"There's an app for that!"

Once upon a time, if you called a company because you had a problem with an order, you were transferred to a customer service representative who resolved the problem. But more and more often these days, it seems that you are given an app which lets you resolve the problem yourself. Often, these apps are advertised as a way to bypass the company's bureaucracy, and therefore as a customer benefit. One hears of travelers whose flights have been canceled, and who use the apps to rebook new flights while everyone else is still standing in line at the complaints desk.

So I want to ask: Do these apps represent an advance in product Quality?

They are certainly sold that way. But I think the final answer is, No. No they don't.

Even on its own terms, there is something ambiguous about the benefit provided by an app. On the one hand, yes it is absolutely true that a company's app lets you do things for yourself rather than requiring you to persuade someone else to do them for you. But notice that this power costs you something. Before you can "do for yourself," you have to know what to do, and you have to understand how to do it in the app. 

Solving your own problems

When you talk to a human customer service agent, all you have to understand is your own problem. Then the service agent translates your problem into terms that the company's system understands, and offers you a couple of choices. If you don't understand what those choices are going to mean for you personally, the agent explains. Finally you pick the option that looks least bad, the agent types your choice into the system, and you can go on about your business.

With an app, there is no one to translate and no one to explain. You have to understand not only what you want, but what the company is offering; and you have to be able to shift back and forth easily between the two perspectives. I think this is why apps are so frequently described in terms of air travel. We all know that there are a few people in the world who travel a lot—far more than the rest of us. These people understand the ins and outs of the system, and are ready to benefit by their familiarity; but the whole task is made easier for them because there are so few options on offer. If you find yourself unexpectedly stranded at the Samarkand International Airport, or at the North Pole, pretty much your only option is to rebook on a different flight. Wherever you were originally trying to go, you're not going to change your mind suddenly and decide to stay for a few months in Samarkand [it might be a nice place, but you likely don't have the right visa] or at the North Pole [because it is very cold]. So it is comparatively easy to switch from thinking like a customer to thinking like an airline.

The second job you have to master is to understand how the app itself works. Some are easier, and some are more difficult. Again, with a human agent, you don't have to take on this task. The human agent works with the same system all day, every day, and knows exactly what to do. Confronted with a brand-new app, you don't have that advantage.   

Why do we have apps?

But there is another side to this question. Why do we have customer service apps in the first place? Why are companies investing in them?

It's not because they are trying to be nice.

The motivation, surely, is that customer service apps cost companies less than customer service departments. Whizzbang Corporation can release an app, lay off the corresponding department, and be money ahead.

From the customer's perspective, for the reasons I sketch out above, replacing a human agent with an app often results in reduced levels of service. In this respect, the advent of customer service apps is just one more aspect of the slow tide of product enshittification that I described a few months ago. But in this one case, the introduction of a customer service app is a form of product degradation that can be sold as customer empowerment! There aren't many of those, so it is no surprise that companies are jumping on the bandwagon of this particular one.

What's behind it?

Why do we see such a trend towards product enshittification? Opinions differ. Cory Doctorow, who invented the word, blames it on rent-seeking by the providers of new online platforms. Other people have taken the concept and run with it. I browsed the Internet for references before writing this post, and found an article by someone who insists that global elites are consciously trying to destroy the world. (Maybe I read the piece too quickly and missed a little nuance somewhere, but consider yourself warned.)

For myself, I'd actually rather extend a little charity to the companies caught up in this cycle, even as I deplore the deliberate degradation of their products. John Michael Greer has argued that we are entering a period of prolonged economic contraction; and he has added more recently that enshittification (which he calls "crapification") is one of the normal strategies by which companies caught in an economic contraction try to keep their heads above water. Their costs are going up, and their revenues (measured in real dollars) are going down. Either they go out of business, or they have to cut the budget somewhere. So hamburgers get smaller, houses get flimsier, appliances break in five years instead of fifty, and customer service departments are replaced by apps. It's sad, but it's a much bigger problem than the avarice of a handful of tech executives. 

At the same time, even if the companies had no other choice, rolling out these apps isn't really Quality.