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> Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often s

> Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said. This was almost certainly his company's own fault. In every call center I've seen, the call center employees hated it, but they were given brainless generic scripts to follow by some quality assurance team who would punish them for any deviation or expression of genuine personality. Then they'd be provided with flowlists designed to make it possible for any idiot pulled off the street to do the job with zero training and to make call center employees easier to replace at the drop of the hat. The lack of training and over-reliance on flows meant that any time workers ran into something their flowlist didn't account for, they'd have no idea what to do. Honestly, call center work seems brutal and cruel. It's so metrics driven that companies treat their employees like robots anyway. Add in all the abuse the employees take from angry customers and it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely. AI can have them.

jstarfish 3y ago
> call center work seems brutal and cruel [...] it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely They are sadistic in the most literal sense-- the conditions you have to put up with are directly lifted from the pages of any mental/emotional sadomasochism tutorial. You're nitpicked over everything and held to conflicting standards that are impossible to meet, and constantly threatened with firing. They want calls resolved without escalation, but you can't spend more than n minutes on the phone to do it. Here's a half-complete KB from 10 years ago to reference. You say good riddance, but these jobs are the best some rural communities can hope for. They paid 3x anything else in the area (a whopping $11/hr back in 2006). Next best thing was Walmart ($8-9). Everything else was minimum wage. Eliminate jobs like this and new opportunities for an unskilled labor force do not replace them.
JohnFen 3y ago
> it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely. That's a strong argument indeed. I wish it didn't come with the cost of AI doing this work, though. I can't think of how this won't result in even worse support than is traditional.

jstarfish 3y ago

> call center work seems brutal and cruel [...] it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely They are sadistic in the most literal sense-- the conditions you have to put up with are directly lifted from the pages of any mental/emotional sadomasochism tutorial. You're nitpicked over everything and held to conflicting standards that are impossible to meet, and constantly threatened with firing. They want calls resolved without escalation, but you can't spend more than n minutes on the phone to do it. Here's a half-complete KB from 10 years ago to reference. You say good riddance, but these jobs are the best some rural communities can hope for. They paid 3x anything else in the area (a whopping $11/hr back in 2006). Next best thing was Walmart ($8-9). Everything else was minimum wage. Eliminate jobs like this and new opportunities for an unskilled labor force do not replace them.

JohnFen 3y ago

> it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely. That's a strong argument indeed. I wish it didn't come with the cost of AI doing this work, though. I can't think of how this won't result in even worse support than is traditional.