I always wondered why tech companies had such an impenetrable inward communication until I came across the following insight:
"If you have a billion users, and 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.
If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up. Amazing."[0]
It's not necessarily the exact same source that I discovered back then but the idea is the same. Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
"If you have a billion users, and 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you'd spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.
If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you'd need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up. Amazing."[0]
It's not necessarily the exact same source that I discovered back then but the idea is the same. Even a tiny portion of customer service would still soak up a large amount of money, perhaps rightfully so, but at the scale some of these companies are, it quickly becomes unsustainable.
[0]: https://plus.google.com/+DeWittClinton/posts/1hRWj489oEz