This is nothing new. When i worked for a shady video game repair company in the early 2000's, the (male) boss would play 3 (female) customer service roles and know exactly what they were typing even back in the early days before facebook.
Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
11–20 of 174 posts
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#12At work, the assumption is that every non-corp web site has a key logger built in. A corp extension monitors (key logs) all input on non-corp sites, checking if any credentials are accidentally typed. If they are, you're notified immediately on the last key press and have to change your credentials within 7 days of the incident. I think this is a reasonable idea for security, and helps prevent some phishing schemes.
[deleted]
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#13I've stood behind a support guy and watched it, it can be hilarious when you see someone type out a horrible rant, then delete it and send thanks.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#14When doing support over chat it is nice to see ahead of time what they are saying to allow for a faster response.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#15This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who allows their browser to run all the Javascript that companies want it to (of course, assuming they have a decent understanding of the web to begin with, which is a huge limiting factor). Reading what you type in real time isn't even as invasive as most companies go, when they commonly track your cursor movements, the size of your window, what extensions you have, make attemp…
Even with JS disabled you can still get a lot of these via CSS. Sadly none of these technologies were designed with privacy in mind.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#16Reminds me of a similar debate my friends had when Google Wave first came out.
But Google Wave was up front about it, and both parties can see what each other is typing.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#17I don't have any problem with this. It highlights a lack of user education, if they expect their typed input to a website to be private.
It reminds me of the "talk" (and ytalk, ntalk) programs, where all parties can see in real-time what the others are typing. It's a cool technology that, unfortunately, is not used on the web.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#18I sometimes assume this is true and use it to my advantage by typing up a scathing rebuke venting frustration, only to delete and type a respectful query. I don't know for sure, but sometimes I get goodies in the form of gift cards and such and I don't know if this is an effort to placate me or not.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#19I always suspected this. Particularly when you're typing something long-winded, and the agent's response is a bit too quick for having to read it all. Although, this will certainly depend on the Chat software used. Back when we used Olark at our company, there was no preview available, although we could "co-browse" and redirect the user's webpage, which was helpful in some cases.
We (Olark) specifically decided not to implement the "read-ahead" or "sneak-peak" feature because we thought it was creepy and broke customer expectations. When you are typing a message to customer service as a customer you should have a chance to compose your thoughts, and should have an expectation of privacy in whatever you are writing before hitting enter.
I like that a lot. It is creepy, imho.
There's been more than a few times where I was up late, on a chat support, and quite upset about something or other... and decided to re-write my message before hitting the "Send" button. Composing your thoughts is valuable...
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#20I'm confused why this is news or surprising? At least for the audience here. I remember plugins for various IM clients would do the same thing in a chat window some decades ago. And I remember my days as a sysop in the good old single line dial up BBS days. You could watch users browse and type all the way back in the mid-80's and I'm sure this has existed about as long as multi-user computers have. If you're typing…
You meant Pidgin's modes? It has methods to guess when a user was typing, but not the content.