Let ’stupid’ handle it…
Posted on January 6, 2008
Filed Under Rise of the machines, Singularity, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
[updated 2009-10-31]
Have you ever had a customer service experience that left you completely, breathlessly in awe at the stupidity of all that transpired? Did you have to listen to a lot of circular non-reasoning, or worse – have to stare down a representative who seemed strangely incapable of initiating anything useful? Well then my friend, you have stumbled upon the tyranny of business information systems.
I first started thinking of this phenomenon when I (used to) frequent big box restaurants – beefeaters. You know… mish-mash of tex-mex/americana/italian fare, waiters and waitresses who spend half an hour fawningly introducing themselves and, if you’re lucky, the menu; badly-sung birthday chorales at nearby tables – come ON. You know what I’m talking about. Anyhow.
I realised after a while that the half-hour intro to your server was important, because no-one else is allowed to serve you after this initial rite of bonding. Forget flagging down Freddie for fresh bread if, in fact, Sally was your server. I usually push my luck a little, but at one moose-themed eatery there was an interesting turn of events: the server I’d flagged down pointedly refused to bring me my bill.
Uhm.. can’t you just go to the till and ring it or whatever the equivalent of ‘ringing it’ is with your fancy POS system? And his answer was, “No, I can’t. The system won’t let me if I’m not the server for your table“.
Pretty startling. I was being held to ransom by a point-of-sale terminal, Gods help me. I was ready to leave, thinking I could just pay and go but my server was nowhere in sight because of the evening rush and the *available* servers couldn’t help me.
Where was the machine making all these waiters look so stupid? Because if I’d decided to have a go at someone, it would have been a poor human bearing the brunt of it, not the stupid table-waiter allocation system.
The more I thought about events that day, the more I realised that the pattern of a) making humans look foolish and b) making humans the first line of defence when crap starts getting flung is already well-established.
“Hi, I’m Bill! Your friendly telephone assistant.”
Think about calls to your favourite telco – (I know, I know… ‘favourite telco’ is oxymoronic, but just play along)… think about a call to complain about a bill for example, or to cancel a service. You wait in a telephone queue for ages, and then if you’re lucky you get an automated, pre-recorded answering system. Some of them even have names. In a ritual eerily similar to the restaurant waiter-bonding rite described earlier, these disembodied voices introduce themselves, and guide you through a maze of options, most of whose paths you have no desire to explore.
And guess what! The moment you confound your virtual voice buddy, and the situation gets too *icky* for their linear repertoire, they bundle you off to the nearest human.
The important thing to remember is that if you’d had a simple (read ‘pleasant’) transaction, they would have hogged you to themselves, never giving a human operator the brief joy of being able to help you.
What’s the upshot of all this? It means human operators get the crappiest calls, while the software system deals with the nice ones.
And it doesn’t end there. Having filtered away what would constitute a pleasant working day for a call-center operator, and leaving behind the dregs, the software system is still there behind the scenes when the human representative queries for data, looks up past transactions etc.
Sometimes the system (which encompasses both people and machines, admittedly) botches up data and transactions, painting a very different picture of events to what might have actually happened. You call one of these centers and say “Look, I don’t care what your dumass computer says – this is what actually transpired. And now this is how we can fix the situation.” But the human at the other end has to concur with what their computer screen tells them, which is in turn based on some hardwired, arcane operations logic that neither knows nor cares about the messy details of real life.
Our beleaguered human operator may have some creative, sensible solutions to your problem, but surprise-surprise: the system won’t let them implement any of it. Their hands are effectively tied. So more human-to-human wrangling must occur, involving humans higher and higher up the chain of command, until someone is eventually reached who has the right access permissions to hit the ABORT button on the automated ops routines.
Meanwhile the friendly disembodied voice carries on dealing with the most pleasant of calls, and if anything goes pear-shaped, it knows to let ’stupid’ back there in the call center handle it.
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