Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–99 of 99 posts

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

#91

Post by MattGaiser »

Nextgrid wrote: post #78
mysterydip wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of blaming the customer for not being able to navigate properly, maybe the website should be built more intuitively?

Most non-tech companies' websites are absolutely awful. Either the login/authentication system is half-assed and you can't access your own account, or the documentation is not easy to find and there is no good search feature, or the website itself directs you to chat/phone once you finally find what you were looking for.

I work for a government that develops a consumer facing system.

The UI starts in a Word document. Then the comms people toss colours and words into it to the point that I as a developer don’t know what parts of the system do.

Never once have norms of the web been considered in the design.

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

#92

Post by quantified »

I’ve found Verizon’s people to be useful/helpful in the past. If this puts them out of work, I’ll be somewhat sad. It won’t lower my bill any, that’s seems certain.

My Comcast experience probably wouldn’t be hurt by replacing them with even a slightly malevolent AI.

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

#93

Post by quantified »

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.

And when you don’t have an internet connection... which is why I might be calling in the first place. See the Comcast comment.

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

#94

Post by quantified »

thesuitonym wrote: post #24
kevinmgranger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every thing you listed that requires a human also results in them making less money. It's no coincidence that these systems make getting to those points harder and harder.

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

Not an issue for your cable company.

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

#95

Post by MandieD »

cortesoft wrote: post #67
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…

Of course a HN reader is comfortable online. Everyone commenting here is comfortable online (a very clear selection bias) There are a lot of people in this world (especially older people) who are used to doing everything over the phone, and don't know how to use the internet and don't want to learn. You are never going to encounter those people on an online forum, but they exist.

Like my 70-year-old dad. My late mom was a fairly competent PC user and liked her iPhone for texting and photos, but my dad never got comfortable. He doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, and cut the cord once he realized that DirecTV supplied sports, old movies and The Weather Channel for way less. If only I could convince him to ditch his $50/mo AT&T contract and let me buy him his preferred form of unlocked dumbphone...

I’m worried for him as the presumption of an internet connection and some basic ability to use a website increases, especially for government services.

One example I saw several years ago: The state of Texas switched to a centralized process of issuing birth certificate copies for things like passport applications. For people like us, it’s super convenient - answer some questions, pay $30 with a credit card, paper in hand in two weeks. For him, it was going to be: get librarian to print this form, mail in with copy of driver’s license along with $80 check, wait about 8 weeks.

Needless to say, I ordered for him, explaining what information I was giving each step of the way.

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

#96

Post by jerrysievert »

agustif wrote: post #62
jerrysievert wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that a couple of choice swear words get me transferred to a human very quickly. typically, a human answers the call and is rather tentative (I'm guessing my call gets flagged due to the swearing?), and after my cheerful response back to them it becomes a pleasant interaction.

and then the algo tags you as bipolar lol Will try the swear words, kinda did it anyway but didn't notice any improvements...

I found that "fuck shit motherfucker son of a bitch" usually gets me to a human quickly, if that helps :)

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

#97

Post by causehealth101 »

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…

This reminds of a typical visit to the doctor.

The nurse enters the room, asks me why I'm there and types the answers into EMR. She leaves...

The doctor walks in and says "so, what brings you in today?"

It's either a huge redundancy or a useful way of sending off your message to join millions of others, with the goal of training the system to improve and speed up the automated service.

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

#98

Post by lecarore »

I've worked in call center automation for a while. Clients (big old company) would complain that people would use the phone line instead of the website. The thing is, the authentication on the website was atrocious while you would be very easily trusted on a phone call. It was in part due to regulations. Because we were building an automated system to handle the calls, it had to use the same user unfriendly authentication as the website. So I'm really not sure that this went anywhere. "Now please type your client number, it's written on a letter we sent you 3 years ago"

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

#99

Post by Bjartr »

Scoundreller wrote: post #73
Bjartr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming you. Being (arguably) legitimate companies, their unsubscribe links actually do work.

It doesn’t stop them from including crap in their invoices now that there’s no printing cost. Then there’s the emails saying: “your bill is ready”, but you gotta login to see what it is and open a PDF. Paper is more convenient.

That's not objective though. For instance I prefer a PDF to a mailed invoice.
Post reply on HN