Jonathan

The Internet Routes Around Bad Customer-Service.

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I wanted some technical information from my ISP, couldn’t find the info on the ISP’s poorly organized web site, telephoned, waited. . . The recorded voice kept telling me that I could find whatever I wanted on the web site, the help-desk guy didn’t know the answer, the customer-service email address didn’t work, and so on.

Meanwhile I decided to google my question and in 10 seconds had a link to a page, on the ISP’s website, that contained exactly the information I wanted.

Nowadays I usually google first. A programmer I know told me that since about 1999 he has used Google, instead of Microsoft’s bundled help software or online Knowledge Base, to get explanations of Microsoft error messages. Google is often the fastest way to get such information. And the Google method can return higher-quality results than you would get from official documentation. It turns out–surprise!–that users sometimes know more about products than do manufacturers. (For example, my recent search for a way to get PGP to run on my computer turned up an individual’s PGP info page that is much more informative about installation issues than is the manufacturer’s documentation and quickly solved my problem.)

It’s easy to carp about software companies that provide inadequate support for their products, but the Internet is making this a nonproblem. Google is, among other things, a distributed online help system that lowers costs for software producers and users alike. Many software and other product manufacturers now provide online forums to help customers resolve support issues. The manufacturers should go one step further and encourage use of Google. More service providers, including my ISP, should realize that customers value quick answers, that the conventional ways of delivering those answers (proprietary web sites and search engines, help desks) often fail, and that encouraging customers to go outside the proprietary system can be good for business.

Deficits Bad?

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Johnathan Pearce cites Andrew Sullivan’s critical observations about increased federal spending under George W. Bush. Sullivan makes a good point. However, Pearce goes Sullivan one better and decries federal deficits, which are not quite the same issue.

Deficits are actually an important constraint on federal spending. In the ideal world we would have a small and balanced federal budget, but our more likely alternatives are a large federal budget with a deficit or a large federal budget with a surplus. A surplus functions much like a silent tax increase whose proceeds will be spent by Congress (as happened in the 1990s), whereas a deficit leads mainly to additional federal borrowing — which is less destructive to productivity and incentives than are tax increases and may itself create pressure for reduced spending. Surpluses allow legislators to increase spending without incurring the political costs associated with explicit tax increases, while deficits create political pressure to spend less. The question of whether to balance the budget is not trivial, but the main goal should be to reduce the overall level of government spending. Ironically, deficits, because of their negative political consequences, may advance this goal most effectively.

Politicians tend to like surpluses and dislike deficits. That should tell us something.