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Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

theregister.com

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Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#41

Post by QuercusMax »

jasode wrote: post #2

Google is very clever! They write AI software to play both sides of the customer-service interaction. The company side is this Verizon story of parsing human voices. The customer side is this story: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-... I would hope the Google Cloud speech recognition (used by Verizon) of the fake voice from Google Assistant (used by the phone customer) would have a 100% acc…

100% accuracy is probably too much to hope for, as there will of course be poor-quality phone calls.

Of course, maybe Google could encode an alternate data stream inside the generated voice, which would enable perfect transcription.

Now I'm imagining a future where robots communicate with each other over audio channels....

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#42

Post by Scoundreller »

canadianwriter wrote: post #33
KMnO4 wrote: post #12

I'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.

The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming you.

When they have to pay $0.62/message, it cuts down on the crap.

I’m a member of a profession where you’re supposed to read all of their comms. Now that they’ve switched to email, they send way more crap that I have to sift through and I can’t block them.

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#43

Post by jabroni_salad »

deathanatos wrote: post #27

The 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…

Chat agents are A) handling many cases simultaneously and B) graded on their response times. Kicking the ball into your court no matter how trivial improves their scores.

If they are ESL they may be trying to match what you wrote to their internal knowledge system and asking you to confirm.

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#44

Post by tialaramex »

grahamburger wrote: post #26
thesuitonym wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping a customer by giving them a discount actually earns you more money that losing a customer by being difficult.

But you have to talk to a human to cancel too! Checkmate!

It's common in Europe (maybe an EU harmonised regulation?) to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site.

The one time I've talked to a human to cancel a service, it was Three and it was a pleasant surprise because although their retentions team did end up keeping me I got a huge discount over not only what I was paying before, but compared to the competitor I was leaving them for. I have no idea how it's even profitable to give me service at the current price, maybe it isn't and just drives somebody's retention-based bonus?

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#46

Post by Simon_says »

sys_64738 wrote: post #45

I don't talk to computers other than to demand a human. I doubt very much I ever will. It's why stuff like Alexa and Siri is doomed to fail. People don't want to communicate that way.

I will when they actually solve my problem, but invariably I want something the bots can't understand.

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#47

Post by sosborn »

canadianwriter wrote: post #33
KMnO4 wrote: post #12

I'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.

> They work REALLY REALLY hard to get people to use the website.

And the telcos make it REALLY REALLY hard to use the damn website.

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#49

Post by supergeek133 »

3814058 wrote: post #23
supergeek133 wrote: post #18

I'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…

Yeah, of course you're going to have a majority bucket of calls. The issue is when it goes above and beyond that. There isn't critical thinking.

- This customer called 3 times in the past two days and we told them to reboot their router. Maybe it's something else. (I've had personal experience with this and it took over a month to get someone to replace my line from the pole to the house).

- In the case of retail, it is much more complex (returns, repairs, warranty, pricing, etc).

It turns from an "OK" experience to a very bad one pretty quick when the script doesn't solve it.

Re: Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

#50

Post by grahamburger »

tialaramex wrote: post #44
grahamburger wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to talk to a human to cancel too! Checkmate!

It's common in Europe (maybe an EU harmonised regulation?) to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site. The one time I've talked to a human to cancel a service, it was Three and it was a pleasant surprise because although their retentions team did end up keeping me I got a huge discount over not only what I was paying before, but compared to the competitor I was leaving…

> to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site.

This is unfortunately not a freedom we enjoy in the US. I recently changed my car insurance provider to a much cheaper one bundled with my home insurance. I called to cancel the old one and talked to the rep for like an hour. He didn't even really try to save my account, made a few half-ass efforts but mostly just chatted. It was early in the pandemic lock down and I didn't have anything else to do anyway so I just talked to the guy for a while. A month later I notice another charge from them. Turns out he just ... didn't cancel it. I think he kept me on the phone so long for plausible deniability if his call got audited, and then just marked me down as a retained customer. When I called to cancel the second time they did actually cancel and refund me back to the original cancel date, fortunately. This was Progressive.

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