Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

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For many of these systems, you actually are talking to a human. The person listens to what you say then directs your call as (hopefully) appropriate. They don't have a mic, so clarifying questions are limited to buttons they can push on a glorified soundboard -- in your case it sounds like there were several departments that handle different aspects of billing and they were trying to sort out where to route your call.

The guy you were talking to eventually just routed you to someone with the same job but who has a mic, because you weren't giving him anything to go on and all he'd have been able to do is push the button again to ask you the exact same question (and having a person do it who can at least vary the inflection of the question is less infuriating than seemingly being stuck in a chatbot's infinite loop).

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Source: have a friend who used to have this job. He has thankfully moved on to something less soul sucking than being a human literally pretending to be a robot.

That seems utterly nonsensical and dehumanizing. If you have a human greeter/operator, why not expose that to the customer? You are already paying for the human to be in the loop, why not benefit from the impression of a friendly human touch as well?

I'd love to know more about these operations, thanks for mentioning this.

I guess during the time the recording talks, they can listen to another call? So you end up having to hire less people.

Sadly I know very little more about it, other than being able to confirm that it really is dehumanizing. You're essentially being paid for your capability of performing simple natural language processing. The amount of courtesy that call-center people get is already pretty low, and bundle in that the frustrated person thinks they're talking to a robot that literally doesn't have feelings... he had some Bad Days (though he did say that you could let a lot of things slide by just reminding yourself of how comically nonsensical the whole situation is).

I'm just speculating here, but I suspect it means that the employee needs less training. All he needs is a quick flow-chart to route the calls. No training for how to talk to customers, no liability regarding things he might say, etc.

He was glad when he found another job.

> For many of these systems, you actually are talking to a human.

Is this practice widespread at all? I've worked at several contact center software companies with many customers and never once heard of this. It's always been automated IVR software controlling this. This sounds to my ears like maybe an outlier of a particularly awful contact center? I'd certainly pause before claiming this is how it works for "many of these systems".

That's actually a good question -- I don't know. My only window into this world was through him, and from his point of view it seemed widespread. I'll update my comment accordingly.

Edit: ahh I can no longer edit it :|

Wow, I'm sorry your friend had to go through that. This is the first time I've heard that this job actually exists!

It seems very strange to have a human who can listen but can't speak. I guess these companies think that by removing speech as a possibility, they're able to pay the employee less or something?

I think it's less about having to pay them less and more about less "customer interface" training, less concern about liability with regards to what the person might say, not having to worry about the potential stigma associated with a foreign accent, etc. But I'm just speculating here.

Weird! A Nuance license would be cheaper and works just as poorly.

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