I'm sure the telcos have statistics to validate this system, but it seems to completely oppose my own personal experiences.
I have never phoned customer support to:
- View my account details (available online)
- Find out about new plans and promos (available online)
- Pay my bill (available online)
- etc (available online)
I have only phoned customer support to:
- Negotiate a better rate (requires a human)
- Argue about excess charges on my bill (requires a human)
- Get put on a off-market plan (ie loyalty, retention, etc -- requires a human)
I guess if there really are that many people phoning support with trivial questions, a voice assistant will free up the phone line for people who actually need a human. I suspect it won't, as they'll reduce the number of support employees accordingly.
As someone who in a past life worked at a telco..... its insane how common those are. A HUGE part of my job was getting people to use the dang website!
They work REALLY REALLY hard to get people to use the website.
It's mostly older generations, they refuse to use a website for many of those basic things. A lot of it is an issue of trust, they just don't trust websites.
> It's mostly older generations, they refuse to use a website for many of those basic things. A lot of it is an issue of trust, they just don't trust websites.
I don't trust websites. Websites from regulated industries (banking, finance, telecom) are especially slow, confusing and poorly built. Totally understand why people avoid them when they know a better alternative.
The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming you.
When they have to pay $0.62/message, it cuts down on the crap.
I’m a member of a profession where you’re supposed to read all of their comms. Now that they’ve switched to email, they send way more crap that I have to sift through and I can’t block them.
Thank you for unsubscribing from promotional notifications! However, next week we will be rolling out sales notifications, which are completely different and you are opted into them by default.
Or do it like PayPal: 'PayPal news and your transactions' - 'to view your transactions, please log in on the site. Additionally, here's a bunch of commercial spam.'
Microsoft has a couple of newsletters that you can’t unsubscribe from unless you cancel the thing they are related to. For example, Windows 10 insiders, dec essentials, and I think some Azure thing. It’s really annoying.
Not going to lie, as a tech savy software engineer I often just phone telco's.
Most of the time I'm calling because my internet is down and I can't go to the website. Or I'm calling because I forgot my password for a website used once every N years.
90% of the time I'm calling, I wouldn't expect the website to have the information I need. Looking at Comcast's website I'm not inclined to look around and find out.
I design, implement and support contact centers for a living (think Avaya, Cisco, etc..). For the past five years, we've been preparing ourselves through education and training for this omnichannel take over of voice. While other channels have taken some of the voice pie, it's not nearly as significant as those of us in this field thought it would. I've created chat bots, IVRs and everything in between for automation, and people absolutely hate it and simply want to talk to a human. Most customers push going to the website, but the problem is that a lot of people don't know how to navigate properly. To help this, a lot of customers implement co-browse into their chat solution, but that's only helped a little. We too are using Google's Dialogflow and I'll be looking to deploy my first one in a couple months - very promising compared to other solutions out there like Amazon Connects Lex Bot. Regardless, leaders and technology evangelists in this field still preach that by 2025, the overall percentage of the pie for voice will end up being about 15%. But they emphasize that those humans who make up the 15% will be the most important in the customer service/support space.
I've worked for companies with large call centers, and anecdotally I don't have a single doubt about it. To close this gap computers need to be easier to use... these people aren't even at a skill level where they can reach the web.
Yeah. Computers have a pretty high skill floor and if you aren't using them enough to stay above that level, you will stop using them entirely and your skills will degrade to zero.
Most non-tech companies' websites are absolutely awful. Either the login/authentication system is half-assed and you can't access your own account, or the documentation is not easy to find and there is no good search feature, or the website itself directs you to chat/phone once you finally find what you were looking for.
I work for a government that develops a consumer facing system.
The UI starts in a Word document. Then the comms people toss colours and words into it to the point that I as a developer don’t know what parts of the system do.
Never once have norms of the web been considered in the design.
Saying to your boss that the VP of something is incompetent and made a crappy site will get you fired. Saying there's this new Tech at google coded by god himself will get you a new cost-center and a promotion.
For the company, it will turn out as nice as it turned out to all those places renting mainframe contracts well into the 2000s.
> Regardless, leaders and technology evangelists in this field still preach that by 2025, the overall percentage of the pie for voice will end up being about 15%.
It's common in Europe (maybe an EU harmonised regulation?) to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site.
The one time I've talked to a human to cancel a service, it was Three and it was a pleasant surprise because although their retentions team did end up keeping me I got a huge discount over not only what I was paying before, but compared to the competitor I was leaving them for. I have no idea how it's even profitable to give me service at the current price, maybe it isn't and just drives somebody's retention-based bonus?
> to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site.
This is unfortunately not a freedom we enjoy in the US. I recently changed my car insurance provider to a much cheaper one bundled with my home insurance. I called to cancel the old one and talked to the rep for like an hour. He didn't even really try to save my account, made a few half-ass efforts but mostly just chatted. It was early in the pandemic lock down and I didn't have anything else to do anyway so I just talked to the guy for a while. A month later I notice another charge from them. Turns out he just ... didn't cancel it. I think he kept me on the phone so long for plausible deniability if his call got audited, and then just marked me down as a retained customer. When I called to cancel the second time they did actually cancel and refund me back to the original cancel date, fortunately. This was Progressive.
Short circuit to most contact center retention flowcharts:
"I'm moving overseas for an extended period of time." (Implication: to somewhere you don't offer service)
"Where are you moving?"
"I can't really say."
Turns out, most service providers have an exclusion to their retention metrics, where "customer moving to location we don't offer service" is one of the few reasons to just process their cancellation request.
Try loading a modern web form over 3g. Try loading a modern web form on an Android <6.x device. Try loading a web form on a feature phone. Try loading a modern web form in BFE over a landline. For any transaction where you don't need a human and it's painful to use the internet walking through phone menus is a pretty good alternative. They only make it painful to speak to a human. For routine transactions they're basically like using a slow CLI where they give you the help without you asking.
Of course a HN reader is comfortable online. Everyone commenting here is comfortable online (a very clear selection bias)
There are a lot of people in this world (especially older people) who are used to doing everything over the phone, and don't know how to use the internet and don't want to learn.
You are never going to encounter those people on an online forum, but they exist.
Like my 70-year-old dad. My late mom was a fairly competent PC user and liked her iPhone for texting and photos, but my dad never got comfortable. He doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, and cut the cord once he realized that DirecTV supplied sports, old movies and The Weather Channel for way less. If only I could convince him to ditch his $50/mo AT&T contract and let me buy him his preferred form of unlocked dumbphone...
I’m worried for him as the presumption of an internet connection and some basic ability to use a website increases, especially for government services.
One example I saw several years ago: The state of Texas switched to a centralized process of issuing birth certificate copies for things like passport applications. For people like us, it’s super convenient - answer some questions, pay $30 with a credit card, paper in hand in two weeks. For him, it was going to be: get librarian to print this form, mail in with copy of driver’s license along with $80 check, wait about 8 weeks.
Needless to say, I ordered for him, explaining what information I was giving each step of the way.
Most of us HN'ers make use of websites to obtain information. There are lot of folks who still find it easier to make call instead of having to deal with the website UX.
I was trying to reach USPS about a subtle forwarding issue that takes someone knowledgeable to clear up and the system kept nagging me about online services and long spiels about the covid. Took a lot of menus and "are you really really really sure you want to talk to someone on the phone, for real?? (you horrible person you)" verifications to finally get to scheduling a call-back.
If you want a person, say the magic words, “I want to terminate the contract”. They’ll more often than not send you to a customer retention representative who has agency within the system.
If you're somehow locked out of your account you usually have to call to do all of those things. There's also still people who don't use the internet much, if at all.
I have some experience in this area and the volume of these kinds of calls in a typical call center is substantial. Especially if your customer demographic is older.
The problems plaguing customer support today are not technical in nature and AI will not fix them.
> You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot
This has always been something I've never understood about customer support. In particular, chat support is bad about this, but I've had it happen on phone support too. Prior to getting connected to the human, the bot wants to take down a short description of your problem. That's fine, but the conversation often goes like this:
> Bot: Please write a short description of your problem.
> Me: Problem I am having.
> Bot: One moment while I connect you.
> (a small eternity later)
> Support: Hi. How can I help you?"
> Ctrl+C problem, Ctrl+V problem*
> Support: I see you are <verbatim repeats problem; with no paraphrasing and no demonstration of understanding, I have no idea if the agent "gets it">. Is that correct?
> Me: :shrug:^W Yes.
… like, why did I ever type that description? Here, a computer (I don't even know if it qualifies as "AI" given how rudimentary of a task it is performing) appears to have failed at the simplest of tasks. And this happens all. the. time.
Phone bots will often "authenticate" me with various credentials, and then connect me to a human who will immediately authenticate me with the same credentials. Whose time was saved?
Chat agents are A) handling many cases simultaneously and B) graded on their response times. Kicking the ball into your court no matter how trivial improves their scores.
If they are ESL they may be trying to match what you wrote to their internal knowledge system and asking you to confirm.
The nurse enters the room, asks me why I'm there and types the answers into EMR. She leaves...
The doctor walks in and says "so, what brings you in today?"
It's either a huge redundancy or a useful way of sending off your message to join millions of others, with the goal of training the system to improve and speed up the automated service.
In the first use case, the original problem statement is probably used for routing and either the system is too poor to actually display that to the reps or they are chatting with many people and have SLAs on first contact/answer times so fire off a quick text question that they have saved.
This kind of thing is why I remain deeply skeptical about any kind of "automation is eating the world" type story.
The techno optimists (execs running these companies) often end up adding workloads because they screw up the human based systems that are already in place.
Except these automated systems never have the power to actually resolve problems. If they did, then someone would exploit them for gain.
I had a problem last year with a major credit card processing bank, where they decided I needed a new card/number, but apparently were unable to actually ship said card to me for an extended period of time. During which, I was locked out of the online/automated phone/etc system because I didn't know the new card/account number (and couldn't activate it). They literally wouldn't take my money, and it took mashing the '0' button in the automated system, which kept requesting my account number, for about 20 minutes before it decided I was allowed to speak to a human. That human located literally on the other side of the planet from me, also didn't know what to do about it, and it took being escalated through three levels of customer support before I got to someone who mysteriously had the power to ship me a new card within a day or two so I could pay my bill, activate the new card before traveling overseas/etc a week later. Thats hardly the first time I've had a problem with some bank/etc making some sweeping/automated change and not thinking through all the problems it will cause to various "odd ball" customers.
Anway, automated customer support is a joke unless your just calling to check your balance or some other activity you should be able to pull off with the web page/etc. At the end of the day, you need people who can understand the system, and solve the problems created by unthinking middle managers making broad decisions.
Companies that are known to have good customer support are the ones that have given their first line support people the ability to make financial decisions that could hurt the company if misused. You simply can't (yet) do that with an automated system.
I recommend Chase or Amex, I have had good success getting through and speaking with them about various issues. I'm not sure about not having the card number.
One thing you can try is the 'lost or stolen card' number rather than the general request line. They will get you taken care of most usually. Also, it's likely they already mailed your new card, so your card was indeed lost, only by them. I think this happened to me once.
Google is very clever! They write AI software to play both sides of the customer-service interaction. The company side is this Verizon story of parsing human voices. The customer side is this story: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-...
I would hope the Google Cloud speech recognition (used by Verizon) of the fake voice from Google Assistant (used by the phone customer) would have a 100% accuracy rate.
I noticed these systems typically immediately take you to a human if you start screaming swear words and overall sound enraged.
Try it next time! "____! Give me a _______ human you ____! ____!!" This is often followed by a prompt click of the line transferring and sure enough you're in the queue for a real person.
Of course, remember to do the opposite with the person. Be polite and respectful with the person on the other end of the line. And I've found, they often can really help you!
Just be aware that your calls are most likely recorded. Some companies even have voice analytics systems in place, which will go through all recording and do a sentiment analysis. This is used for quality and monitoring purposes. But you can always do a GDPR request to get your recordings deleted.
I had to return rental equipment after canceling FIOS service last month.
A few weeks ago I started getting automated calls from “Alex at Verizon” (obviously a computer) reading a script reminding me that the equipment needs to be returned. The only problem? Sometimes it would call 5 times a day, leaving a new VM every time.
I think it should be illegal to claim to be human, and generally these messages should always be delivered by text message with an option to reply STOP.
On the plus side, I brought the equipment to a UPS store where they scanned the barcode stickers directly into their system, handed me a receipt and an hour later Verizon had emailed confirmation of receipt. I didn’t even need to pack them.
It sounds like annoying you with five voicemails a day is what it took to get you to do the return so if you’re complaining about their strategy I doubt they care :p
Rather than effort into phone bits, can we just put effort into letting you do everything from their website?
A well designed service doesn't let phone agents do anything the customer couldn't do themselves. It is literally called customer support, because they help you do the things you want to do, rather than doing it for you.
I used to be with a Canadian MVNO who offer zero phone support agents (Public Mobile). Everything is done online.
As such, their online portal offers actions typically requiring a phone call, such as phone number porting, SIM unlocking, choosing a new number/region, and cancelling your account.
Aside: I once accidentally ported the wrong number over since autofill screwed up the input box (444 from my personal 444-4444 line and 5555 from my work line 555-5555). Within 5 minutes I my phone would ring 444-5555. I feel bad for the owner of that number, because it was assigned to me without any authentication whatsoever. Really put the 2FA attacks into perspective.
Exactly! One time I had an issue with my iCloud account, and after two long, frustrating calls with extremely undertrained support members, someone finally fixed my issue by simply clicking a “Repair Account” button on some internal support dashboard. Why on earth isn’t that button available to users?
Their goal is not to support you nor to help you solve problems. Their goal is to extract a larger share of wallet. They’re automating the parts that will not impact their ability to upsell, the rest of it will go to humans who use all sorts of psychological tricks to manipulate you into paying more.
The profit motive of corporations is directly in conflict with the duty to social good. As we proceed into an automated future, our labor protections are pricing humans out of the market. A great deal of unnecessary evil and pain worldwide results from this conflict.
At the scale of corporations such as Verizon, even a cost efficiency of one cent per transaction can translate into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on the bottom line. Simple state machines with rigorously defined transitions are very efficient. Creatively handling exceptions and undefined states is a capability of human employees, and it's often very inefficient to do so. A million automated transactions could occur for every one bespoke transaction requiring ingenious human attention. Ideally, corporations would prefer not to hire people at all, but where does that leave us as a society?
> As we proceed into an automated future, our labor protections are pricing humans out of the market
Not just that, but the skill and knowledge requirements to compete with automation will continue to grow and less and less people will be able to meet that demand. Many people argue that many thought this would be the case with many technical revolutions before, but fail to admit that it's converging on a singularity. Sure jobs we didn't know would exist are being created where people can shift their work to, but the cycle for automation is becoming shorter and cheaper and sooner or later we as humans won't be able to keep up (unless you meet the high demands which are unreasonable to expect everyone to adapt to).
What kind of democratic solution do you see us humans make in the first three decades of this problem (when it really starts to hurt a lot of people)?
And what kind of realistic solution would be better?
I ask because I don't see many good solutions in my life time that will solve any of this. As you can guess I'm skeptical of UBI where people can live comfortably in the first decades due to culture and I'm from northern Europe.
The thing is telephone customer support is you are already starting with an extremely low bar. Calling Verizon support before was always horrible. So even if the support stays on par with being bad but using NLP and GA it's a win for Google and a win for Verizon but the customer still has a bad experience.
I could see regulations go the other way: tech companies will be forced to hire quotas of customer service reps to offset the jobs they keep trying to displace. More specifically, above certain thresholds of revenue and customers for a digital service, you need X number of customer service employees.
This would be a great benefit to most since it creates jobs and gives us real humans to speak with. Of course, it would increase prices of things, but depending by how much (I'm sure there's a sweet spot), it may be worth it for the better customer service.
I've worked in call center automation for a while. Clients (big old company) would complain that people would use the phone line instead of the website. The thing is, the authentication on the website was atrocious while you would be very easily trusted on a phone call. It was in part due to regulations. Because we were building an automated system to handle the calls, it had to use the same user unfriendly authentication as the website. So I'm really not sure that this went anywhere. "Now please type your client number, it's written on a letter we sent you 3 years ago"
I’ve found Verizon’s people to be useful/helpful in the past. If this puts them out of work, I’ll be somewhat sad. It won’t lower my bill any, that’s seems certain.
My Comcast experience probably wouldn’t be hurt by replacing them with even a slightly malevolent AI.
I've worked for large and small companies, and I've never understood the outsourcing/robot-ting of your phone customer care people. First and sometimes last line of defense in gaining or keeping a customer.
Best Buy was probably the most egregious example of this.
Yeah, of course you're going to have a majority bucket of calls. The issue is when it goes above and beyond that. There isn't critical thinking.
- This customer called 3 times in the past two days and we told them to reboot their router. Maybe it's something else. (I've had personal experience with this and it took over a month to get someone to replace my line from the pole to the house).
- In the case of retail, it is much more complex (returns, repairs, warranty, pricing, etc).
It turns from an "OK" experience to a very bad one pretty quick when the script doesn't solve it.
The simple answer could be to charge a fee for support calls. Either a flat fee per minute, or a fee applied to the account that gets refunded if it ends up being an issue on their side that can't be self-solved.
They would reach a "sweet spot" where the fee would still be affordable but dissuasive enough to cut down on the amount of stupid calls, and would actually allow them to hire less, but more skilled support advisors.
In the mid-90s, I probably spent > 50 hours on my ISP’s support. Would call most days after school.
Turned out to be a UART issue: the 8250 would error on 9/10 packets and we needed to get a 16550 serial card. Took a very long time to get someone to determine that.
They probably lost money for a couple years on our account.
I don't talk to computers other than to demand a human. I doubt very much I ever will. It's why stuff like Alexa and Siri is doomed to fail. People don't want to communicate that way.
On the other hand, Amazon's chatbot for order issues is actually one of the best customer support experiences I've had.
Me: "I need to get a refund"
Bot: "Which order do you need refunded?"
Me: select order
Bot: "What's your reason for requesting a refund?"
Me: "Item did not arrive"
Bot: "Alright, I've credited your payment method x#### used on this order."
Fastest refund I've ever gotten-- the product never arrived at the door and usually a refund like that requires an escalation to prevent fraud; I'm assuming this system uses some sort of risk analysis score to determine if it can refund without a return.
You know that it's even faster through their return portal, right? I've had literally zero positive experiences with chatbots. There's a reason why they're not taking off.
I remember a Canadian ISP that asked me to call back at a certain number. It turned out to be the direct number to the call centre where they would immediately answer.
Amusingly, if you get through to a human, or demand to speak to a person, the staffer will probably just tell you what the AI wanted to say anyway: the software will, behind the scenes, provide prompts to the call-center workers.
I find that a couple of choice swear words get me transferred to a human very quickly.
typically, a human answers the call and is rather tentative (I'm guessing my call gets flagged due to the swearing?), and after my cheerful response back to them it becomes a pleasant interaction.
chat bots, automated phone systems etc have been an utter failure thus far. verizon and att have the most convoluted pricing models. telcos should be nationalized like the airline industry.
the question become's who's in charge of developing the Dialogflow for this use case. If it's Verizon, I'd certainly expect it to make the human less useful.
I have never phoned customer support to:
- View my account details (available online)
- Find out about new plans and promos (available online)
- Pay my bill (available online)
- etc (available online)
I have only phoned customer support to:
- Negotiate a better rate (requires a human)
- Argue about excess charges on my bill (requires a human)
- Get put on a off-market plan (ie loyalty, retention, etc -- requires a human)
I guess if there really are that many people phoning support with trivial questions, a voice assistant will free up the phone line for people who actually need a human. I suspect it won't, as they'll reduce the number of support employees accordingly.