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On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

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Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#351

Post by jstanley »

wenc wrote: post #290
technofiend wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, I suppose it depends on the business but at my Fortune 50 we're required to use "lowest logical airfare". You can force a choice of Southwest over United by choosing one airport over another, and there's enough wiggle room to let…

> But unless you're a highly placed executive no one travels on the company dime often enough to bother with air miles anyway This isn't really a true statement. Marketing and enterprise sales folks travel a lot on the company dime. I'm on the engineering and consulting staff in my company, and I travel a decent amount, mostly domestic. Most of our engineers do frequent on-sites. One might not be able to get status,…

> This isn't really a true statement.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about the company he works at, not the company you work at.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#352

Post by sametmax »

kirse wrote: post #316
atourgates wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something about air travel that makes it a uniquely terrible experience and drives me to participate in these programs. There is nothing I do in my life regularly where I'm more restricted, or more closely related to a rigid caste system than air travel. Every time you take a flight, for somewhere between 3 and 20 hours, you're told exactly where to stand, where to sit, what you can and can't wear, what you c…

Every time you take a flight, for somewhere between 3 and 20 hours, you're told exactly where to stand, where to sit, what you can and can't wear, what you can and can't carry. On the other hand, it no longer takes months to travel West and half your family generally doesn't die of dysentery on the way there.

Yes but you were not expected to travel.

Most people were merely moving from house to house, sometime town to town. It was not frequent, and everybody knew it would take time so there was not that much time pressure.

Today, a lot of people are expected to be able to travel hundreds of miles, regularly, in short period of times, with not that much rest between those times, and be on schedule. Schedule that is precise to a few hours.

Appart from nomads and a few merchants (again traveling a way slower pace, frequency and lower expectations), most people just stayed put.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#353

Post by golergka »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #25
soneil wrote: post #13

How's this a secret? I used to work in retail/service. Not something with data and metrics, just a mom'n'pop. But we knew our customers. We especially knew our regulars. And you did try not to piss off a regular. But from this I learnt that people will try to play their 'value' as a trump card when they want to complain. Do you know who I am, do you know how much I spend here, I come here every day, blah blah blah. T…

In my extremely limited experience, the people pulling out the "do you know who I am?" card are typically not regulars. They might think they are, but they're not. I'm a regular at a few places, and I treasure that status and the privilege that comes with it, and wouldn't go trying to fuck it up unless I was prepared to completely burn that bridge.

Also, probability of going into seriously heated argument is constant for each sale, and is a factor of a buyer (of a shop too, but we're only looking at one shop, so it's a constant). So, if this already has not hapenned enough times for a customer to become a regular, we can conclude that there's very low probability of this happening ever - i.e. people who become regulars do it because they're satisfied with the service, and it will probably stay that way.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#355

Post by vntok »

Karunamon wrote: post #274
vntok wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more you try to obfuscate your online sessions (eg: by disabling browser features, disabling JS, removing fonts, removing WebRTC, using the privacy-aware browser-of-the-day, etc. thus making your fingerprint even more unique), the more you stand out from the regular users crowd, the more automated tracking machines/algos get interested in you as an abnormal datapoint, the more you are paradoxically at risk of bei…

How exactly do they intend on fingerprinting me with no JS? They get my IP and referrer - that's it.

Just one example of CSS-only tracking. Does not require JS: https://github.com/jbtronics/CrookedStyleSheets

Other data that leak: User-Agent, Accept or Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding headers...

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#356

Post by blub »

notatoad wrote: post #322
mehrdadn wrote: post #91

> Zeta Global, whose clients include wireless carriers, generates scores using data points such as the number of times a customer has dialed a call center and whether that person has browsed a competitor’s website or searched certain keywords in the past few days. Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is th…

every time i hear about tracking like this, i start to get paranoid and think about trying to restrict my trackability. But then i remember that if i search for (to give last week's example) a new travel mug on amazon, and then buy a new travel mug on amazon, i continue getting "retargeting" ads from amazon for the exact same product for two weeks after purchasing it. If amazon can't figure out whether or not to adve…

They're going for repeat purchasers with those ads, someone explained it here on HN a while ago. It also makes them look silly / harmless which is a double win.

Looks to me that Amazon outsmarted you by so much, it overflowed and now you think you're outsmarting them :)

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#358

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mindslight wrote: post #287
Swizec wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It improves tracking by fisabling your ad blocker.

As someone who has used chromium incognito as a crutch, 100% this. Browsers need to be seriously redesigned with privacy (aka security) in mind. The javascript execution environment needs to be gutted to remove security leaks like screen/window size. And incompetently (/maliciously) designed APIs like websockets need to be thrown right out.

The main browser makers get huge incomes from advertising. That's not going to make them want to spend a lot on protecting users from advertising.

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#359

Post by pbhjpbhj »

lozaning wrote: post #266
philwelch wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political campaigns track voters on an individual level, correlating third party data with public voter rolls and using the data for microtargeting and analytics.

Any yet I've somehow been bombarded all week with spam sms from only the party who's candidates I do not intend to vote for. Anyone that could tie the website I visit to my phone number should be able to guess that easily enough.

Why would a party you do intend to vote for need to bombard you with advertising? Surely you're only going to get deluged with advertising of you're known not to vote for that party.

Or is reverse psychology!

Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line ...

Re: On Hold for 45 Minutes? It Might Be Your Secret Customer Score

#360

Post by pbhjpbhj »

solarkraft wrote: post #199
CamperBob2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A classic example from several years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... That was several years ago.

That's using all of her purchasing history. Knowing your customer has visited a competitor's website appears more difficult to me.

DNS providers often know all the websites an IP visited.
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