Part of the art and science of customer support is understanding how you can lose money on *every* transaction that customer support gets involved with and still have things work out for you at scale... contingent on *very* successful execution both inside and outside of CS.https://twitter.com/bznotes/status/1202362389917847559 …
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An example of this: no single transaction involving a retail customer below approximately a mortgage would have positive contribution to a bank's bottom line if a person talked to you about it.
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The bank doesn't employ people so you can talk to them. The bank employs people so that you use that bank when you *don't* need to talk to anyone.
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A useful number to keep in your head, from a US-based call center a long time ago: seven dollars. Seven dollars is the cost of picking up the phone. (I earned $10.25 an hour, and was confused as to how that math works, and was told "overhead." It took years before I understood.)
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$7 blows away all the contribution margin from a
$N million domestic wire, about a $500 to $1k credit card transaction (for the issuer), a middle class American's primary banking relationship for about a month or so, a month of B2C SaaS, etc etc etc.Show this thread -
Note that $7 is *very much not* the top end of e.g. "How much does it cost to respond to a ticket given that the ticket will be touched by e.g. a San Francisco-based engineer multiple times?"
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Anyhow: Hug your customer support professionals close. Understand that this is the math dictating why it is difficult to get a human on the first ring in many places. Understand that most places with sucky CS didn't say "Strategy memo: humans, who cares what they think."
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End of conversation
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