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I hate telephones

jameshfisher.com

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Re: I hate telephones

#171

Post by fivre »

dataker wrote: post #49

It's not just customers. I manage teams of support engineers/agents. They will do anything to avoid a phone call. Indeed, almost all the time, phone calls lead nowhere, only to emotional distress. If you have a really serious issue, you need to escalate to an actual software/platform engineer, and that's something that takes hours, if not days.

Phone calls in isolation are terrible. I've worked as support for both older and newer service providers. For the older provider, calls reached support agents with all the customer's information readily available, and support agents had easy means to invite customers to screen sharing sessions, so they could see what we were looking at and we could discuss it together.

That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions.

With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent.

No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.

Re: I hate telephones

#172

Post by drewmol »

paulie_a wrote: post #163
kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

If you ever move. Make sure to go to the Post office and fill out the change of address there. If you do it online you are required to grant the USPS permission to sell your phone number. I recently moved and immediately found the number of spam calls increase drastically. From 1-2 a week to ten a day.

Just curious where you got this information? I did it online a few years ago and iirc I was able to opt out of all the spammy 'covienience' services offered by USPS affiliates

Re: I hate telephones

#173

Post by figurehe4d »

izacus wrote: post #65
kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

20 spam calls per day? That sounds like torture... is there really no body in USA that would prevent that from happening? (I've never received a spam call on my now 20 year old phone number.)

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way, the ones that DO give you the option to be 'do not call' will forward your number to other spammers, actually increasing the spam calls you get. Do not ask them to put you on the d-n-c list!

Here's what does work (in my experience): answer the call, but say nothing, heck, mute your phone mic if you have to. Just give them silence. I'm not sure if there's some 'person on the other end' detection algorithm or what, but I went from 10-15 spam calls a day to 1 every few days. It took a little while, but it worked. Just don't answer strange numbers with a 'hello?', if someone's trying to reach you, they'll usually say it first.

Re: I hate telephones

#174

Post by astura »

paulie_a wrote: post #163
kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

If you ever move. Make sure to go to the Post office and fill out the change of address there. If you do it online you are required to grant the USPS permission to sell your phone number. I recently moved and immediately found the number of spam calls increase drastically. From 1-2 a week to ten a day.

Oh, FFS, no they don't.

What they do is notify companies that already have your address of your new address. So (for example) your phone company and your magazine subscriptions are told of your new address.

They don't sell or disclose phone numbers.

There is also no way to opt out.

Re: I hate telephones

#176

Post by amelius »

kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

If everybody who received spam calls wasted 5 minutes of the caller's time, then the whole problem would not exist.

Re: I hate telephones

#177

Post by simonbarker87 »

anotherevan wrote: post #111

I’m probably a bit the other way in that I get frustrated with text messages going back and forth and back and forth when a one minute phone call will sort everything out far more efficiently. Probably also has something to do with hating tapping away at tiny virtual keyboard on the phone, too. My teenage daughter seems very reluctant to make a phone call. Watching her try and organise something with her friends driv…

I agree, I really dislike the move to everything by text. Text has it’s place for communication (HN is a perfect example) however it is far easier to work through something even remotely complicated with voice instead of text. We speak much faster than we type, we can add inflexions and tone to convey meaning in a way that text can’t (although emoji help) and, most importantly, there are no typos when talking.

My job requires interacting with lots of people, be it customers, suppliers, investors I can easily interact with 100 people a day who are not onsite and by mid afternoon I look forward to those I can deal with on the phone - even just for two minutes as it’s a break from typing. I often thank suppliers for calling when I answer as I know it’s a chance for some wider bandwidth communications that won’t require numerous back and forths.

Re: I hate telephones

#178

Post by jimmaswell »

mikestew wrote: post #35
Trav5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but same here. Born in the 80s and only our parents have landlines. Though my mobile and office phone receive far more spam calls than real calls. My Google voice line gets a hand full of robot voicemails per day. The "Should I answer?" app blocks a lot, but not all.

Born in the 60s, old enough to be your parent: no landline at our house in I don’t know how many years. We both have a phone that’s nearby all of the time, what would we do with a landline except as a spam vector? And my parents, who are old enough to be your grandparents? Ditched the landline a couple of years ago. I have no idea what the demographics look like for hardlines anymore.

It's necessary if your house has poor cellular reception.

Re: I hate telephones

#179

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

projektir wrote: post #85

I recently had to spend a lot of time on the phone to set something important up. It was a very frustrating experience. I would call them, and be met with a robocall. The robocall would not really have a section for what I actually needed to do, so I would stumble around and often end up at the wrong person. Often we were both confused and it wasn't clear what was going on. Every time I called, it's a different perso…

At this point, I have to assume that it's deliberate at some level. There is so much low-hanging fruit for improving the customer experience that it's no longer plausible to me that most call centers have that as a genuine goal.

Re: I hate telephones

#180

Post by simonbarker87 »

msangi wrote: post #141
blfr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no trouble getting to a human in a reasonable time (under 10 minutes) as a regular customer for services like cable/Internet, mobile, building maintenance. And for business services I usually have a real person's card and a direct phone number to them.

I would find "under 10 minutes" to be a quite annoying amount of time, especially if I'm paying for them the premium rate that some customer services have.

I easily waste 10 minutes per online support chat waiting for the agent to deal with the 4 other cases they are on, fixing my typos because typing is worse than speaking and dealing with the context switching that comes from doing other stuff whilst waiting for them to respond.

Much better to start the call, get through the menu and then put my phone on the desk either on speaker or with a hands free set and doing something else whilst waiting for them, once I get the person on the phone I can then focus on the call and not other things.

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