Communication preference is one thing. But what a lot of modern "online" support is really about is preventing people from getting support and forcing them into a dark pattern doing what the company wants and not what they want.

If I could unsubscribe, deal with billing errors, resolve complaints, etc online I'd love it. But most support systems try and trap you in some Kafkaesque faq hell that never lets you get near something that would solve your problem. That's the real reason people want a person.

It's ironic, but at the company where I provide support (50-ish employees), one of the most common things I have to tell people is that they actually have to sign in and cancel their memberships themselves. They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves.

> They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves.

Can you really blame them? So many of us have gotten used to companies doing everything they can to make unsubscribing as difficult as possible, I'm not surprised their first instinct is to email.

And your response it to say it's the user's fault?

The email flow is click on the "contact us" email that's at the bottom of every page, it opens in gmail, the ask to cancel and hit send. Some time later they get a notification that it's done. They never even had to sign in. They're authenticated by virtue of it being sent from the email associated with the account.

The web flow is signing in, hunting around your app for the account page, and then hunting around that for how to cancel. Sending an email works for every service in the same way. Finding the account management page is different for every website.

Is the front line the still staffed by humans then? Or does something first scan the email for unsubscribe and all its synonyms, and send them a canned reply, before escalating to a human.

There's an auto-reply system if you message outside of business hours, but if we're open, we reply directly and first.

There's a pretty good trick to dealing with this (I've found): just call up the credit card company and tell them that you tried contacting the merchant, then ask them to bounce the charge

But what if it is the credit card company you are dealing with?

For example I wanted to cancel one of my credit cards. There was nothing in their FAQ's that mentioned anything around "canceling". There was nothing under "Account options" or any logged in setting menu. There was no chat/support on their webpage. They only have a phone line you can call. The phone line is completely automated, and has 2 menus to go back and forth, with no option to speak to a real person. You listen to the first menu, nothing is related to speaking to support or canceling a card. You listen to the second menu, same thing. You go back to the first menu, just to make sure you didn't mishear anything. The call disconnects because you took too long to figure out an option, Eventually you figure out you have to choose one of the options, then spam invalid input.

This finally gets into holding for a real support person. Unfortunately turns out all their agents are busy at the moment and there is a greater than 10 minute hold to get a support agent. If you would like you could hold your place in line and they will call you back when you are ready to take the call. You think to yourself, "sure why not?", and the call ends.

You get a call from their automated system 20 minutes later. It is finally your turn to speak to a human. An automated voice says: "Press 1 to confirm you are ready", you press 1. Nothing happens. The message repeats. You press 1 again. Yet again the message repeats. You spam press 1, the call ends.

You call the automated line again. Go 1 option deep and spam numbers again, get put into holding. This time you do not opt to have your place held in line. Shitty and horrible compressed music blasts into your ear. After about 20 minutes, you get a person. You explain you're canceling, support agent goes through the usual walk through and finally cancels your card.

> But what if it is the credit card company you are dealing with?

In general, I find dealing with any big company in writing, much easier than the telephone nightmare you describe. Your call is important to us! Due to unusually high [sic] volumes, the waiting time is half an hour!

Also, in writing, they don't accidentally forget previous conversations. If it has to be escalated to e.g. arbitration, then you have a good record.

If they don't do online messaging, send a tracked letter to their head office. Obviously, that's a pain these days (don't misplace the proof of postage). Thankfully there are companies who print and post letters as a service.

Yeah you still have to deal with it through the CC company, but the benefit of doing it that way is once you suffer through the BS and eventually get a live person, it's normally resolved

also I think some of the CC companies are less of a PITA in this, from my experience C1 is more of a PITA than Chase for example

I'm not sure you can call it a change of opinion when the older generation grew up where phone was the only option. So it sounds more like each generation prefers the method that they grew up with. If in the future everyone ends up doing work in the "Metaverse" for some reason then I'm sure the current online generation would hate it even more. I can't think of a good reason to do anything in the metaverse but maybe the next generation will find a way to make it work.

For similar reasons, a lot of people on Hackernews prefer reading articles rather than watching videos whereas a lot of newer programmers learn a lot from videos more so than books and articles.

Sure, of course. But I also think (and I'll just speak for myself) that the less people have real, 1-1 conversations with someone else, the more uncomfortable people get with interacting with others - people just get "out of practice" for lack of a better term.

There is a restaurant in Austin, El Arroyo, that's famous for their funny signs. In the midst of the pandemic they had a sign that said "Once this pandemic is over and we start seeing people in person again, we're all going to be awkward as fuck." It's a general sentiment that I agree with - the more we get used to "virtual" interactions, the less comfortable we are with synchronous, person-to-person interactions.

Trust me. Every few weeks I hear a complaint from my dad that he can't just go into an office or directly get someone on the phone to make some change. (And I'm certainly not a millennial.) At some level he just resents he needs to do this stuff on a computer. I'm annoyed when I can't reach someone in the event of a problem but I am totally cool with transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system.

I do talk with certain advisors in person and we even share various personal info about what's going on--but most routine things are email.

I guess I'm against the trend since I'm a gen z who also vastly prefers a phone call to online. Computer systems IME are riddled with dark patterns, bugs, ads, and terrible UIs that make it nearly impossible to figure out where to go to solve my problem. Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?

>Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?

Sure. A random travel booking. A stock purchase. Checking my account balance anywhere.

These are all things that took visiting travel agents, brokers, and waiting for delayed monthly statements previously. We made a lot of phone calls and went into offices for multiple hours to handle things.

I think your examples also highlight the issue at hand - the automated systems are great when they work, but when they don't work it means that there are now a lot fewer real humans that can solve your problem.

Take travel bookings. When I know where I'm going and have relatively firm dates, I'd much prefer the ease of online booking. However, when I'm more in the mood of "I want to go on vacation to country X, but I don't know a lot about that country or what the best places to stay/visit are" I've found myself wasting a ton of time on endless travel websites trying to get a better "feel" for what I want to visit. About 15 years ago I went on a long trip to Italy, and the travel agent was invaluable. These days I'm not even sure travel agents like that exist any more.

Somewhat tangential (or ominous) aside, I've found ChatGPT to be really the best tool for travel planning/travel ideas when you're in that "I have a general idea of the kind of vacation I want" mood.

Time was, that travel agent was pretty much your only option, unless you happened to have extremely well-traveled friends or family who could make an itinerary with you. Even finding a list of which airlines fly from where to where and the visa processes was a major hassle. Let alone making a connection at the other end. How would you even get a regional Italian train timetable without the internet? At least it would take an afternoon on the phone.

And if your local agents weren't good at it, or they only knew about, say, Spain in detail and not Italy, you'd be pretty out of luck.

And most of those travel agents, like the one at my office in my company in the 90s, knew how to book pretty cookie-cutter plane flights and cruises.

I used "adventure travel" companies in that period for other stuff and my dad had a specialty travel agent who mostly worked with other private adventure agents.

There is also the 'emergency' case where your room is double booked, your flight is cancelled, etc. For the most part, humans are the best at navigating edge cases (as opposed to a phone tree or an 'ai' that's hardly intelligent, and 90% in an emergency you're just tapping your foot to get to the person anyways).

Want to get to your destination that day? A travel agent is often 'in the know' about what myriad of connection options is most likely to get you there, particularly if the nonstops are all gone.

I do do trips through specialized agents, sometimes with guides sometimes without, so yeah I don’t depend on general travel agents in general.There are private trips for someone going through some of these companies but they’re probably pretty expensive

> "I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone

This works when the things you are purchasing are uncomplicated, like a toaster or a streaming subscription. Younger folks will realize that big-ticket purchases are precisely the kind of things that you will want to have some kind of human involved on the other side for when things go wrong.