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If you can't tell, does it matter? The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots. Rather, because they often make it difficult to ge
by baumandm 8y ago
If you can't tell, does it matter?
The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots. Rather, because they often make it difficult to get the help you need or reach the right department. If a live human read the script of a phone tree to you it would be equally (more?) infuriating.
If I called a companies number and got a conversational bot masquerading as a person instead of a phone tree, that would be a dramatic improvement.
- tlb 8y agoYes. Because if I'm having a bad day and I'm rude to the caller (not knowing it's a machine), I will feel guilt afterwards. The guilt will be unnecessary, because no human was offended. That may be a trivial case, but more generally our social contract is that we owe a duty of politeness and consideration to fellow humans. When you're interacting with another human, a big part of your brain is actively engaged in following social norms. By masquerading as human, machines co-opt this part of your brain and extract a duty that they don't deserve. I think every machine caller should be required to identify itself as such. Restaurants will still be happy to take reservations from them. If one calls me to sell me something, I can tell it where to go without any guilt.
- candiodari 8y agoThe problem with phone trees is not that they suck at getting you to the right department, it's that the options required mostly aren't there. It's that it makes it soooo cheap for the company implementing the phone tree to waste your time just to improve the metrics of some low-level idiot manager at the company. Voice will make this a LOT worse, not better.