In terms of games theory; if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer, then that's an incentive to ignore the consumer's complaint. Especially if that company has a monopoly.

I can understand why GP suggested company pays $20.

The suggestion is the customer pays $20 so they don't try and go straight to the ombudsman with ever little issue. The company doesn't and shouldn't pay the customer under any circumstance.

In technical support, one of the largest problems you have to deal with is all of the idiots that don't know how to use the product and won't look up the documentation or learn the product on their own. These people spam the shit out of support all day for the most basic shit. Seriously, I was working support at an anti-virus company and 85% of the calls into the paid business tier support were requests for us to do installs or basic application configuration for them. I know that not everybody knows how to configure a firewall, but "where do I download the install file for x" is literally Google-able.

The idea of an ombudsman is ultimately a bad one in this case because the problem isn't with the product or the support or the documentation. The problem is people Always think their issue is special and the most capable person should help them. Our support tier was paid, so more often than not we did what they asked, but the free customers would just get routed to a sales rep because free customers are even dumber and more entitled than the paying ones.

This whole situation is farcicle to me. Yet another free customer blew a minor issue out of proportion and had to apologize when it turned out the system hadn't failed him, he was just a free loading mooch all along.

A company has no incentive to ignore the customer, all else being equal, but they do have costs in servicing the customer and costs from ignoring the customer.

Assume the company has no way of distinguishing "valid" or "high impact" cases from other cases. This means that in order for the company to handle cases they need the sum of fully treating every case to be greater than the sum of the cost of fully treating every case. This is almost certainly never going to be true, unless each of your cases is high cost to ignore (think enterprise support).

So you need to funnel down the cases. Typically this is done with low tier support that tries to suggest fixes and such. You can also offer high value added support to give customers the ability to pay for a support plan. This $20 proposal is like that but on a more ad-hoc basis.

> if there's no cost to the company to ignore the customer

Simplifying, that's "if (false)", since ignoring the customers in the limit gets you a failed business and bankruptcy.

For the non-enterprise user, isn't this the scenario established today, with no failed business?

No, I don't think so. All the major internet companies listen to their non-enterprise users. They may not provide enterprise quality support to each individual user, but user voices in aggregate are considered critically important.

not if you have a monopoly. Which is why customer support for most ISPs in the US is so abysmal.

And even if it is just a sufficiently large company, if the customer is not a large payer and the issue is non-trivial to solve, the the cost of losing that customer could very well be less than the cost of fixing the issue.

What I was addressing was specifically the notion that companies pay zero cost for ignoring a customer, or the idea that they believe the same. That's false. Now there's no question there are some customers these large companies are better off without, and there are large and small examples of companies firing customers, or ignoring them til they go away. Nothing wrong with that. All the time on this site we talk about firing unprofitable customers. If you do this judiciously it's just good business. Doing that in particular cases is not the same as doing that generally.