Buh-Bye: Ranting and Raving about Voice Response
One of my pet peeves is synthetic-voice driven customer support telephone lines. I find myself shouting into these things: "Operator! Person! Someone! Anyone! I WANT TO TALK TO A HUMAN BEING!"
It is kind of cool knowing I'm talking to a computer, because I can rant, rave, and curse all I like without having to feel remorse at exhibiting inappropriate behavior before a mere human cog in the machine. (Instead, I'm exhibiting it to a machine cog in the machine, who will probably remember me detrimentally the next time I try to do a really tricky bit of programming!)
Somehow all my upset never results in the computer at the other end transferring me to a "customer service" representative. Which is, I suppose, the point of the whole thing.
Voice-response customer service lines were brought to mind by a message flashing on my DirectTV last night advertising that the DirectTV phone lines had "improved" by going down this path. (It's another, minor pet peeve of mine that DirectTV sees fit to signal some stupid message to me by flashing a light in my bedroom on the TV-satellite controller box. What nerve!)
This trend of automating customer service using software that "understands" what you say is probably good for companies in this business like Nuance. But pretty obviously it's not good for consumers. If you've ever been frustrated trying to get through one of these systems, you'll know what I mean. I'm all for self-service help mechanisms where appropriate, but this is the forte of the internet, not a telephone that I've picked up.
So what gives? In his glib bestseller The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman tells us (as if we didn't know) that outsourcing is here to stay. (Where tomorrow's lowest-cost outsource provider will be located is another question.)
Friedman, however, doesn't really pinpoint one of the main thrusts of outsourcing: many companies have come to believe that customer service is a cost center and a drain on their bottom lines. The less their customer service costs, and the more shabby their customer service, the better. These businesses are now marching to the tune of Wall Street's quarterly expectations, and do not realize that in the long term people do remember how they've been treated.
You can see an example of this disturbing trend in a voice-response customer service that places another obstacle in the way of getting through to a human being. It all reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit I happened to see recently. David Spade and Helen Hunt play flight attendants saying "Buh-Bye" to passengers leaving an airplane. No matter what the passenger wants—for example, information about a connecting flight—the response is always "Buh-Bye." It's hard to convey how funny this gets (I know it sounds like real life, and not particularly funny, but you have to see Spade and Hunt in action) with lines like, "I said Buh-Bye and your mouth is still flapping!"
Finally, when the rude flight attendants have dismissed the last passengers, Spade picks up the intercom and calls for a protective escort to get out of the terminal.
Spade plays—for laughs—a flight attendant so rude he'll need an armed body guard to protect him from his customers. So will all these companies that have relegated customer service to impenetrable automated systems and the back of beyond.
Posted by Harold Davis at April 4, 2006 10:05 AM
