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Comment by nonstopdev | Hacker News Reader

Working in the industry, lots of companies rely on outsourced work through Business Process Outsourcers. Basically you are calling Target or another company and in their internal system probably run by Avaya or Cisco on ancient hardware and only can process limited inputs like DTMF/Touch and a tree format. When you transfer to a person, that agent works in a different region/office/company and on a different system. Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are and chances are have a different system that sees a limited set of information to handle your call.

Telephony is a cost center for most companies and the work to build clean experiences for callers is not a priority so a lot of companies have these broken systems and spending money maintenance to keep them running instead of understanding how a proper experience for someone helps their business and brand.

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> Telephony is a cost center for most companies

This is the key here.

> Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are

This really depends on the capabilities of the system and the willingness of the company to improve their CX.

For example, short info like customer name, ticket/account/order number, can easily be passed via text-to-speech, through the phone, to the agent on the line, before connecting the customer.

But why do they collect your information through the IVR in the first place, if they can't pass it to the agent?

When I did Comcast phone support it was common to have different call centers and queues for different regions, each region has different internal tools owing to differing networks during acquisitions so only agents with the right tools and accounts would be able to handle certain customers. Our center handled multiple regions but agents would usually be trained to handle just one. Usually the IVR will make cursory account billing and outage checks and then forward the call to the appropriate location.

I also had the displeasure of working for Comcast in phone support before I went back to school and this is definitely part of the reason.

Multiple completely different decrepit and kafkaesque billing systems because they were too lazy or incompetent to properly migrate customers over to a unified modern one. IMO, one of the reasons Comcast has had notoriously bad customer support is because their internal systems were so complicated that even reps who wanted to help might have just given up and told you they fixed the issue to get you off the phone.

You may also find agents don't trust the supplied information, even if they have access to it.

I suppose it also let's the entity running the IVR to monitor and log things themselves. Now they know what you called about, and to which third party they directed your call to. If the first party runs the post call questionnaire, they might get full loop feedback on how their contractor is handling calls; from the end user an not the contractor.

From their perspective even if they can't pass it on, making you provide it as early as possible before you've reached a human ensures you'll have it ready when the human requests it.

How many callers just hang up at the automated first query for the information?

Having recently dealt with some brutal rental car phone support situations, I'm convinced these companies prioritize getting callers to just give up with the minimum of resources expended on their part.

Should you actually reach the live person they want you locked and loaded to not waste their time waiting.

I hate the future.

To ensure you have the information available at the time of calling. Account number lookups is a waste of time/money for them. They don’t care about the CX part enough. In some cases, they hope that prompted an “oh forget about it” moment.

It’s also a highly metric driven industry. They may have a goal that each agent has an average call length of 3 minutes. But when they implemented that goal the agents pushed back on management about how it takes 3 minutes just to look up an account. So as a quick fix/hack they put up an automated screen to force the customer be prepared.

Also it’s like a captcha in that it prevents ddos of the phone lines.

Because a call center is a cost center, is even more of a reason to make it as efficient as possible.

I’m not a call center/contact flow designer expert by any means. But I do work on cloud based call center design and integrations occasionally.

Yeah it’s weird because you could definitely do some kind of data transfer with SIP headers.

Yeah that’s kind of out of my domain. I was trying to avoid hawking my employer’s product. I’ve created call center solutions with Amazon Connect. With that, you can do basically any type of integration via a Lambda.

You can integrate with Salesforce and have a ticket with all of the information automatically pop up on screen by the time the call is transferred to a human.

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