Yahoo! Charging For Support
from the give-us-money,-give-us-money dept
As Yahoo gets greedier and greedier, it appears they'll look in just about every hidden corner for a way to make some extra money. Now, I understand that telephone support (especially for free services) is an expensive proposition. However, I always worry about any company that offers costly phone support to their customers. To me, it suggests they have extra incentive to not provide good service - as they'll make more money from phone calls. So, I'm not a big fan of Yahoo's decision to test $2/minute phone support for users of their email system. I would rather they offered no phone support than charging for it.
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fair's fair
Yahoo have invested $$$s in infrastructure and (so far) have been able to offer a lot of services to the world at large for nothing. But stop and think about it - nobody is investing that kind of money without expecting some kind of return.
Think about how much it'd cost you to set up your own email service, including servers, wiring, software, etc. Makes a $2 phone call for advice on how to use something else which is totally free look like pretty good value to me.
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greedier and greedier?
Or just more and more desparate to try and pay the bills?
Other comments are right. It's very hard to try and even pay the bills when someone's giving things away.
I'm not going to defend Yahoo, given the other stuff they've pulled recently, but it seems to be clue deficient marketers trying to keep going thatn anything else.
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Re: fair's fair
There is no penalty for a long call, which is nice. Even with the fee, what would be the average fee per user for all users? Maybe a fraction of a penny. If you are clueless, maybe you pay 20 dollars a year. Still pretty nice. So what is the beef?
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Re: fair's fair
However - making it a profit center sends the wrong incentive messages to Yahoo. They now have incentive to force more people to call so they make more money. If Yahoo charged exactly what the call cost to users, I wouldn't be so upset. Or even slightly below cost. This way, users still don't want to have long phone calls - and Yahoo still has the incentive to make their systems better.
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