At one call center in the Philippines, workers help Americans with diabetes or neurological conditions troubleshoot devices that monitor their health. Sometimes they get pressing calls: elderly patients who are alone and experiencing a medical emergency.
I recently had a good experience with one of these where I was able to schedule an appointment for a contractor. They actually repeated my info back to me to make sure it was correct and I understood it.
So many times receptionists are either hard to understand or make a fuck up on some simple task.
Soon we will reach peak enshitification
I coached my grandma to just repeat “I want to talk to a human operator, please” over and over until she got through. It worked about 70% of the time but some are nearly impenetrable.
I called Comcast and it was horrible
human, operator, GET HUMAN, person, technician, for fucks sake! Bomb? Give me a fucking human!
Nope, nothin, mashing 0 on the keypad also did nothing.
I build call centers.
When we design the call flows, those are the first tings we disable. You can tell a company at least slightly cares about their customer base if they actually do allow you to escalate to a human without a ton of effort. Most don’t, and want to shove “AI” in front of everything, so they can hire even less people in low-cost markets. Offshoring wasn’t cheap enough for these
leechescompanies, now they want AI to replace those folks making starvation wages to get yelled at all day.And sometimes, these solutions work well. Most of the time, they work just well enough to not have people quitting their service in frustration.
So, the Klarna pattern?
They literally tried this last time and called it “AI.” They used Siri clones to replace receptionists but they sucked and that’s why call centers became the norm.
Hmmm years back they were using mturk and underpaying for a bit.
But the ai is good for like 95% of questions people ask.
If I’m going to have to talk to a computer just put it on a fucking website. There are 0 circumstances where I ever want to speak to a machine.
Buddy if you want to talk to an AI be my guest but don’t act like 19/20 people find them useful as phone receptionists unless you are going to post a detailed study to that effect. 👍
This won’t go well.
Its either this or people in India. Once one company does it the price of that good falls and the CPI prints more money entrenching the shrinkflation.
fuck yeah!
