9 ms·

Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

98 points by LinuxBender 6y ago

tiffanyh 6y ago
Tough loss for Twilio Flex
quantified 6y 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.
lecarore 6y ago
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"
jasode 6y ago
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-makes-phone-call-demo-duplex-io-2018 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.
- QuercusMax 6y ago
  100% accuracy is probably too much to hope for, as there will of course be poor-quality phone calls. Of course, maybe Google could encode an alternate data stream inside the generated voice, which would enable perfect transcription. Now I'm imagining a future where robots communicate with each other over audio channels....
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    What's wrong with that? We've preferred programs communicate with each other in human-parsable formats for decades.
    - QuercusMax 6y ago
      Nothing wrong with it at all, necessarily. Just seems... a bit too on-the-nose.
corey_moncure 6y ago
We're going to need a new system. 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?
- hanniabu 6y ago
  > 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).
- 3814058 6y ago
  But say that we are pragmatic and realistic. 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.
bastardoperator 6y ago
I just say "fking human please" and AI seems to understand that pretty well in most cases.
- jerrysievert 6y ago
  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.
  - agustif 6y ago
    and then the algo tags you as bipolar lol Will try the swear words, kinda did it anyway but didn't notice any improvements...
    - jerrysievert 6y ago
      I found that "fuck shit motherfucker son of a bitch" usually gets me to a human quickly, if that helps :)
- bcraven 6y ago
  Paragraph 9: 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.
- mrspeaker 6y ago
  That exact situation is what the article is about. The part truncated from the article title on HN is "...The human is told what to say by the bot".
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    We're implementing Manna [1] one little step at a time. 1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
ProAm 6y ago
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.
loraa 6y ago
America burns down again as democrats protest against Trump and his botophobe bigots. This comes weeks after transmechanical advocates protested the White House. "I am a bot born inside of a human body, and I should have the right to be a Google Nest Mini" said one bot protesting..
Scoundreller 6y ago
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. I published that one far and wide!!!
dutch3000 6y ago
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.
londons_explore 6y ago
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.
- cle 6y ago
  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.
- KMnO4 6y ago
  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.
- seditiousseals 6y ago
  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?
KMnO4 6y ago
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.
- importantbrian 6y ago
  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.
- kevinmgranger 6y ago
  Every thing you listed that requires a human also results in them making less money. It's no coincidence that these systems make getting to those points harder and harder.
  - thesuitonym 6y ago
    Keeping a customer by giving them a discount actually earns you more money that losing a customer by being difficult.
    - quantified 6y ago
      Not an issue for your cable company.
    - grahamburger 6y ago
      But you have to talk to a human to cancel too! Checkmate!
reportgunner 6y ago
I'm not a customer support agent but I took a basic customer support training at my previous company to get better at communication. If I remembered anything from the education it's this: You have to address the customer's emotional needs before addressing the customer's business need. If you don't you end up with an unhappy customer who had his problem solved. I don't see an AI satisfying my emotional needs any time soon.
- oldgradstudent 6y ago
  There's nothing more painfully frustrating than a customer service agent that tries to handle what they think are my emotional needs. My emotional needs are that they fix their damn service.
jameslk 6y ago
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.
supergeek133 6y ago
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.
- 3814058 6y ago
  Having worked in a call center for Internet, Telephone, and TV about 3 years ago. In my experience most people have the same stupid question. 1. Do I plug in the green wire in the green port or in the red port (They call before they have even tried to connect things). 2. My TV isn't working when they haven't pressed "Source". 3. Something is wrong, restart router. 4. My WiFi is slow when they have one router for 200 m2 in a house of concrete. 5. A few % of the costumers make up the majority of the calls because of how they are.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    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.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    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.
  - supergeek133 6y ago
    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.
abstractbarista 6y ago
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!
- StangeStars 6y ago
  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.
- badwolf 6y ago
  This generally isn't good advice and can result in your call being dropped, marked as "hot," etc...
deathanatos 6y ago
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?
- causehealth101 6y ago
  This reminds of a typical visit to the doctor. 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.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  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.
- admax88q 6y ago
  A support agents time was saved because every annoying step like that causes x% of people to just give up.
StillBored 6y ago
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.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  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.
ihsw 6y ago
Now we need a bot that will input whatever incantations are required to get to a human on the phone.
Scoundreller 6y ago
My favourite was a Canadian ISP changing its tech support number. This is before ubiquitous wifi and mobile data, but after electronic bills. Like, if your service goes down, how are you supposed to find the new number? I thought telecom tech supports numbers were sacrosanct.
sys_64738 6y ago
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.
- Simon_says 6y ago
  I will when they actually solve my problem, but invariably I want something the bots can't understand.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Because you don’t talk to computers it’s doomed to fail? I on the other hand use Siri all of the time when I need to be hands free or using my Watch.
- jackson1442 6y ago
  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.
  - woeirua 6y ago
    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.
bibinou 6y ago
The key part of the title is left out, making this clickbait.
- bibinou 6y ago
  title changed.
zaroth 6y ago
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.
- Lammy 6y ago
  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
  - zaroth 6y ago
    No, they give you 30 days to return the equipment at which point they charge you late fees. The calls were totally superfluous.
htrp 6y ago
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.
magoon 6y ago
I never call until I’ve exhausted all self service options. I don’t need to be told every time “Did you know...you can find us online to X, Y, and Z?” Verizon customers are paying more because they expect more, so this move by them is disappointing.

98 points by LinuxBender 6y ago

Tough loss for Twilio Flex

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.

lecarore 6y ago

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"

jasode 6y ago

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-makes-phone-call-demo-duplex-io-2018 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.

QuercusMax 6y ago
100% accuracy is probably too much to hope for, as there will of course be poor-quality phone calls. Of course, maybe Google could encode an alternate data stream inside the generated voice, which would enable perfect transcription. Now I'm imagining a future where robots communicate with each other over audio channels....
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  What's wrong with that? We've preferred programs communicate with each other in human-parsable formats for decades.
  - QuercusMax 6y ago
    Nothing wrong with it at all, necessarily. Just seems... a bit too on-the-nose.

corey_moncure 6y ago

We're going to need a new system. 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?

hanniabu 6y ago
> 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).
3814058 6y ago
But say that we are pragmatic and realistic. 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.

bastardoperator 6y ago

I just say "fking human please" and AI seems to understand that pretty well in most cases.

jerrysievert 6y ago
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.
- agustif 6y ago
  and then the algo tags you as bipolar lol Will try the swear words, kinda did it anyway but didn't notice any improvements...
  - jerrysievert 6y ago
    I found that "fuck shit motherfucker son of a bitch" usually gets me to a human quickly, if that helps :)
bcraven 6y ago
Paragraph 9: 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.
mrspeaker 6y ago
That exact situation is what the article is about. The part truncated from the article title on HN is "...The human is told what to say by the bot".
- ryandrake 6y ago
  We're implementing Manna [1] one little step at a time. 1: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

ProAm 6y ago

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.

loraa 6y ago

America burns down again as democrats protest against Trump and his botophobe bigots. This comes weeks after transmechanical advocates protested the White House. "I am a bot born inside of a human body, and I should have the right to be a Google Nest Mini" said one bot protesting..

Scoundreller 6y ago

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. I published that one far and wide!!!

dutch3000 6y ago

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.

londons_explore 6y ago

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.

cle 6y ago
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.
KMnO4 6y ago
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.
seditiousseals 6y ago
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?

KMnO4 6y ago

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.

importantbrian 6y ago
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.
kevinmgranger 6y ago
Every thing you listed that requires a human also results in them making less money. It's no coincidence that these systems make getting to those points harder and harder.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  Keeping a customer by giving them a discount actually earns you more money that losing a customer by being difficult.
  - quantified 6y ago
    Not an issue for your cable company.
  - grahamburger 6y ago
    But you have to talk to a human to cancel too! Checkmate!

reportgunner 6y ago

I'm not a customer support agent but I took a basic customer support training at my previous company to get better at communication. If I remembered anything from the education it's this: You have to address the customer's emotional needs before addressing the customer's business need. If you don't you end up with an unhappy customer who had his problem solved. I don't see an AI satisfying my emotional needs any time soon.

oldgradstudent 6y ago
There's nothing more painfully frustrating than a customer service agent that tries to handle what they think are my emotional needs. My emotional needs are that they fix their damn service.

jameslk 6y ago

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.

supergeek133 6y ago

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.

3814058 6y ago
Having worked in a call center for Internet, Telephone, and TV about 3 years ago. In my experience most people have the same stupid question. 1. Do I plug in the green wire in the green port or in the red port (They call before they have even tried to connect things). 2. My TV isn't working when they haven't pressed "Source". 3. Something is wrong, restart router. 4. My WiFi is slow when they have one router for 200 m2 in a house of concrete. 5. A few % of the costumers make up the majority of the calls because of how they are.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  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.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  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.
- supergeek133 6y ago
  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.

abstractbarista 6y ago

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!

StangeStars 6y ago
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.
badwolf 6y ago
This generally isn't good advice and can result in your call being dropped, marked as "hot," etc...

deathanatos 6y ago

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?

causehealth101 6y ago
This reminds of a typical visit to the doctor. 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.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
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.
admax88q 6y ago
A support agents time was saved because every annoying step like that causes x% of people to just give up.

StillBored 6y ago

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.

linuxftw 6y ago
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.

ihsw 6y ago

Now we need a bot that will input whatever incantations are required to get to a human on the phone.

Scoundreller 6y ago

My favourite was a Canadian ISP changing its tech support number. This is before ubiquitous wifi and mobile data, but after electronic bills. Like, if your service goes down, how are you supposed to find the new number? I thought telecom tech supports numbers were sacrosanct.

sys_64738 6y ago

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.

Simon_says 6y ago
I will when they actually solve my problem, but invariably I want something the bots can't understand.
scarface74 6y ago
Because you don’t talk to computers it’s doomed to fail? I on the other hand use Siri all of the time when I need to be hands free or using my Watch.
jackson1442 6y ago
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.
- woeirua 6y ago
  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.

bibinou 6y ago

The key part of the title is left out, making this clickbait.

bibinou 6y ago
title changed.

zaroth 6y ago

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.

Lammy 6y ago
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
- zaroth 6y ago
  No, they give you 30 days to return the equipment at which point they charge you late fees. The calls were totally superfluous.

htrp 6y ago

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.

magoon 6y ago

I never call until I’ve exhausted all self service options. I don’t need to be told every time “Did you know...you can find us online to X, Y, and Z?” Verizon customers are paying more because they expect more, so this move by them is disappointing.