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 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.