These days? When was this not a standard practice for the financial industry?
Most of the time when a bank (or similar) decides to close your account they literally can’t even discuss the reasons with you without putting themselves in jeopardy.
Work for a hedge fund under both US and UK regulatory authority.
Where pleasant in this case is the person replying took the time to read the words you wrote and confirmed that by prefacing most sentences with "so I see you're trying to do xyz", followed by a thorough and well thought out response with references and suggestions.
So many times I've emailed other places (multi-million dollar companies) where it's painfully clear the person replying didn't read anything and some tool scanned my email for keywords which they auto-replied with even though the response makes no sense based on what I wrote. Then it takes additional days and back and forths to get to the point where they understand the original email that was written, in which case it gets "escalated" to another support team / tier within the organization where the process starts again.
No option to reach a human by phone, chat, email. It felt pretty awful.
Edit: I should clarify that I mean Amazon retail. I don't use AWS, but I imagine it has much better support.
Edit: I should clarify that I mean Amazon retail. I don't use AWS, but I imagine it has much better support.
Pivoting the angle on your perspective a bit:
"If a customer having a problem with our service isn't technical enough to backchannel us, they're not technical enough to be a viral thorn in our side."
To be clear, this is a process defect, and no company should aspire to build this into their processes as a feature. It's a net negative for absolutely everyone except perhaps you, me, and in the short term, the company. I'd argue it's a long term negative for you and me too as we hawk a service to others based on our current experiences, keeping the product from improving for everyone, including ourselves.
A good example of this is apple card support. You just text the support line. It's great because I don't need to wait on the phone. If someone doesn't have the info I need they can pass it on without me needing to know about it. I can continue my day without making a chore out of something. This is the part I was trying to highlight (not the reduced access to support).
> This is how support is handled these days.
... with an implied all other things are dropped/neglected and you replied with
> I personally don't see this as entirely a negative.
I fully agree with your point that companies being available on social media, but your first comment can be read as supporting that other avenues are dropped and that's clearly a negative. The grandparent clearly replied to that reading of your comment.
If you want to know whether a famous Windows audio app works on Surface X (ARM), just ask them on Twitter because the web site sucks and mails aren't replied. If you have an issue with your groceries, just call them out on Twitter because in the store they don't care. For big tech, use HN. Fine.