Now we need a bot that will input whatever incantations are required to get to a human on the phone.
Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#32The problems plaguing customer support today are not technical in nature and AI will not fix them. > You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot This has always been something I've never understood about customer support. In particular, chat support is bad about this, but I've had it happen on phone support too. Prior to getting connected to the human, the bot wants to take down a short description o…
This kind of thing is why I remain deeply skeptical about any kind of "automation is eating the world" type story.
The techno optimists (execs running these companies) often end up adding workloads because they screw up the human based systems that are already in place.
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#33I'm sure the telcos have statistics to validate this system, but it seems to completely oppose my own personal experiences. I have never phoned customer support to: - View my account details (available online) - Find out about new plans and promos (available online) - Pay my bill (available online) - etc (available online) I have only phoned customer support to: - Negotiate a better rate (requires a human) - Argue ab…
As someone who in a past life worked at a telco..... its insane how common those are. A HUGE part of my job was getting people to use the dang website!
They work REALLY REALLY hard to get people to use the website.
It's mostly older generations, they refuse to use a website for many of those basic things. A lot of it is an issue of trust, they just don't trust websites.
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#34Rather than effort into phone bits, can we just put effort into letting you do everything from their website? A well designed service doesn't let phone agents do anything the customer couldn't do themselves. It is literally called customer support , because they help you do the things you want to do, rather than doing it for you.
Exactly! One time I had an issue with my iCloud account, and after two long, frustrating calls with extremely undertrained support members, someone finally fixed my issue by simply clicking a “Repair Account” button on some internal support dashboard. Why on earth isn’t that button available to users?
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#35I've worked for large and small companies, and I've never understood the outsourcing/robot-ting of your phone customer care people. First and sometimes last line of defense in gaining or keeping a customer. Best Buy was probably the most egregious example of this.
Having worked in a call center for Internet, Telephone, and TV about 3 years ago. In my experience most people have the same stupid question. 1. Do I plug in the green wire in the green port or in the red port (They call before they have even tried to connect things). 2. My TV isn't working when they haven't pressed "Source". 3. Something is wrong, restart router. 4. My WiFi is slow when they have one router for 200…
In the mid-90s, I probably spent > 50 hours on my ISP’s support. Would call most days after school.
Turned out to be a UART issue: the 8250 would error on 9/10 packets and we needed to get a 16550 serial card. Took a very long time to get someone to determine that.
They probably lost money for a couple years on our account.
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#36I'm sure the telcos have statistics to validate this system, but it seems to completely oppose my own personal experiences. I have never phoned customer support to: - View my account details (available online) - Find out about new plans and promos (available online) - Pay my bill (available online) - etc (available online) I have only phoned customer support to: - Negotiate a better rate (requires a human) - Argue ab…
Most of us HN'ers make use of websites to obtain information. There are lot of folks who still find it easier to make call instead of having to deal with the website UX.
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#37My favourite was a Canadian ISP changing its tech support number. This is before ubiquitous wifi and mobile data, but after electronic bills.
Like, if your service goes down, how are you supposed to find the new number?
I thought telecom tech supports numbers were sacrosanct.
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#38I remember a Canadian ISP that asked me to call back at a certain number. It turned out to be the direct number to the call centre where they would immediately answer.
I published that one far and wide!!!
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#39The problems plaguing customer support today are not technical in nature and AI will not fix them. > You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot This has always been something I've never understood about customer support. In particular, chat support is bad about this, but I've had it happen on phone support too. Prior to getting connected to the human, the bot wants to take down a short description o…
In the first use case, the original problem statement is probably used for routing and either the system is too poor to actually display that to the reps or they are chatting with many people and have SLAs on first contact/answer times so fire off a quick text question that they have saved.
Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
#40chat bots, automated phone systems etc have been an utter failure thus far. verizon and att have the most convoluted pricing models. telcos should be nationalized like the airline industry.