I agree many companies could do a better job of being accessible. Providing good customer service is challenging, especially at large scale. I am reminded of when Postmates first launched, and they provided a customer service phone number for assistance with orders. Eventually that number was replaced with a message saying "phone support is temporarily unavailable while we migrate to a new system" and asked you to send an email instead. Temporary must have become permanent, because it's impossible to reach someone if you have a problem now. (Part of me wonders whether their claim about it being temporary was even true at the time, or was a deliberate falsehood intended to placate customers until they'd had a chance to try the new email-only solution.)
Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media.
We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:
A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online.
Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.
> We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r....
That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that).
What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios.
1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event.
2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up.
It seems like you are responding as if I'm holding up those situations as examples of how people ought to behave -- as if I'm for or against what happened in them. I'm not. My purpose in pointing out those examples is solely to demonstrate by example that there are multiple sides to a story.
If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.
Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media.
We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...
A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online.
Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.