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> Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online. It's so interesting to me how generational this is, and how it cha

> Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online. It's so interesting to me how generational this is, and how it changed so quickly. I used to work in something tangentially related to real estate. The sellers/landlords tended to all be older (50+, this was about 10 years ago), while the renters/some buyers tended to be millennials and younger. The older folks went apoplectic when we tried to move more communication onto our online platform: "I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone - if they couldn't complete the whole transaction online they were much more likely to bail. Not making a judgment about either approach, really just thought it was interesting how stark the divide was and how it changed so quickly.

ghaff 3y ago
Trust me. Every few weeks I hear a complaint from my dad that he can't just go into an office or directly get someone on the phone to make some change. (And I'm certainly not a millennial.) At some level he just resents he needs to do this stuff on a computer. I'm annoyed when I can't reach someone in the event of a problem but I am totally cool with transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system. I do talk with certain advisors in person and we even share various personal info about what's going on--but most routine things are email.
- eastof 3y ago
  I guess I'm against the trend since I'm a gen z who also vastly prefers a phone call to online. Computer systems IME are riddled with dark patterns, bugs, ads, and terrible UIs that make it nearly impossible to figure out where to go to solve my problem. Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"? Sure. A random travel booking. A stock purchase. Checking my account balance anywhere. These are all things that took visiting travel agents, brokers, and waiting for delayed monthly statements previously. We made a lot of phone calls and went into offices for multiple hours to handle things.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      I think your examples also highlight the issue at hand - the automated systems are great when they work, but when they don't work it means that there are now a lot fewer real humans that can solve your problem. Take travel bookings. When I know where I'm going and have relatively firm dates, I'd much prefer the ease of online booking. However, when I'm more in the mood of "I want to go on vacation to country X, but I don't know a lot about that country or what the best places to stay/visit are" I've found myself wasting a ton of time on endless travel websites trying to get a better "feel" for what I want to visit. About 15 years ago I went on a long trip to Italy, and the travel agent was invaluable. These days I'm not even sure travel agents like that exist any more. Somewhat tangential (or ominous) aside, I've found ChatGPT to be really the best tool for travel planning/travel ideas when you're in that "I have a general idea of the kind of vacation I want" mood.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I do do trips through specialized agents, sometimes with guides sometimes without, so yeah I don’t depend on general travel agents in general.There are private trips for someone going through some of these companies but they’re probably pretty expensive
      - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
        Time was, that travel agent was pretty much your only option, unless you happened to have extremely well-traveled friends or family who could make an itinerary with you. Even finding a list of which airlines fly from where to where and the visa processes was a major hassle. Let alone making a connection at the other end. How would you even get a regional Italian train timetable without the internet? At least it would take an afternoon on the phone. And if your local agents weren't good at it, or they only knew about, say, Spain in detail and not Italy, you'd be pretty out of luck.
xmprt 3y ago
I'm not sure you can call it a change of opinion when the older generation grew up where phone was the only option. So it sounds more like each generation prefers the method that they grew up with. If in the future everyone ends up doing work in the "Metaverse" for some reason then I'm sure the current online generation would hate it even more. I can't think of a good reason to do anything in the metaverse but maybe the next generation will find a way to make it work. For similar reasons, a lot of people on Hackernews prefer reading articles rather than watching videos whereas a lot of newer programmers learn a lot from videos more so than books and articles.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Sure, of course. But I also think (and I'll just speak for myself) that the less people have real, 1-1 conversations with someone else, the more uncomfortable people get with interacting with others - people just get "out of practice" for lack of a better term. There is a restaurant in Austin, El Arroyo, that's famous for their funny signs. In the midst of the pandemic they had a sign that said "Once this pandemic is over and we start seeing people in person again, we're all going to be awkward as fuck." It's a general sentiment that I agree with - the more we get used to "virtual" interactions, the less comfortable we are with synchronous, person-to-person interactions.
version_five 3y ago
Communication preference is one thing. But what a lot of modern "online" support is really about is preventing people from getting support and forcing them into a dark pattern doing what the company wants and not what they want. If I could unsubscribe, deal with billing errors, resolve complaints, etc online I'd love it. But most support systems try and trap you in some Kafkaesque faq hell that never lets you get near something that would solve your problem. That's the real reason people want a person.
- smeej 3y ago
  It's ironic, but at the company where I provide support (50-ish employees), one of the most common things I have to tell people is that they actually have to sign in and cancel their memberships themselves. They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves. Can you really blame them? So many of us have gotten used to companies doing everything they can to make unsubscribing as difficult as possible, I'm not surprised their first instinct is to email.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    And your response it to say it's the user's fault? The email flow is click on the "contact us" email that's at the bottom of every page, it opens in gmail, the ask to cancel and hit send. Some time later they get a notification that it's done. They never even had to sign in. They're authenticated by virtue of it being sent from the email associated with the account. The web flow is signing in, hunting around your app for the account page, and then hunting around that for how to cancel. Sending an email works for every service in the same way. Finding the account management page is different for every website.
  - 3y ago
rchaud 3y ago
> "I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone This works when the things you are purchasing are uncomplicated, like a toaster or a streaming subscription. Younger folks will realize that big-ticket purchases are precisely the kind of things that you will want to have some kind of human involved on the other side for when things go wrong.

ghaff 3y ago

Trust me. Every few weeks I hear a complaint from my dad that he can't just go into an office or directly get someone on the phone to make some change. (And I'm certainly not a millennial.) At some level he just resents he needs to do this stuff on a computer. I'm annoyed when I can't reach someone in the event of a problem but I am totally cool with transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system. I do talk with certain advisors in person and we even share various personal info about what's going on--but most routine things are email.

eastof 3y ago
I guess I'm against the trend since I'm a gen z who also vastly prefers a phone call to online. Computer systems IME are riddled with dark patterns, bugs, ads, and terrible UIs that make it nearly impossible to figure out where to go to solve my problem. Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?
- ghaff 3y ago
  >Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"? Sure. A random travel booking. A stock purchase. Checking my account balance anywhere. These are all things that took visiting travel agents, brokers, and waiting for delayed monthly statements previously. We made a lot of phone calls and went into offices for multiple hours to handle things.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I think your examples also highlight the issue at hand - the automated systems are great when they work, but when they don't work it means that there are now a lot fewer real humans that can solve your problem. Take travel bookings. When I know where I'm going and have relatively firm dates, I'd much prefer the ease of online booking. However, when I'm more in the mood of "I want to go on vacation to country X, but I don't know a lot about that country or what the best places to stay/visit are" I've found myself wasting a ton of time on endless travel websites trying to get a better "feel" for what I want to visit. About 15 years ago I went on a long trip to Italy, and the travel agent was invaluable. These days I'm not even sure travel agents like that exist any more. Somewhat tangential (or ominous) aside, I've found ChatGPT to be really the best tool for travel planning/travel ideas when you're in that "I have a general idea of the kind of vacation I want" mood.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I do do trips through specialized agents, sometimes with guides sometimes without, so yeah I don’t depend on general travel agents in general.There are private trips for someone going through some of these companies but they’re probably pretty expensive
    - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      Time was, that travel agent was pretty much your only option, unless you happened to have extremely well-traveled friends or family who could make an itinerary with you. Even finding a list of which airlines fly from where to where and the visa processes was a major hassle. Let alone making a connection at the other end. How would you even get a regional Italian train timetable without the internet? At least it would take an afternoon on the phone. And if your local agents weren't good at it, or they only knew about, say, Spain in detail and not Italy, you'd be pretty out of luck.

xmprt 3y ago

I'm not sure you can call it a change of opinion when the older generation grew up where phone was the only option. So it sounds more like each generation prefers the method that they grew up with. If in the future everyone ends up doing work in the "Metaverse" for some reason then I'm sure the current online generation would hate it even more. I can't think of a good reason to do anything in the metaverse but maybe the next generation will find a way to make it work. For similar reasons, a lot of people on Hackernews prefer reading articles rather than watching videos whereas a lot of newer programmers learn a lot from videos more so than books and articles.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Sure, of course. But I also think (and I'll just speak for myself) that the less people have real, 1-1 conversations with someone else, the more uncomfortable people get with interacting with others - people just get "out of practice" for lack of a better term. There is a restaurant in Austin, El Arroyo, that's famous for their funny signs. In the midst of the pandemic they had a sign that said "Once this pandemic is over and we start seeing people in person again, we're all going to be awkward as fuck." It's a general sentiment that I agree with - the more we get used to "virtual" interactions, the less comfortable we are with synchronous, person-to-person interactions.

version_five 3y ago

Communication preference is one thing. But what a lot of modern "online" support is really about is preventing people from getting support and forcing them into a dark pattern doing what the company wants and not what they want. If I could unsubscribe, deal with billing errors, resolve complaints, etc online I'd love it. But most support systems try and trap you in some Kafkaesque faq hell that never lets you get near something that would solve your problem. That's the real reason people want a person.

smeej 3y ago
It's ironic, but at the company where I provide support (50-ish employees), one of the most common things I have to tell people is that they actually have to sign in and cancel their memberships themselves. They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > They just fire off an email rather that investing even four seconds into typing the same message into the Support Center or just looking at their Account page and doing it themselves. Can you really blame them? So many of us have gotten used to companies doing everything they can to make unsubscribing as difficult as possible, I'm not surprised their first instinct is to email.
- Spivak 3y ago
  And your response it to say it's the user's fault? The email flow is click on the "contact us" email that's at the bottom of every page, it opens in gmail, the ask to cancel and hit send. Some time later they get a notification that it's done. They never even had to sign in. They're authenticated by virtue of it being sent from the email associated with the account. The web flow is signing in, hunting around your app for the account page, and then hunting around that for how to cancel. Sending an email works for every service in the same way. Finding the account management page is different for every website.
- 3y ago

rchaud 3y ago

> "I always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone This works when the things you are purchasing are uncomplicated, like a toaster or a streaming subscription. Younger folks will realize that big-ticket purchases are precisely the kind of things that you will want to have some kind of human involved on the other side for when things go wrong.