Preface
One of the main issues with dealing with large companies is that the method for grievance addressal is gruesome. Once a company grows large, there can be a lot of automation which can cause issue to the users of the company. Lets find out what are the mitigation techniques that can be implemented.
Many companies that have large number of users where the users don’t pay a penny to use their service depends mainly on ad revenue and selling data to provide the services. These companies might not care about the issues that are affecting a 10% of the users across various things.
Issues
One prominent example of this is YouTube. YouTube routinely blocks accounts of small creators. These creators then have to find out how to get this fixed by going through 100s of forums. Still many won’t get fixed. They won’t even give a reason why that has happened. There are many instances of this. Like Gmail account getting blocked and making the play store, docs, photos getting inaccessible. If the account gets blocked, even the takeout option doesn’t work.
Mitigations
Due to the cost involved in supporting the millions of the users the large companies will just ignore these things. So we need the regulations to step in to fix these problems.
One of the things I want to see in this would be: If the company/product crosses a certain number of users then there should be a physical location for grievance addressal
- 10,000 users = Valid reason + A direct line and no Automated voice. Max waiting time 10 minutes
- 100,000 users = Physical location in all major cities in a country
- 1,000,000 users = One on all states of the country
- 10,000,000 users = Multiple location on all states
- 100,000,000 = One on all districts
- 1,000,000,000+ = Multiple on all districts (24×7 working)
There are some points that we have to note here.
- Multiple companies should not be able to collude and create single location in an area for all the companies.
- There should be enough staff at all the time
- All issues should be solved in 5 days.
- Account blockings etc should be given valid reasons
I will update the list when the new things comes into my mind. You can checkout the wiki article where these things can be useful. https://wiki.mntl.in/index.php/Grievance_addressal