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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

This sucks.

Google is an engineering company, but one has to believe that they wouldn't purposefully engineer a robot to be this foolish. I have to believe it's actually people you're dealing with, people who have been programmed to behave like computers (YOU MUST PASTE THIS AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH EMAIL).

It's frankly too banal and too non-sensical to be a robot programmed by Google; but in a way, a programmed customer service employee in a call center is a bit of a robot.

We should consider the impact repeated nonsense has on a persons ability to deal with situations in a fashion beyond rote memorization. We should consider the impact of dehumanizing folks in call centers. Google should try to understand how unique human interactions can make a contact center/email experience that much easier, instead of dehumanizing these moments for the sake of expediency.

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Indeed, dehumanization appears to be an important issue.

The most unusual occurence I had was with VFS Global (visa handling company) employees. Every one of them had a paper sticker with a number on their tie; and all refused to tell me their name (asked out of courtesy), insisting I refer to them by their number if I have the need.

Is that a common thing in the US/UK? All this looked distinctly dystopian, and mildly surreal, to me.

> Is that a common thing in the US/UK? All this looked distinctly dystopian, and mildly surreal, to me.

never ever seen that in the US. ever.

That is incredibly strange. I have to wonder what possible reason they could have for that?

You could go the Zappos route of actually empower customer service reps. But at the very least, I would expect Google to build better in house CRM tools to feed helpful content to the support reps rather than making them repeat themselves.

From what I've heard from friends at Google, internal tools like this have a notoriously hard time getting engineering resources. I wish they could turn it into a sexy machine learning project and actually get some resources on fixing this issue.

I believe that many of the customer service software solutions have what amount to pre-programmed macros. Eg they may have a 'greet' one saying "Hello ${NAME}, I will do everything I can to assist you." and another 'orderstatus' "I understand your message is about your order status."

The support rep can then chain together the macros for some or most of the response far quicker than they could ever type. And of course that increases their productivity (messages handled per hour) and possibly even has an effect on happy customers per hour although that is harder to measure and seems less of a interest.

The net result are email responses that are indistinguishable from robots, and I suspect the systems would take an initial stab at which macros should be used for a response.

The real problem is companies rarely seem to take the effort to work out why people used email or call centres instead of self service. For outsourced providers there is absolutely no incentive to do anything to reduce call volumes.

Joel also has a good article http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html

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