What an amazing opportunity for trolling support staff :)
It is. But... you're actually going to want help from them, so trolling them might not be in your best interest. A related maxim: "Never be rude to an airline gate agent."
Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
31–40 of 174 posts
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#33I'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…
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You meant Pidgin's modes? It has methods to guess when a user was typing, but not the content.
Thought it was Pidgin, but might have been ICQ... it was a long, long time ago that I used any of these... can't remember specifically; maybe even MSN via Pidgin. Seems like it would have been more a function of the protocol that you were using than the client/plugin specifically (naturally that had to support it, too, but the more fundamental would have been the protocol.)
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#35I 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.
But I appreciate it. Thank you.
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
You meant Pidgin's modes? It has methods to guess when a user was typing, but not the content.
Thought it was Pidgin, but might have been ICQ... it was a long, long time ago that I used any of these... can't remember specifically; maybe even MSN via Pidgin. Seems like it would have been more a function of the protocol that you were using than the client/plugin specifically (naturally that had to support it, too, but the more fundamental would have been the protocol.)
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#37I wish that it was more prevalent for people to just assume and know that any website, regardless of whether or not it has a chat function, has the ability to record what you're saying (read: typing). Everyone out there should act like everything they type into their web browser has the potential to be seen by, at the very least, the website they're typing it on and, at worst, by everyone online. If you really need t…
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#38Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
You meant Pidgin's modes? It has methods to guess when a user was typing, but not the content.
Thought it was Pidgin, but might have been ICQ... it was a long, long time ago that I used any of these... can't remember specifically; maybe even MSN via Pidgin. Seems like it would have been more a function of the protocol that you were using than the client/plugin specifically (naturally that had to support it, too, but the more fundamental would have been the protocol.)
Re: Customer Service Agents Can See What You're Typing in Real Time
#40I'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…
The older IM clients (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, et al.) could tell you if someone was typing or entered unsent text, but it never previewed what had been typed. At least that wasn't a default option back then.
...but I recall that it was great fun (for about 5 minutes) answering questions before they had been fully typed and sent since I was the faster typist.