10 ms·
Counterpoint: a few years ago, having been stuck in abnormally high traffic on the way to the airport, I was running right on the cusp of the arbitrary check-in
by NamTaf 10y ago
Counterpoint: a few years ago, having been stuck in abnormally high traffic on the way to the airport, I was running right on the cusp of the arbitrary check-in deadline for my flight. I began the automated checkin service, which was comparitively extremely slow on that day also. It let me start the process, but threw an unspecified error when I got to the final stages to print my boarding pass and bag tags. Upon retrying, I was past the check-in deadline. Buggery.
Walking over to the check-in counter, a polite explanation of the situation I found myself in (and, possibly, my moderate-level status with the carrier but I don't fully know) made the service attendant remove the problem in about 30 seconds, guaranteeing that both I and my luggage would make the flight with no problems despite being 'technically past the deadline now'.
Flesh-based interaction points, by their very nature, have a tendancy to span a far broader range of service quality than machines. The bad are far worse because machines don't gossip and hate their jobs. Conversely, machines have little hope when things go south compared with a good service employee, who'll do their level best to go above and beyond their basic responsibilites to make whatever issue you have either go away or minimally impact you.
My experience is that one of the most apparent examples of this is if you ever find yourself significantly up the greasy ladder of the airline status game for whatever reason. I postulate that because carriers have realised that 'bending the rules' is a relatively 0-cost commodity to exchange for brand loyalty and this is precisely factored into the training and job directives of their employees.
- AznHisoka 10y agoi have had similar experiences with check out machines in Target and large retailers. they puke if you dont follow the directions to a T. Now I deliberately avoid any automated checkout and go straight to the human cashier. if you insist on replacing humans with machines, it has to be flawless
- jsemrau 10y agoHow come there is no remove scanned item option like the real cashiers have. It happens to me -every single time-. Prefer the human option, truly.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoI prefer automated checkouts far more than human cashiers. It's much faster. Maybe there's some problem 20% of the time which is quickly resolved by an employee. (People who would say that the system still needs humans ignore the fact that one person can now look over six checkouts, thus cutting jobs by one-sixth.)
- mod 10y agoI strongly dislike the automated checkouts; I prefer to wait in line to get a human. I don't like the bagging system that has to ensure you put your item into a bag, and that has a quite noticeable delay in responding to your actions. I also don't like the tiny area they have for the bags. What am I supposed to do? Put full bags back into my half-emptied shopping cart alongside items that haven't been scanned yet? It makes me uncomfortable, like they'll think I'm up to something. I also tend to buy items in bulk, like 2-liter bottles, and it's nice to say "I have 8 of these" and pass one to the cashier.
- paulddraper 10y agoOTOH, you can make sure your 2-liter bottles and tortilla chips are bagged separately.
- douche 10y ago> I also tend to buy items in bulk, like 2-liter bottles, and it's nice to say "I have 8 of these" and pass one to the cashier. This is really not the case the self-checkout lines are designed for. I use them almost exclusively for those cases where I duck in and grab a couple things quickly, and want to get the hell out. It's always faster and easier than even the 12-items-or-less express checkout line, not to mention the regular lines, where you get stuck behind somebody with a cart rounded to the sky and $400 worth of groceries in it.
- empath75 10y agoYeah, when I checked groceries and had the produce codes memorized, I could blast through a grocery cart full of food in the time it takes me to check out a dozen items in the self checkout. I always go to a person for anything other than the express line.
- njharman 10y agoThose self checkouts aren't automated. Those are having human customer do the checkout work. Automated would I walk out the door and rfid or whatever senses what I'm carrying and charges my account. Or, I don't go to the store at all and shit just shows up on my doorstep, periodically or whenever I hit a button.
- cableshaft 10y agoAmazon Prime Pantry seems to do the latter. We've been getting some of our stuff delivered that way the past few months.
- irishbro 10y agoI feel like a lot of people miss this point. The technology has existed for years although clearly the cost to implement a touch screen console has also plummeted.Even accounting for that most self-service checkouts are just a tilled turned around. I wonder how much of this is super markets jumping on to the fact people are conflating automation with using a machine and assuming self-service checkouts are proof of a technological revolution. At the end of the day the same amount of work is being done at the till as if a cashier was working but it is now being done for free and a company won't miss a chance to capitalise on an opportunity like that.
- yardie 10y agoI shop at Aldi's where the prices are low and the employees are well compensated. The owners, 2 brothers, have some unique ideas about efficiency. They haven't installed any machines because they are slow, customers are slow, and they don't handle edge cases well. Employees are few and far between. Generally 1 cashier and 2 on extra busy days. The Target on the other hand has rows and rows of empty checkout tills. They try to get you to use the automated tills but that line is so much longer that it just boggles the mind. Any time savings is wasted on the machine having an error,
- stronglikedan 10y agoWhile I haven't used Target's, I do like Home Depot's self checkouts. They are pretty intelligent on their own, like just swiping a card to initiate the payment process, even if you don't press the "pay now" button. Then, when you do encounter a problem, there's an attendant for every four checkout stations that can help you from their workstation. Usually they know you're having a problem before you can even turn to tell them so, and by the time you do, they're waving you on and the problem has been resolved. My only issue with them is that they shut them down about an hour before closing, and waiting for a human cashier is even more annoying after the self-checkout experience there.
- AznHisoka 10y agoi have flown into JFK over 10 times and to this day i still dont know how those passport scanning machines work. i try various permutations of placing it on the machines but everytime i just give up.
- culturestate 10y agoI think some passports are just bad at this, but I have no plausible theory as to why. Mine never scans without at least 3 attempts at any scanner, in any situation, anywhere I've been in the world.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoTry the new mobile passport app instead: http://www.mobilepassport.us/ http://www.mobilepassport.us/
- teknologist 10y agoI've heard that in the UK they have people controlling those automated passport gates - the matching of the photograph is not done by machine. Needless to say, mine never works and I have to go to the person who asks "is that really you?" and I reply "yes" and that's enough human touch verification to pass through
- tluyben2 10y agoMine used to not work, now, the same passport works everywhere without flaw. I notice I have to take my glasses off otherwise I does not, but that is not too strange as my passport pic has glasses. Not that it matters, most airports have manual checks after automated check anyway.
- Symbiote 10y agoWhere are the second checks? I've used the system often in Europe, mostly London, and never had a second check.
- 10y ago
- teknologist 10y agoWhat if we had machine intelligence monitoring employees to decide which ones are going above the call of duty? Too Black Mirror?
- lostcolony 10y agoNo thank you. The good companies already strive to recognize it, the bad ones will use it as grounds to let someone go for bending the rules.
- teknologist 10y agoArguably there are people who have it in them to do better, but feel that their extra contributions would not be recognised. Tipping is supposed to be a solution to this in some jobs, but there's not much of a culture of tipping airline check-in desk clerks in most cultures
- lostcolony 10y agoSure. But if their company is not already trying to recognize it, why would they pay for software to do it? And if they are, and are just not good at it, why would they recognize software as the solution? I just haven't seen any companies going "We sure would like to recognize our best employees, but we just have no way of knowing why they are". -Especially- in customer service land.
- cm2187 10y agoThe other thing is the interaction needs to be fast and practical. Like many IT departments, the internal IT support at my employer likes to follow the latest fad more than being useful, and replaced the dial in menus in the phone helpline with a voice recognition system where you have to describe your problem to be directed to the right area. Of course you don't know what kind of sentence it expects, particularly for a complex problem, and half of the employees are non native english speakers and the damn thing doesn't do foreign accents...
- Haydos585x2 10y agoIf you work for ANZ, godddamn. Even if you don't please stop it. This is probably one of the most annoying processes I've had to go through and made a 2 minute call take about 15 minutes while I argued with a robot that can only handle very specific phrases.
- yellowapple 10y agoAutomated telephone systems should be required by law to respond to "shibboleet" and take the appropriate action. Or, at the very least, should be required to let me press 0 for an operator.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoWith most voice-recognition systems if you blow a couple raspberries down the receiver (or rub your finger on the mic or otherwise generate some noise) they'll give up after a couple of tries and take you to a human.
- therealidiot 10y agoSome just hang up on you when they give up. Quite awful
- StavrosK 10y ago
- lmm 10y agoSo why was the human able to fix the problem and the machine not? Perhaps the machine has an arbitrary deadline whereas the human measures the progress of the actual boarding process, in which case the fix is to build that into the machine. Perhaps they use differential "deadlines" as a way to subtly discriminate against undesirables customers, in which case the clear light of automation probably improves matters overall.
- analog31 10y agoIf the anti-labor argument were taken to the extreme, the explanation should be that the machine was programmed by humans, who gossip and hate their jobs. At the end of the day, the machine is still a human touch point, albeit an abstract one.
- lmm 10y agoTo the extent that we can automate the programming of the machine, we should (and the history of programming is full of that - e.g. on the earliest computers assembling was done by hand, but this was repetitive, mechanistic work so people wrote assembler programs instead).
- Lambdanaut 10y agoThat sort of thought has interesting philosophical implementations. You're positing that when our creations interact with others, we are unconsciously the ones interacting with others. To a deeper extent, when you create and then raise a child, and your child grows up and interacts with others, that is also a case of you unconsciously interacting with others. Follow the chain of creative identity backwards in time to the beginning, and you end up with the cause of the universe, whatever that may be, unconsciously interacting with itself, through everyone and everything. It's not very relevant, and perhaps not even important, but it's an interesting perspective :)
- notduncansmith 10y agoThrough our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence. - Alan Watts