Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
Young startups often thrill early adopters by offering outstanding customer service with a personal touch. Many Big Tech companies, on the other hand, are notoriously hard to get a hold of when running into any sort of problem. Let’s look into why this is happening, and whether it might change any time soon. — Anna
Faceless
“Customer complaints handling at scale is broken at most tech companies,” author and engineer Gergely Orosz wrote in a blog post.
Like many tech employees, Orosz learned of customer service struggles firsthand while working at Skype and Uber: “As soon as you update your LinkedIn profile to the new gig, you start to get messages from friends of friends asking to solve one of their problems.”
If people are desperate to find a connection inside tech companies who can help them with an issue, it is because of how hard it otherwise is to get a human in the loop. Meta is a blatant example of this: “Facebook and Instagram serve nearly 3 billion users a day with a help desk that numbers closer to zero,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Powered by WPeMatico