The fuck off contact page

"You will get less leads with the 'enterprise style' contact page. You don't have enough leads right now. You don't have low value self-serve users you want to turn away. Your BDR team is not overflowing with leads you need to turn away. You can make money from having more leads. Less leads will generate less revenue. Here are some potential metrics from the two styles of contact pages. Here is how these metrics tie into revenue."

I think an honest message like this, at least communicated via email to the budget owners would abscond... or at least absolve one of any guilt.

Also, thank you for having the option to toggle the font. I wrote a css rule, but found it later.

I think the last point combined with some real data or case studies would prompt introspection.

Anecdotally I stick to companies with good customer support like glue, even if their product is inferior. It's an absolute wonder to be taken seriously by a company, to have feedback integrated into future products, or just have small issues taken care of without hassle.

Scolding your clients like theyre kids will definitely sour the relationship

You're going to laugh, but this is why I stick with AWS. They've twice helped me with billing issues on my personal account - as in an actual human helping me. They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments at my day job. They just demonstrate great customer service to me as a small client.

So they have me as a loyal customer. And advocate, it seems.

You have to judge it client by client though. Some are amenable to and grateful for a flatly stated analysis and recommendation, even if it goes against their ideas. Some will feel belittled and undermined. You need both sorts to pay their invoices and refer their peers, so you pick your battles.

AWS support is extremely good. I have had the same experience in personal projects and in turn have quadrupled down on our leverage of their support at my work.

Where’s the font option? I hate playing games to make a site readable.

> Some will feel belittled and undermined.

This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!

The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff. They're used to browsing the web, so they think they know what a good website is. They know how to write a letter in MS Word, so they think they can write good web copy. Etc.

Bottom-right.

(Very few sites have this feature, so the one in question gets big bonus points from me)

Thanks. Turns out reader mode works fine too. I thought it wouldn’t but I was mistaken.

A lot of it is internal politics. As a consultant, you see the tip of the iceberg. There may be rational reasons for seemingly irrational decisions that you're not privy to. Your contact's boss wants it done some particular way, so your contact insists on doing it that way. Or your contact has recommended doing it some way internally, and they don't want to be made to look a fool by an outside consultant. Etc.

Absolutely. I've communicated with product teams at AWS in my day job, which is pretty sweet as I've worked for some large organisations, but I've also been put in contact with product teams in my personal projects when I encountered bugs with the AWS SSO, for example.

It's annoying that they actually solve my problems because it would be so easy to hate them as the 900 lb gorilla.

There’s a site that collects stories about experiences like this. It used to be called Clients From Hell, but got absorbed into a bigger site, called Not Always Right[0]. I suspect some of the stories are apocryphal, but it can be entertaining.

[0] https://notalwaysright.com/

That’s the topic of this classic post (Beans and Noses, by Jared Spool): https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...

>They have no idea I manage large (not huge) AWS deployments

I wonder if that is true? Like, how tenacious are they with knowing customers? If the same IP address was used to login to manage two deployments would customer service see a potential link in their interface?

I'm never quite sure in our supposed data-driven economy how clever companies get with this stuff.

I don’t think the person you’re replying to is suggesting literally that exact message, but something like it. Adapt to your client and the type of relationship you have with them. You can transmit that same message with a different tone.

> This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!

Many people absolutely do. Hell, look at the number of people who refused to take a safe and effective vaccine during a pandemic!

> The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff.

I must also say there is definitely a reasonable point to challenge your doctor. While they're an expert, they're still human. As a software engineer, I expect my non-expert colleagues to challenge me, and I've come up with better ideas as a result.

As a real-life example, I'm currently trying to get treatment for my Morton's neuroma (foot-nerve issue). The orthopaedic consultant wants to do a neurectomy but I want to investigate alternatives before taking the leap. Why? The alternatives, while they may not work, won't make things appreciable worse, whereas a neurectomy has a 3-6 month recovery if it goes well and can't really be undone if it goes wrong.

First, if this is private vs corporate, they are probably using a separate laptop, likely with a VPN. Second, doing this kind of shadow profiling is a lot of work with potential legal consequences with little gain, at least for support teams. For fraud detection, that is a completely different thing.

So I think a simpler explanation is more plausible: they are selling AWS at such a premium that they can afford normal human customer service and still make a lot of buck.

Actually, the default font is much more pleasant than that used on this site (https://lenowo.org/index.php) which I complained about a few days ago - and that site doesn't have an option to make it more readable as far as I can see...

On the professional side, they also often let you interact with their experts and architects directly, as part of your support contract. With most other companies, you either have to go through front-office support exclusively, or pay extra for Professional Services.

As a very small (like, two digit spend a month) AWS user, I still have gotten a human to help me when I've needed one.

Amazon is amazing to be a customer of. Just not an employee of (not one, know many).

My toddler was playing with my Kindle the other day, and he bought a £600 (yes, six hundred) volume of books. I was unable to refund them automatically, and when looking for help I was confronted with a "fuck off" contact page. After finding the option to talk to a human, I was put through within 5 seconds, and the woman had the item refunded in about 1 minute.

Was pleasantly surprised.

Both are pretty bad.

> You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!

It happens more than you'd think, even in the HN comment section! Go to any thread where the topic is medical or diseases. Plenty of people distrust their doctor and advocate going to the doctor with your own crackpot theory you "researched" on WebMD. There's a huge anti-credential streak, even here. A lot of people see professional service providers of all kinds as "mere gatekeeping implementors of my own ideas" rather than experts in the field.

AWS is good but Amazon has had a fuck off page while Bezos was still there. It was one of the many tell tale signs that Amazon hit Day Two years ago.

Amazon seems to be going for a model where they keep support costs down by making it progressively harder over time to actually contact a person, but when you do manage to you get a good experience. It's an interesting idea, and I suspect that the pleasant surprise at the end makes up for a lot of the frustration getting there.

It will still come across as scolding and out of touch. It makes a lot of assumptions that a contractor will never have insight into. And because of that, no matter how soft the wording it will always come across as self aggrandizing

AWS specifically has a policy of having strong support regardless of how much money they're getting from you, be it $5/mo or $5,000/mo. They definitely have the resources and signals to connect the dots, but it doesn't necessarily effect whether you get support, unless that SigInt tells them you're abusing the system (Eg Scammer/Spammer/Bad Actor) in some way. More money certainly seems to get you better support, but even entry level users still get decent support, and any SigInt connecting of the dots that may or may not be happening doesn't seem to have an impact unless you're using the same billing/contact info or account. That said, I can't objectively say what their customer support reps actually see regarding that kind of info, but after 2 decades of working with clients big and small using or considering AWS, I can confirm their approach to support is genuinely quite good, especially for the "Cheaper" end of offerings compared to competitors.

Hell, they still treat me well despite being a very out-spoken critic socially, and professional have steered a lot of clients away from their ecosystem and thus am objectively responsible for very real losses in revenue; though ultimately still surely a rounding error to their bottom line.

For context, these days I primarily work in helping people deploy performant and/or secure storage systems and associated networks. "This is how much money you're wasting by using AWS/the cloud" is a common approach for us, and the most common counter-point is how good AWS support is (and they're not wrong).

TL;DR: I have lots to criticize about AWS, but their support isn't really one of them, it's genuinely good especially for small users. Also, for many people AWS is perfectly fine, I still use them off and on myself. I only allege it's a "waste of money" in specific situations, but that's also largely subjective of course depending on what's important to you/the client.

I realized recently that i somehow had been subscribed to prime disney+ for like 6 months.

It was _super_ annoying to figure out how to actually chat with a human, but once i did they gave me a refund for the full 6 months, simple as that.