One of the amazing things about Morrowind is that it's a combat-rich game in which you can feasibly go through much of the game without ever fighting; indeed, gaming up your Disposition with every NPC you meet is a key to a much easier and interesting experience.
A major vendor that I rely on has had three major incidents this week. If you were to expand the aperture slightly, they've had five in the past 30 days. This is a vendor that I've historically liked a lot and advocated for to people who ask me about it for a number of reasons, but most of all, their customer service, which has been historically excellent.
...Until recently, that is. It's hard to pinpoint the exact time when support crossed the threshold from "good" to "bad," but the memory that immediately comes to mind is being six emails into a thread with someone asking for an RCA on an incident and then getting hijacked by the AI chatbot they were rolling out, which promptly and cheerfully directed me to a bunch of unrelated documentation.
In Naughtiness, I wrote:
Customer goodwill is a real asset; it is one that will probably become more valuable over the next decade, as other software-shaped assets start to become devalued. It feels almost anodyne to say "it is in a company's best interest to do right by their customers", but our low churn and high unpaid growth in a space uniquely defined by lack of vendor lock-in is perhaps a sign that being nice is an undervalued strategy. And "being nice" in a meaningful sense is, like "being naughty", something that gets baked into an organization's culture very early and very deeply.
When thinking about this vendor — and the process, which now feels inevitable, of having to shop around for a replacement — I am reminded of this. Little grace notes and positive interactions build up a war chest of goodwill that can be drawn upon to offset bad days. Good will is finite and must be constantly replenished; it will save you from the blowback of one or two things but not, say, five.
People talk about AI-enhanced support largely through the lens of efficiency: support is a cost center, here is a way to reduce those costs. Setting aside the obvious flaws (I have thoughts for another essay on that!), I reject the underlying frame because customer support is a profit center. Trying to outsource the function (whether to an AI or whomever) is not dissimilar to trying to outsource pricing or positioning: if you're comfortable giving up one of the key ways you interact with users and deliver differentiated value, you better have a really good reason.
