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Ask HN: If I enter account or order in a phone tree, why am I asked again?
99 points by adamsmark on Sept 3, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 61 comments
Target prompted me to enter my order information when I used its phone tree to call about a return. When I connected with an operator, they prompted me for the order number again.

This has happened with several providers e.g Banks, other E-commerce sites.

What's going on? Why even prompt me for this information if the operator needs me to repeat the information? Its aggravating and sets the wrong tone for my support call.

Anyone have insight into why this poor support CX is so common?



It’s called CTI in industry — computer telephony integration. Normally well run firms will have CTI setup properly to transfer IVR data to an agent.

Sometimes however agents are trained to distrust this information as there are ways to spoof or attack the system. One easy way is to call a victim and pretend to be the company, then “3 way” them in with the IVR of the real company, have them verify, then disconnect them and take over, ask to transfer to an agent and you have full access to do whatever you want to their account (if the agent doesn’t re-verify). For this reason, 99% of the time financial institutions already have CTI data but will always do re-verification.


If they don't trust it, why have the automated system ask for it in the first place?


Don't think about it as not trusting, it's "Trust but verify".

Try to imagine such a scam being pulled and now the company has to answer questions on "why weren't further verifications done? So anyone with a benign number can just do whatever with my account?"

I'm sympathetic to the annoyance of long phone queues but this extends to the support teams that can do everything "right" and still end up raked over the coals because they got social engineered by a scammer or a customer shared what should have been a secret a bit too publicly.

I've dealt with both sides of the concerns in previous jobs in Support orgs, and there is rarely middle ground between "Why do I need to enter the information repeatedly?" and "Why did you work with this person just because they gave a correct number? Our private information may have been exfiltrated!" The latter is better to optimize for IMO as the worst result of failing on the former is that you get complaints. Failing on the latter means a potential data breach incident.

Scam-detection training is done typically for support teams, but it's not perfect, and often a few sanity checks are enough to catch or stop most scams and ensure you're talking to someone actually authorized to be contacting regarding the information.


For analytics, reducing load on call centers by servicing common requests via IVR, call routing, improving call readiness times —- it takes time to find/lookup accounts.

The most critical metric for customer service focused call centers is first call resolution. Customers who call in for the same issue or department on the same day are tracked via the IVR and those metrics are used to decide what the IVR should actually do.


They're probably optimizing your initial rank in the queue depending on perceived customer value/risk of churn. It's OK for this to be wrong occasionally, so the quality of implementation probably matches this requirement. ;-)

But I agree wholeheartedly. It should work and make things smoother. Instead it makes an already painful customer care experience worse.


I used to build such system.

Programmers aren’t always very good. And may not know how to carry information end to end during a call.

Their could be multiple systems involved that make it harder.

Their may be significant delays of when info pops up for the agent. So it’s faster to ask.

The ordering software may not be properly integrated.


Working in the industry, lots of companies rely on outsourced work through Business Process Outsourcers. Basically you are calling Target or another company and in their internal system probably run by Avaya or Cisco on ancient hardware and only can process limited inputs like DTMF/Touch and a tree format. When you transfer to a person, that agent works in a different region/office/company and on a different system. Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are and chances are have a different system that sees a limited set of information to handle your call.

Telephony is a cost center for most companies and the work to build clean experiences for callers is not a priority so a lot of companies have these broken systems and spending money maintenance to keep them running instead of understanding how a proper experience for someone helps their business and brand.


> Telephony is a cost center for most companies

This is the key here.

> Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are

This really depends on the capabilities of the system and the willingness of the company to improve their CX.

For example, short info like customer name, ticket/account/order number, can easily be passed via text-to-speech, through the phone, to the agent on the line, before connecting the customer.


But why do they collect your information through the IVR in the first place, if they can't pass it to the agent?


When I did Comcast phone support it was common to have different call centers and queues for different regions, each region has different internal tools owing to differing networks during acquisitions so only agents with the right tools and accounts would be able to handle certain customers. Our center handled multiple regions but agents would usually be trained to handle just one. Usually the IVR will make cursory account billing and outage checks and then forward the call to the appropriate location.


I also had the displeasure of working for Comcast in phone support before I went back to school and this is definitely part of the reason.

Multiple completely different decrepit and kafkaesque billing systems because they were too lazy or incompetent to properly migrate customers over to a unified modern one. IMO, one of the reasons Comcast has had notoriously bad customer support is because their internal systems were so complicated that even reps who wanted to help might have just given up and told you they fixed the issue to get you off the phone.


To ensure you have the information available at the time of calling. Account number lookups is a waste of time/money for them. They don’t care about the CX part enough. In some cases, they hope that prompted an “oh forget about it” moment.

It’s also a highly metric driven industry. They may have a goal that each agent has an average call length of 3 minutes. But when they implemented that goal the agents pushed back on management about how it takes 3 minutes just to look up an account. So as a quick fix/hack they put up an automated screen to force the customer be prepared.

Also it’s like a captcha in that it prevents ddos of the phone lines.


From their perspective even if they can't pass it on, making you provide it as early as possible before you've reached a human ensures you'll have it ready when the human requests it.

How many callers just hang up at the automated first query for the information?

Having recently dealt with some brutal rental car phone support situations, I'm convinced these companies prioritize getting callers to just give up with the minimum of resources expended on their part.

Should you actually reach the live person they want you locked and loaded to not waste their time waiting.

I hate the future.


I suppose it also let's the entity running the IVR to monitor and log things themselves. Now they know what you called about, and to which third party they directed your call to. If the first party runs the post call questionnaire, they might get full loop feedback on how their contractor is handling calls; from the end user an not the contractor.


You may also find agents don't trust the supplied information, even if they have access to it.


Because a call center is a cost center, is even more of a reason to make it as efficient as possible.

I’m not a call center/contact flow designer expert by any means. But I do work on cloud based call center design and integrations occasionally.


Yeah it’s weird because you could definitely do some kind of data transfer with SIP headers.


Yeah that’s kind of out of my domain. I was trying to avoid hawking my employer’s product. I’ve created call center solutions with Amazon Connect. With that, you can do basically any type of integration via a Lambda.

You can integrate with Salesforce and have a ticket with all of the information automatically pop up on screen by the time the call is transferred to a human.


The phone tree needs your information to route your call properly, the service rep needs your information to service you. Conveying the information to the service rep is harder than routing your call, so it's not always done.


After experiencing this myself in numerous different contexts I just figured it was essentially a time sponge step - it feels like you're making progress through the system, but in actual fact it's just to make waiting in the queue seem less time consuming.

"Here's some pointless busywork, ooh look you've moved up in the queue 3 places since we asked you for your order / account / ticket / reservation number.


Collecting info early serves several functions: - confirming you are a real user - routing / escalating you appropriately - weeding out unmotivated calls - generating analytics about inbound in volume - (potentially) improving your handle time

As you can see, the frost four bullets have value even if the fifth one is ignored, so "vestigial" identification steps have a reason to persist even if they don't follow you. Add in a couple of reasons that the info might not get passed:

- fear of fraud - constantly shifting tech platforms - org boundaries, like using an outsourced call center at certain times of day

And there are a lot of ways you can end up with repeat asks.

Bonus: the same reasons this info doesn't get passed makes it harder to track the negative impact to it not getting passed along, so it is hard to prioritize a fix.


Probably for the same reason that upon hearing “your call is important to us” you instantly know that the call center is understaffed, the company has no interest in talking to you, you’ll be hearing that elevator music for quite a while longer, and call centers are a cost center.

While technically possible, it would cost slightly more money to actually make it happen and so it isn’t done.

Or maybe it used to work that way 20 years ago when the flow was designed and ever since it’s been changed over and over no one actually bothered to look into it: the requirements was just “make it ask the same things as it always did” without wondering “why”.


It could be that they are using and older setup that doesn't support this, but more likely they just didn't set it up or have an integration issue between their IVR system and their CRM they chose not to pursue.

It's been 10+ years now since I used to work building these systems myself but even back then this was possible. In this day and age I agree, while it might be fine for the customer support rep to verify the data passed through the IVR, they really should get it. There is no excuse not to.


It's the same at the doctor's or dentist's. Every time I got they hand me a paper form and ask me to fill it out even though they already have my info. They could just ask "has anything changed" but nope. They could also do it all online before I get there but nope. If they're required to file they could print out the info and just ask me to verify then sign it but nope.

As for the phone tree, FAAMG is no better


The experience is similar, but the consequence of missing a change in health status is potentially much more significant, so I don't think it's quite the right comparison.


For HN readers outside of the US,"Target" is the name of a store in the US. Took me a minute.


On one system I saw, it is shown to the service rep but it's required to ask again to confirm. Other larger system only route you to proper service rep which would probably be on the other side of the planet and using a different system to service your support call.


I asked a friend who manages a call center now and has managed call centers for years, previously at a big US bank.

He said that sometimes they have multiple systems or outsourced call centers that don't integrate, and since the inconvenience falls on the customer no one at the bank considers fixing it a priority.

He then mentioned that customer service operators frequently get people on the line who don't have their account number or whatever they need ready, so having the phone tree collect that (even if it's just an input that gets ignored) heads off the operators wasting time on the call while the customer digs around for their account number or receipt number or whatever it is they need.

Having worked at a company that had an outsourced call center myself I know people often call the wrong company (calling their bank about their credit report, calling a store about insufficient balance on their credit card). And I know that even asking customers to enter their ZIP code or phone prefix (to route the call to a regional center) will flummox a significant number of callers. Because call center operators generally work with quotas and maximum time per call monitored, reducing the time the operators spend waiting for grandma to find her account number becomes an important goal, even at the expense of irritating some customers.


As a counter-example: DHL is the only company I've called that does forward information to humans.


and Amazon. sometimes I use th e call back on an item just to get to them, but the caller always knows which item/order is about.


I used to work at a call center, most of the time the phone tree doesn't carry the info over to the call or there may be a piece of info missing that could count your call as authenticated so the rep has to ask.

There was even times where I had the previous customers account still open and the new call came in, the IVR would not populate the system with the IVR data.

Most automated systems are used to answer easy and commonly asked questions or offer some simple self-help.


Probably because each level of support is using an outdated isolated system, that have minimum interoperability beyond call routing.


The most likely reason has been replied to multiple times, that the phone system doesn't pass it.

But another reason is this is a failsafe to ensure the right order number was entered, as with a phone system there are very few means of authentication before that point.


Mmmm, not really. First of all, they system generally DOES check to see if the account number is valid. After that, all it has to do (and generally does) is ask for another piece of correlated information.


Also, some flows may use the user provided data, others do not.

People will do weird shit to get what the want, including using other peoples info at the IVR or asking for things that will get them to a human faster.


It’s an anti-fraud maze of sort - @patio11 calls it anti-fraud loops [0]

[0] - https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/


It feels like an unnecessary gate left in place, in the hopes that some callers won’t get through, this reducing total call volume to the humans.

More likely, it’s just not worth it to implement the interface between the systems.


Straight-up incompetence on the part of the systems integrator or designer. I'm so tired of this shit, especially when entry of an account number is essentially a REQUIREMENT to even get into the system.


Straight-up incompetence on the part of the systems integrator or designer

Can confirm.

My first ever programming job, 20+ years ago, was doing CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) and call-center integration stuff... basically, building IVR's and integrating them with backend databases and customer support apps. Truth is, there's rarely - if ever - any real technical reason to not have the agent shown the customer's information as soon as they pick up the call. This stuff was all being done decades ago.

As far as I'm concerned, it's either "straight up incompetence" or "straight up laziness" or some variation on that theme.


IBM AS/400 CallPath system demonstrated here https://youtu.be/5pY6Xxptp9A?t=2083 almost brought a tear to at least one viewer's eye


Oh yeah. CallPath and DirectTalk. And AS/400's. That's pretty much where my career began. I'm just glad I dodged the bullet of getting heavily involved in RPG programming...


+1, incompetence

There are lots of technical reasons why they might not see it, but it all comes down to someone not caring enough when deploying (or updating) these solutions - because it's possible, easy and standard, and has been for 20+ years.


I briefly did customer support like this, the bigcorps have various call centers many of which are other companies outsourcing it (I was and am in the US although obviously offshore exists too). I don't think there is a technical limitation, it is just a decision both companies make on the cost/benefit of having to come up with some protocol and integrate/require that with every 3rd party call center.

There were Tier 1's people talk to, no idea where they are and I was WFH taking escalations and asking same questions again.


"Please say your order number."

"SIX THREE FOUR NINE"

"Did you say "SIX brick barn fine", say yes or no"

"NO"

"Thank you ... please wait while we look up your account"


Actually encountered:

"Would you like to leave your phone number for further contact?"

"No."

"...................."


Just like building a good UX for a website takes skill, so does building a good UX for a call center. I’ve only developed contact flows with newer cloud based call center solutions. But I’ve integrated them with Salesforce so by the time you talk to a human, they can already see all of the relevant information and it automatically pulls up related data.


The larger the company, the more bureaucratic it is, and also the more siloed individual divisions are.


I'm really interested in this problem.


> I'm really interested in this problem.

Ah, the good ol' institutional imperative :-).

Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287430


[flagged]


What? It’s a legitimate question. Companies set up automated phone trees to reduce costs, at the expense of frustrating customers. It would seem relatively simple to send any account info entered on the phone to whichever operator ends up pulling up the customer on the computer.


> Companies set up automated phone trees to reduce costs, at the expense of frustrating customers

I'd modify that slightly to say they set up phone trees to reduce costs by frustrating customers. Adding friction to prevent people from getting refunds or other concessions, or getting them to give up without speaking to a human, is a big reason for these systems. They could easily make them better, but there is no incentive. That's why (usually) monopolies or places like rewards programs that don't want you to use them have the worst service, but if you ever call in to get a new insurance policy you'll be talking to a human in seconds.


True. Reducing customer support calls that get to a real person contributes to the performance and cost metrics for a call center. Some companies may try to make a useful phone tree. Some may use it to introduce friction and cut off nuisance calls. I won’t say the companies always have nefarious or uncaring intentions but it can feel that way from the customer end.


Agreed. That would make sense given the facts I think I have. Maybe some legal or regulatory or anti-fraud consideration comes into it that I don’t know about.

I have worked on phone trees that run in a software PBX that actually doesn’t connect to other systems, like customer service, though I don’t see any technical impediment. Maybe the various vendors don’t interoperate. Maybe the company outsources their phone tree, or their customer service, or both.

Lots of things don’t work the way we’d like or think they should. I get that. But getting upset and starting off the chat with a real person in a bad mood or tone, when they had nothing to do with the phone tree implementation, you do have control over that.

Almost every day I see people driving in ways I interpret as rude, dangerous, or oblivious. I try to remind myself that their behavior isn’t directed at me, personally, and I can’t control them but I can control my reactions. Same principle.


"But getting upset and starting off the chat with a real person in a bad mood or tone,"

They didn't say that. They never said they took it out on the employee. They said that the system caused the customer to be less happy than they could have been. Perfectly legit complaint, and a failure on the part of the people who set up the system.

That's actually why they came HERE to ask. That is something they have control over.


> Its aggravating and sets the wrong tone for my support call.

One can read that in different ways. When I’m aggravated by the time I get through to a person I may communicate that by my tone. Having worked on the receiving end of support calls I know that’s common. Who else can they vent on?


And they have a right to be aggravated. You're talking about something else, their outward reaction, which you are making assumptions about.

I'd hope every user interface designer (and yes this is user interface design) also gets aggravated by bad design. If all you do is make excuses for bad design, it's a good bet your designs suck.


I made no excuses. I did offer some possible explanations in a different comment thread. I didn’t go so far as to say anyone’s work sucked.

I don’t let myself get aggravated over things I can’t control or that likely have causes other than malice or someone sucking at design. I don’t take out my frustrations on customer support people. Not worth it, no point.


Again, no one took out their frustrations on customer support, so I'm not sure why you keep saying that. They came to HN and voiced them.


You don’t know that. We just interpret the original complaint differently. If someone says their frustration with a phone tree “sets the tone” that implies something about the following conversation. A “tone” doesn’t mean anything without a conversation.

Complaining on HN will not get any closer to changing the actual problem. I offered possible explanations elsewhere — multiple vendors, incompatible systems, outsourcing, deliberate friction to reduce human call volume, anti-fraud. Sheer incompetence or even malice present possible explanations too. I stand by my original answer: Things don’t necessarily work the way we think they should, that’s simply a fact, so there’s no point letting yourself get aggravated about those things.


I hope you don't design things that other people use, because that sort of attitude is why so many thing suck.

There is a lot of point in, if not getting aggravated, striving to do better in the things you do.


This doesn’t really deserve a reply, because you have extrapolated from my comments about something I had nothing to do with (a phone tree) and my advice to not take out frustration on people who have no power or control over such inconveniences (customer service operators). How you got to my skills or what I might do in such cases I can’t tell, but it’s a leap of thinking that just seems like misdirection or jumbled logic.

I do design and implement user-facing software, have done that for decades, and can point to online testimonials about my own work as user-friendly. As I described in comments in this topic (not necessarily in response to you, but you can see all of my comments), bad phone trees can happen for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with deliberate bad user experience. It can be as simple as the explanation for why a Jeep spare tire won’t work on my Mazda. And yes, as I already described, some of the explanations have to do with saving money and reducing operator time on call, which we as customers perceive as frustration and not caring, but at minimum you have to understand that the problem has multiple dimensions.

As for not getting aggravated and frustrated, I only advised against taking that out on people who have no control or power or ability to fix problems. Whether the OP actually did that or not is irrelevant. Lots of people do berate and shout at customer service reps, and if you have ever worked in a call center (I have) you would know what a crushing experience that is, to get shouted at and blamed for problems you cannot influence or fix. A little patience and empathy goes a long way. Feel free to email the software managers at the company with the shitty phone tree. Feel free to design a better phone tree and call center user experience and sell it to the big companies that use those products. I can already tell you that end-user/customer satisfaction is not a metric most companies care about, so feel free to not use those companies. That’s how I handle it — terrible customer service, I take my business elsewhere. I don’t bitch about bad phone trees online or yell at customer service reps about it.




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