Hacker News Reader

Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

>Then, when the phone rings, the automated CallJoy agent answers, greets callers with a custom message and provides basic business information (like hours of operation).

Just what the world needs. More jabber before I can speak to a human. No, I don't want your hours of operation, unless you are closed. If you are open then I want (a) a human to answer; or (b) a message that says "Happy and Healthy Foods Here. Sorry we are on the phone at the moment. We estimate a wait time of 3 minutes. Please hold on, or press 1 to leave us a message."

Usually the amount of robo-chatter I get is so excessive that I have tuned out anyway.

View on HN

I mean, I do want hours of operation in one specific case—to know whether those hours have changed (i.e. are shorter) given that it's currently a holiday. Your regular hours probably show up when Googling your business name, but any holiday-specific hours won't.

Sadly, you probably won't update your IVR system with your holiday hours either. You always end up having to talk to a real person to find out. It's kind of ridiculous.

> Your regular hours probably show up when Googling your business name, but any holiday-specific hours won't.

they often do. Google is quite insistent on getting businesses to update their holiday hours for any common holidays, and when you look up business hours on a holiday you see the result of this - many businesses do update their holiday hours, and the business listing tells you whether the business owner has confirmed that the hours are correct for the holiday, or they have not updated the page for the holiday.

They do but it's worse than useless. For every time they have accurate holiday hours, they 10 times show me a bullshit warning that the hours may vary due to the holidays when a) I already know that and b) the business is open regular hours on some religious holiday that I don't observe.

You're mad that an interface shows a warning when the data isn't known to be accurate? What do you propose would be better?

simplicity would be better IMO. open source would be better. not changing up an app I already like would be better.

In many ways Gopher was better than the web, because a gopher client could make more decisions about how to present the data than the web, for which the presentation is mostly prescribed by the content provider.

what are you talking about? how does gopher or open source have any relation to the hours of operation that a business lists on their google maps page?

It’s about how the page is being overly helpful instead of giving me just the information I asked for.

A dynamic response IVR message would be fantastic. When I call, I usually care about today's hours. A shortened response such as "Thanks for calling Foo Café, open until 6pm today" or "Thanks for calling Foo Café, we open today at 10am" if the call is before opening hours, would be fantastic. Not so long that it's tedious and infuriating to sit through, but still prevents employees from having to handle such a repetitive task.

I wonder how often that's the case.

I noticed recently that the Target app does this.

When you launch it the phone geolocates and shows you a message at the top of the screen like "Target at Xyzzy opens today at 10am!" or "Target at Xyzzy is open now and closes at 9pm!" Super useful, and unobtrusive.

>For example, a hair salon owner can search how many times a day callers ask about “men’s haircut pricing” or “wedding hairstyles.”

Don't forget the obligatory creepiness that every single phone call is recorded & translated to text. CallJoy seems as much an AI training program as anything.

"2 to leave your number and receive a call back."

I tried that with T-Mobile one time. They called me back and asked me for my SSN, date of birth, ... . this was after I went through this process when I tried to call them and yes they were calling a T-Mobile number.

In 2011!

I said just think about what you're asking for and the representative pretended to not understand.

What is this madness? I will never use call back unless something changes.

> "Happy and Healthy Foods Here. Sorry we are on the phone at the moment. We estimate a wait time of 3 minutes. Please hold on, or press 1 to leave us a message."

You could even tighten that up a little more, depending on the politeness manner callers expect (e.g., maybe callers expect you to be all-business, and appreciate concise over apology).

And there should be something in every corporate charter that says any voice response system will never say two things that most organizations I phone always say: "Please listen carefully, as our menu items have recently changed", and "We're experiencing unusually high call volumes".

Nor do periodic jolting interruption of on-hold music, interrupting whatever you were thinking as you waited, making you think someone might be picking up, so you have to be ready to speak on-task, but then it says "Your call is important to us. Please remain on the line for the next available representative."

(Please. I and many others absolutely hate calling under even the best of conditions, and we wouldn't do it unless it was necessary. Don't try to get us to hang up, and don't make it more frustrating than it has to be.)

You'd be surprised how many people call to ask for location and time you close or open. It's significant.

Then it should state "Press 1 for hours of operation and location information."

I hate the way Chase makes me listen to "You can check your balance on the app!" messages a minimum of six times before I get to a human. If I wanted to use the app, or I wanted to know the balance, I would have used the app.

Two weeks ago I was logged in on my computer watching my bank account being drained while waiting on hold for the fraud department. (Seriously? Three transfers to get to the fraud department, Chase?) The whole time I kept getting told to use the app to check my balance.

Amex has a human pick up immediately. Just saying.

That's nice, except that Amex terminated my account for non-payment, then two months later sent back the payment check they lost saying they had no account to go with it.

My Dad pays by check. He spends a couple of hours each month going through his bills... writing checks... licking stamps.. okay, maybe not licking stamps.

I pay through my bank's online interface. Less chance of mail getting lost. Faster payment.

I was kicked out of Amex before it had online bill paying. There was a world before the internet.

Fair enough. For what its worth I don't have an Amex card either =).

Reminds me of this: https://despair.com/collections/builder/products/apathy

Maybe if we make it burdensome for customers to get ahold of us, maybe they'll stop calling.

Usually the amount of robo-chatter I get is so excessive that I have tuned out anyway.

It works as intended, why would you think they want you to talk to them?

Gotta love those menus where you try all the combinations and find out NONE of them lead to an operator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com