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Ask HN: Why Is Anthropic's Customer Support Bad?

4 points by tj-teej 3 days ago | 9 comments

I've been a Max user of Claude all year and it's crucial to my day to day work. Last night I had a new experience which makes me feel like a junior dev who blew thousands of dollars on a misconfigured AWS CDK file.

To avoid agents doing online research from leaking private info I created a persona which can do online research as a subagent from a fresh context, I asked it to fact check claims as well. Little did I know subagents don't report their token usage and my subagents ended up recursively checking claims. I burned through 80% of my Fable usage for the week in 10 minutes.

I've never come close to using my full token allowance before and now I'm going to have to spend money on expensive usage tokens or upgrade to 20x (or change to a different provider) to complete this weeks work.

Anthropic's online support agent was terse, "empathizing" but ultimately said it could not do anything.

Wouldn't the right thing from a Customer Support perspective to give a one-time usage reset in a case like this? If they had a human instead of an agent doing it, would that have changed the outcome?

I've implemented bounding now in my persona's but it just seems like this is a preventable problem that they're (1) not solving and (2) not willing to remedy when it did happen.

Full disclosure, I love what Anthropic has built in Claude and use the product daily.

[–] lukan 9 hours ago

It is not just subagents. Antrophic just tightened the limits again heavily it seems. I just used 43 percent of my fable use in 2 sessions starting fresh today. Before their IPO I never hit any limits.

Am not happy and rather investigate now the alternatives than upgrading again.

[–] coffinbirth 1 day ago

That's sad. Seems like you're totally dependent on that malign AI service in order to do you job. Your last sentence is the cherry on the cake: 'Full disclosure, I love being enslaved and I love being clapped daily.'.

[–] ben_w 3 days ago

> Wouldn't the right thing from a Customer Support perspective to give a one-time usage reset in a case like this? If they had a human instead of an agent doing it, would that have changed the outcome?

I spent something like a year and a half arguing with E.ON's very human customer support agents about how it's not OK for them to send bills to a street address which does not exist, especially after they had agreed that it was not OK and to stop doing it half way through this time, but had carried on using the non-existent street anyway.

E.ON are the third highest ranked energy company in the UK for customer service: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/energy/energy-sup...

This is to say: customer service is never easy to get right, very easy to get wrong.

[–] saidnooneever 20 hours ago

i would seriously consider changing your sentiment towards Anthropic..rather than being stolen from and then still giving it love.

customer support doesnt need to have empathy towards you. they just need to check if a big condition was met..it was not as per your own words. it was lack of understanding, which is how they happen to make their money..

[–] spottedmarley 3 days ago

Some lessons in life are expensive. Now you know and you won't let it happen again and you will make fewer presumptions moving forward. Overall, a win in the experience category.

PS. Im also an everyday user of Claude on the Max plan and I too love it.

[–] atleastoptimal 2 days ago

Because their subscription customers lose money. Their enterprise customers make them money, so they focus their energy on them.

[–] armchairhacker 3 days ago

If it's really important, you can pay for a second account.

[–] gokuljs 1 day ago

They don't give a fuck about you. They have bigger customers to worry about. You are just paying them to improve their training dataset so that you can get kicked out of your own job :).

[–] verdverm 3 days ago

because demand is way above what they can handle, thus they can afford any churn from lack of support or sales contact