4 ms·

But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it w

But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs".

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
>Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. I have never seen customer service come up during a purchasing discussion outside of large corporate purchases. It's pretty firmly a "cost center" that MBAs try to optimize into being as cheap as possible. It is simply cheaper to outsource your support and make it obtuse/difficult to reach a person, basically only fulfilling the absolute bare minimum to not get sued.
jackmott 4y ago
Are you a real person?
drewg123 4y ago
How do you know the problem is solved, and the customer didn't just hang up in frustration?
WantonQuantum 4y ago
I’ve never encountered an automated phone system that can direct me to the manual for a product. Do you have an example of this? I have, however, encountered phone systems that make it literally impossible to talk to a person.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  A number of years ago, Tracfone realised it _would_ be a good thing for customers to be able to automatic'ly extend their end-of-service date rather than having to remember to buying airtime minutes they don't need (due to already having lots of unused minutes) just to prevent getting their number suspended. Tracfone also decided it should be possible to activate this feature using just your phone number and a credit card, without having to sign into the website. There wasn't even a way for customers to sign into anything! Years later, they added a possibility of customers signing into an online account. But doing so did not give access to payment information enter in the old no-sign-in system. The call-in help number's menu system also got changed sometime, such that it was no longer possible to talk to a person — all permutations of the menu tree, as well as fallbacks like "just press zero a few times" resulted in loops.The mandated contact number for the vendor on credit card bills also went to this menu system. The end result was that the only way to modify or cancel a recurring payment created under the old no-sign-in system seemed to be telling the credit card company to either refuse charges from Tracfone or to close the revolving account. Doing so would cause Tracfone to cancel your service (which might not be what either you or Tracfone wanted). And after they cancelled? The remnants of Tracfone automation would do two things: send your now-disabled phone occasional messages trying to entice you back, and keep submitting charges to the credit card company to be rejected. When the credit card's refuse-charges instruction expired after five years, Tracfone would resume taking payment, for a now unrecoverable (already reassigned) phone number, for an IMEI that had not appeared any network for years. On the upside, I know somebody who has no problems with current Tracfone.
marcinzm 4y ago
Solving a customer's problem does not directly make a company money. It may arguably avoid them losing potential future money but it doesn't make them money.
- r00fus 4y ago
  It builds/preserves your brand. A proper customer centric strategy relies on support to empower the sales/product teams (and vice-versa).
version_five 4y ago
Automated call centers save money by disincentivizing calling in, and by making people give up. Most people don't think about customer service or support when they are buying stuff. Actually solving the customers problem is way down the list of objectives for most phone systems. It's easy to see this by comparing the quality of phone support with the kind of market power a company has.
- fcarraldo 4y ago
  That is an interesting thought. Google, for most consumer products (and a good number of business ones) notoriously has next to no phone support at all. Is this an indication of being a market leader or of being a digital monopoly?
  - adriancr 4y ago
    Google for paid products has phone support. From a quick check, 2-3 min answer time for calls or chat from google one on cheapest plan. If you use the free option, the no support is given which is fair, you're not a customer
    - jen20 4y ago
      My experience of Google is that you can be the smallest (paying) customer or the largest enterprise, and the support is still trash.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Google is a leader in the tech playbook concept of cornering off your monopoly then treating your customers like shit. It's actually essential to any internet scale business model, because of the challenges of profitable serving so many people if you actually provide some kind of support. FWIW, google is better positioned to give shitty support because their users are the product anyway, and they grew organically into this. Support was never really part of the bargain (incidentally why I would never take google seriously for "business" services like gsuite or gcp because it's just not their culture). The more egregious examples are companies like uber (probably the worst) that actually have customers but think they can treat them as badly as google treats its users because it's a "tech" business. And you end up with supposedly "disruptive" businesses that just amount to "we're cheaper because we're self serve and don't offer support (and ignore laws)". But returning to your point and mine, the first step is "blitz-scaling" yourself a de-facto monopoly so you can get away with treating people badly.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Why? And how would they know? Customer service is a thing that maybe 10% of customers will interact with, and usually long after the product is purchased. It's very hard to evaluate up-front except through "brand" reputation.
adriancr 4y ago
I would argue automated call centers are a problem. If you end up needing to call someone since you've exhausted all other avenues you do want to talk to someone. At that point you will either: - waste a lot of time navigating prompts until you give up or reach a human. - automated call center will decide that prompt it gave you is the correct one and close your call... (had this happen a lot...) - automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close... And all metrics will show great for the company while you've given up or you start looking for other companies. Sure, lots of problems are solved by pointing to correct manual... although that would be an argument if product is user friendly enough. Now... on southwest airlines case... what manual could you look up to fix your cancelled flight?, how do you deal with that? Personally, I have had a cancelled flight on vacation. I could not find someone to talk to, automated prompts and calls closed. I booked another airline flight home and asked for a refund and compensation after the fact... This might not be an option in a lot of cases.
- teeray 4y ago
  > automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close I usually just talk complete nonsense to these prompts (but valid English sentences). That way the automation gives up when it can parse the sentences but can’t intuit meaning from them.
  - adriancr 4y ago
    last time i tried that i got a 'please repeat' a couple times and call closed. On the other hand, calling a bank and saying you'd like to report fraud to the prompt directs you really fast to customer support.
    - SnowHill9902 4y ago
      If you don’t really have a fraud case to report, you are actually reporting fraud on yourself. Think about it.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Not all products/services offer customers (or end users) a choice. Government, wired ISP, and health insurance are usually not a choice. A lot of times, mobile network and airline are effectively without choice too.
mattashii 4y ago
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! If a company's phone tree can make the consumer drop the call, it saves the company support worker time, regardless of whether the customer request was adequately served. For a company, the tradeoff where customer may be on the line for 10 hours in a call tree to get an answer a their question, or 10 minutes with a support agent, is fairly easy if you do not care about support. Phone trees do not automagically save anyones time, and especially not that of the customer.
acdha 4y ago
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Do you have any evidence for that claim? It seems unlikely that could be true since people need to call for things like repairs which a manual couldn’t help with and the intersection of people who don’t read manuals but will read them when prompted seems to leave out a lot of other people. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. This is leaving out a lot of obvious alternatives: products don’t fail often enough that people buy anything but the cheapest one (or the one that is featured more prominently in the store they have a promotional agreement with), companies have all cut their support staff so the ability to shop around is limited, the cost is shifted to the retailers or installers, some fraction of people give up and ask a friend or neighbor to help, etc.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
joshstrange 4y ago
This comment is so wrong it hurts. > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. It's a strategy to try to get you to go online, use an automated system, or annoy you until you give up. Trust me, if I'm calling into a business something has already gone horribly wrong. The automated line lying about "higher than normal call volume" (bullshit, hire more people) or "You can find the answers you need on our website" (nope, that's why I'm calling in) only pisses me off. It has never in my life provided information that I found useful. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! What does this even mean? Of course understaffing saves the company money. > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Yes, because I have a real choice on what electric, gas, water, internet company I use /s. For non-monopoly companies (growing increasingly rare) I often can't help that I currently have their product, I might buy an alternative (if one exists) next time around but "vote with your dollars" doesn't really work here well. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". No, it's not. It might be a metric for human workers but they literally don't care if it takes you 10x longer to find the answer as long as they don't have to pay a human it's a win. I've worked for companies with call centers and I assure you the only thing they care about is reducing that headcount, the outcome for the customer doesn't even rank.
- subradios 4y ago
  I agree with your story about the answers not being on the website. However, the users that represent the vast majority of support calls are very clearly not you. This is ok.
taneq 4y ago
Depends on the call centre. Some are great and answer your question straight away. Others are newspeak-laden smokescreens designed entirely to either funnel customers into doing what the company wants, or to waste their time until they give up. “Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”
maxbond 4y ago
My experience is that customer service is often trying to convince me that there is no problem or that my problem is my fault and there's nothing they can do about it. I bet many people here can sympathize with me when I say I know from experience that when customer service asks what operating system I use, the correct answer is "Windows," even though I run Linux, because I will never get help with any issue of I admit I'm using Linux (even for issues not at all related to my OS, like issues with my router - I don't call for Linux issues, because I can diagnose and fix those!). They will tell me Linux isn't supported... By their browser app or broadband service or what have you. The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you. (I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)
cycomanic 4y ago
> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. That assumes that there is a choice. Often enough there isn't. Just like there often enough isnt really competition. We have seen how "compeditors" have colluded to keep wages low before (the "gentlemens agreements between apple, Google etc execs). Funnily enough these agreements are never done to keep exec salaries down, might have something to do with the fact that they all sit on the same boards. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". Evidence required. I suspect the systems are actually designed for customers to just give up. This is especially obvious in services which customers only use rarely and thus price becomes the main purchase factor. Take airlines, which probably are the worst in terms of call wait times, people do not buy tickets enough to make purchase decisions based on service when something goes wrong, so service is atrocious, except for business customers and frequent flyers, who typically get significantly better service.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

>Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. I have never seen customer service come up during a purchasing discussion outside of large corporate purchases. It's pretty firmly a "cost center" that MBAs try to optimize into being as cheap as possible. It is simply cheaper to outsource your support and make it obtuse/difficult to reach a person, basically only fulfilling the absolute bare minimum to not get sued.

jackmott 4y ago

Are you a real person?

drewg123 4y ago

How do you know the problem is solved, and the customer didn't just hang up in frustration?

WantonQuantum 4y ago

I’ve never encountered an automated phone system that can direct me to the manual for a product. Do you have an example of this? I have, however, encountered phone systems that make it literally impossible to talk to a person.

IIsi50MHz 4y ago
A number of years ago, Tracfone realised it _would_ be a good thing for customers to be able to automatic'ly extend their end-of-service date rather than having to remember to buying airtime minutes they don't need (due to already having lots of unused minutes) just to prevent getting their number suspended. Tracfone also decided it should be possible to activate this feature using just your phone number and a credit card, without having to sign into the website. There wasn't even a way for customers to sign into anything! Years later, they added a possibility of customers signing into an online account. But doing so did not give access to payment information enter in the old no-sign-in system. The call-in help number's menu system also got changed sometime, such that it was no longer possible to talk to a person — all permutations of the menu tree, as well as fallbacks like "just press zero a few times" resulted in loops.The mandated contact number for the vendor on credit card bills also went to this menu system. The end result was that the only way to modify or cancel a recurring payment created under the old no-sign-in system seemed to be telling the credit card company to either refuse charges from Tracfone or to close the revolving account. Doing so would cause Tracfone to cancel your service (which might not be what either you or Tracfone wanted). And after they cancelled? The remnants of Tracfone automation would do two things: send your now-disabled phone occasional messages trying to entice you back, and keep submitting charges to the credit card company to be rejected. When the credit card's refuse-charges instruction expired after five years, Tracfone would resume taking payment, for a now unrecoverable (already reassigned) phone number, for an IMEI that had not appeared any network for years. On the upside, I know somebody who has no problems with current Tracfone.

marcinzm 4y ago

Solving a customer's problem does not directly make a company money. It may arguably avoid them losing potential future money but it doesn't make them money.

r00fus 4y ago
It builds/preserves your brand. A proper customer centric strategy relies on support to empower the sales/product teams (and vice-versa).

version_five 4y ago

Automated call centers save money by disincentivizing calling in, and by making people give up. Most people don't think about customer service or support when they are buying stuff. Actually solving the customers problem is way down the list of objectives for most phone systems. It's easy to see this by comparing the quality of phone support with the kind of market power a company has.

fcarraldo 4y ago
That is an interesting thought. Google, for most consumer products (and a good number of business ones) notoriously has next to no phone support at all. Is this an indication of being a market leader or of being a digital monopoly?
- adriancr 4y ago
  Google for paid products has phone support. From a quick check, 2-3 min answer time for calls or chat from google one on cheapest plan. If you use the free option, the no support is given which is fair, you're not a customer
  - jen20 4y ago
    My experience of Google is that you can be the smallest (paying) customer or the largest enterprise, and the support is still trash.
- version_five 4y ago
  Google is a leader in the tech playbook concept of cornering off your monopoly then treating your customers like shit. It's actually essential to any internet scale business model, because of the challenges of profitable serving so many people if you actually provide some kind of support. FWIW, google is better positioned to give shitty support because their users are the product anyway, and they grew organically into this. Support was never really part of the bargain (incidentally why I would never take google seriously for "business" services like gsuite or gcp because it's just not their culture). The more egregious examples are companies like uber (probably the worst) that actually have customers but think they can treat them as badly as google treats its users because it's a "tech" business. And you end up with supposedly "disruptive" businesses that just amount to "we're cheaper because we're self serve and don't offer support (and ignore laws)". But returning to your point and mine, the first step is "blitz-scaling" yourself a de-facto monopoly so you can get away with treating people badly.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Why? And how would they know? Customer service is a thing that maybe 10% of customers will interact with, and usually long after the product is purchased. It's very hard to evaluate up-front except through "brand" reputation.

adriancr 4y ago

I would argue automated call centers are a problem. If you end up needing to call someone since you've exhausted all other avenues you do want to talk to someone. At that point you will either: - waste a lot of time navigating prompts until you give up or reach a human. - automated call center will decide that prompt it gave you is the correct one and close your call... (had this happen a lot...) - automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close... And all metrics will show great for the company while you've given up or you start looking for other companies. Sure, lots of problems are solved by pointing to correct manual... although that would be an argument if product is user friendly enough. Now... on southwest airlines case... what manual could you look up to fix your cancelled flight?, how do you deal with that? Personally, I have had a cancelled flight on vacation. I could not find someone to talk to, automated prompts and calls closed. I booked another airline flight home and asked for a refund and compensation after the fact... This might not be an option in a lot of cases.

teeray 4y ago
> automated call center asks you to state your issue, does speech to text, does a stupid prompt and close I usually just talk complete nonsense to these prompts (but valid English sentences). That way the automation gives up when it can parse the sentences but can’t intuit meaning from them.
- adriancr 4y ago
  last time i tried that i got a 'please repeat' a couple times and call closed. On the other hand, calling a bank and saying you'd like to report fraud to the prompt directs you really fast to customer support.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    If you don’t really have a fraud case to report, you are actually reporting fraud on yourself. Think about it.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Not all products/services offer customers (or end users) a choice. Government, wired ISP, and health insurance are usually not a choice. A lot of times, mobile network and airline are effectively without choice too.

mattashii 4y ago

acdha 4y ago

> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Do you have any evidence for that claim? It seems unlikely that could be true since people need to call for things like repairs which a manual couldn’t help with and the intersection of people who don’t read manuals but will read them when prompted seems to leave out a lot of other people. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. This is leaving out a lot of obvious alternatives: products don’t fail often enough that people buy anything but the cheapest one (or the one that is featured more prominently in the store they have a promotional agreement with), companies have all cut their support staff so the ability to shop around is limited, the cost is shifted to the retailers or installers, some fraction of people give up and ask a friend or neighbor to help, etc.

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

joshstrange 4y ago

This comment is so wrong it hurts. > But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. It's a strategy to try to get you to go online, use an automated system, or annoy you until you give up. Trust me, if I'm calling into a business something has already gone horribly wrong. The automated line lying about "higher than normal call volume" (bullshit, hire more people) or "You can find the answers you need on our website" (nope, that's why I'm calling in) only pisses me off. It has never in my life provided information that I found useful. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! What does this even mean? Of course understaffing saves the company money. > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. Yes, because I have a real choice on what electric, gas, water, internet company I use /s. For non-monopoly companies (growing increasingly rare) I often can't help that I currently have their product, I might buy an alternative (if one exists) next time around but "vote with your dollars" doesn't really work here well. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". No, it's not. It might be a metric for human workers but they literally don't care if it takes you 10x longer to find the answer as long as they don't have to pay a human it's a win. I've worked for companies with call centers and I assure you the only thing they care about is reducing that headcount, the outcome for the customer doesn't even rank.

subradios 4y ago
I agree with your story about the answers not being on the website. However, the users that represent the vast majority of support calls are very clearly not you. This is ok.

taneq 4y ago

Depends on the call centre. Some are great and answer your question straight away. Others are newspeak-laden smokescreens designed entirely to either funnel customers into doing what the company wants, or to waste their time until they give up. “Thanks for calling $corp, press 1 to pay a bill or 2 to give us a 5 star rating. Press 3 to hear these options again.”

maxbond 4y ago

My experience is that customer service is often trying to convince me that there is no problem or that my problem is my fault and there's nothing they can do about it. I bet many people here can sympathize with me when I say I know from experience that when customer service asks what operating system I use, the correct answer is "Windows," even though I run Linux, because I will never get help with any issue of I admit I'm using Linux (even for issues not at all related to my OS, like issues with my router - I don't call for Linux issues, because I can diagnose and fix those!). They will tell me Linux isn't supported... By their browser app or broadband service or what have you. The less connected you are to a real person, the more true this is. Email is the worst. If you include any detail remotely atypical, they will latch right on to it. It's not like writing a ticket where if you include everything you think might be relevant, it will be appreciated and used to troubleshoot in good faith. It's more like they're building a case against you and any extraneous information you include will be used to achieve a summary judgement against you. (I've had lots of great customer service experiences with smaller businesses and startups, over email and phone calls, but for giant organizations it's a terrible, adversarial process that often doesn't resolve my issue.)

cycomanic 4y ago

> But automated call centers do save the customer time. 9 times out of 10 a user problem is easily remediated by pointing the user to the correct manual. > If it wasn't, phone trees and other pre-tech phone routing would never save the company money at all! > Customers would buy products with customer service that actually solved their problem instead. That assumes that there is a choice. Often enough there isn't. Just like there often enough isnt really competition. We have seen how "compeditors" have colluded to keep wages low before (the "gentlemens agreements between apple, Google etc execs). Funnily enough these agreements are never done to keep exec salaries down, might have something to do with the fact that they all sit on the same boards. > Customer service solving the customer problem in the fastest possible time is the metric, and if humans were better at it - you could still hire less humans and "save labor costs". Evidence required. I suspect the systems are actually designed for customers to just give up. This is especially obvious in services which customers only use rarely and thus price becomes the main purchase factor. Take airlines, which probably are the worst in terms of call wait times, people do not buy tickets enough to make purchase decisions based on service when something goes wrong, so service is atrocious, except for business customers and frequent flyers, who typically get significantly better service.