I’ve been doing some computer consulting work recently. Yesterday, I called a major computer company to track down some software my client had ordered, but which hadn’t arrived.

I hadn’t had much contact with this computer company in a couple of years. I was surprised how shoddy their customer service had become. This company, which I won’t name but it rhymes with the last syllable of “Phone Tree Hell”, used to have good customer service.

Their automated systems were no help for my problem; I needed to talk to a human being. But I couldn’t find the right one. They transferred me three times (once to some off-shore customer-support know-nothing script-reader), put me on hold about a dozen times, once so long I hung up and called up and started over again, after which they ended up accidentally (I presume) hanging up on me twice, all without answering my simple question. It took another 45 minutes on the phone this morning to arrange to get the missing software shipped.

Now I should be angry about this, but this seems all-too-common; often, the larger a company gets, the worse its customer service becomes. I wondered why. Maybe, at some point in the success cycle, good customer service becomes too expensive, and you’re better off letting the exceptions drown.

Then I thought about blogs. The more popular a blog gets, the less likely it is to accept comments. Comments are like customer service, in a way. At a certain traffic level, too many spammers, trolls and name-callers make the costs start to outweigh the benefits.

People complain today that baseball players aren’t as accessible as they used to be. It’s the same problem.

I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused. There’s a natural ecosystem at work here. As organizations grow, the limits of human nature, such as the “Rule of 150“, dictate that these organizations must become more mechanistic and impersonal. That creates opportunites in the ecosystem for smaller organizations to fill in, to provide the kind of personal touch the larger organizations cannot.

I’ve been to hundreds of major league games, and I’ve never had a conversation with a player during a game. But I went to one minor league game, sat in the first row by a bullpen, and Jamey Wright was kind enough to spend some time chatting with my kids.

There was less than a dozen people sitting near that bullpen. If there had been more than 150, Wright would likely have ignored us. We would have been just one of many indistinguishable voices chirping in a large, crowded phone tree.