Every customer service interaction I've had recently:
(hold music)
(Suspiciously cheerful voice) Did you know that you can manage the intensity and depth of your torment online? Simply log into TormentNexus dot com and click "My Account"!
(hold music)
Me: (muffled expletives) if your website would let me do what I was trying to do I wouldn't be calling you...
@azonenberg It's the "We really don't want to talk to you and wish you would be content with our automated processes so we could fire half our staff" subtext that I hate!
@azonenberg
They know, they want you to give up, so they can pay even less for real humans (if badly trained ones) to man the phones. Shitty AI systems are even worse, especially the ones that don't let you talk to a human without going through the one size fits none prompts or guessing the magic words.
@azonenberg@arush Also can we talk about the fact that everyone's phone is also their media consumption device and loud hold music prevents the enjoyable consumption of media? I do not understand why it's still a thing.
@HollieK72 Yes, but call center staff pay is expensive and robot menu systems are cheap.
So if there's an 0.1% chance that they might have someone solve their problem with the robot before talking to a human, it makes complete sense if you don't care about externalities (i.e. your staff time is expensive, the caller's time is of no value).
@azonenberg And by the time we do get through to the actual person, we waste a lot of their expensive time complaining about our horrible experience with the robot menu systems, and they have to calm us down.
@HollieK72 I'm sure the probability and the expected duration of the complaint are carefully modeled and weighed against the number of caller-agent interactions which the robot helps avoid.
@azonenberg I’m especially thankful to the ones that start their recorded message with “please note that abuse of any kind will not be tolerated” because then I know for sure it’s going to be a shit interaction and I’m absolutely going to come away from that company frustrated and unsatisfied.
@azonenberg Yes, so much this. I have to do this more often than I'd like with a certain large international courier company and it's exactly the same vibe.
Every 30 seconds the same message telling me all the things I don't need to do.
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