrom #telcos made an art out of giving customers disservice. Your analysis is indeed very interesting @Mottie wow. That must have been a really difficult job. Adhesion gosh people trying to make am inhumane system less so, and getting stymied by the system itself. The assumption here is that corporate managements know what they’re doing, that all they do is wise and sensible and beneficial to the corporation’s interests, even that the corporation’s interests, as viewed by management, include the successful operation of the airline. And assumes that the “customers” are the corporation’s actual customers and not ledger items in the assets column for the benefit of the actual customers, the shareholders. Too jaded? |
Unexpected or unpredictable adverse events — large storms, power blackouts, cyberattacks, and so forth — create disruptions that massively increase load on customer service departments. It can be impossible for a company to muster the emergency staffing support it needs to handle the demand for service agents.