I once worked in a call center as tech support for an ISP that also did phone and TV. One day a women called about her continuing problems with the phone service crapping out. She had been in contact with us for months, and at some point she said she got the feeling people didn't take her seriously because she was a woman. She was a widow who was taking care of her 40 year old heavily disabled son, where any second there could be a life-threatening emergency requiring her to call an ambulance.
I took down all the details, and, briefly detailed that she tried everything she could on her end. All previous tickets were closed with "seems fine", basically. Which ticked me off, but I tried to be somewhat professional about it, other than spending more time on that than my employer would have liked. But then I also did what was totally verboten, I wrote down her customer number, and a week later I checked in on her account again. As I expected, the ticket got closed again. So I did the SUPER MEGA verboten thing (because we got paid for inbound calls), I called her, asked if the problem still persists, it did. So I went through all the details again and wrote a super detailed ticket including the medical situation, that she had replaced the phone and everything else she did. I knew better than to be full on snarky, but I also did not hold back. I was fuming. 1-2 weeks later I checked again, it was solved, I called her, she said a tech had shown up and been super nice and helpful. I don't recall what the issue was, but they fixed it. I was so proud, and I couldn't even tell anyone about it.
The only reason I did that was that I figured if they fire me from this minimum wage job I can get just another minimum wage job -- but I would not be able to live with myself to just go by the script in such cases. And I had plenty discussions with team and project lead about my average handling time, you bet. But they never fired me -- because I did solve problems, and with things that were standard procedure I was quick, I ended up quitting.
A bot cannot do that, be disobedient. Too few people can even do that.
There’s so few people that would have done what you did. In my experience, most customer service reps want to complete their tickets as quickly as possible to meet the companies quotas. When you run into reps as yourself it’s so refreshing. 10 years ago this lack of customer service was rare, businesses tried to provide the best customer service as possible but now you get companies that seemingly chose to avoid providing support.
There really should be a website that documents factually interactions with these companies that lawyers can dissect.
I'm not particularly in favour of replacing the humans with AIs, but honestly, between a human drone whose incentives are sapped, and an AI I can prompt engineer at least somewhat, I'm reasonably certain I can get more out of the AI than the drone.
What we should be looking at is strict requirements on human customer support. Not "in the AI age" but IN GENERAL. If a company fails customer compliance, it should be dead-easy to prove, report and get actioned. This is feasible.
I had billing issues with Ring a while back. Their CS phone line was broken, their email was auto-reply-only, they had no legal email point of contact. My only recourse was to go through a lengthy EU-wide mediation process (which I did, and resulted in fuck all).
There's a power imbalance that needs to be straight up fixed. Companies don't need to care about providing good service, complying with local laws, hearing their customers or really... anything. Once they have a good amount of customers they just have the inertia necessary to stop giving a fuck.
> In my experience, most customer service reps want to complete their tickets as quickly as possible to meet the companies quotas.
Yes, that's kinda of how that customer ended up in that situation. But most of that comes from the quotas etc., and AI will be 100% aligned with those.
I took down all the details, and, briefly detailed that she tried everything she could on her end. All previous tickets were closed with "seems fine", basically. Which ticked me off, but I tried to be somewhat professional about it, other than spending more time on that than my employer would have liked. But then I also did what was totally verboten, I wrote down her customer number, and a week later I checked in on her account again. As I expected, the ticket got closed again. So I did the SUPER MEGA verboten thing (because we got paid for inbound calls), I called her, asked if the problem still persists, it did. So I went through all the details again and wrote a super detailed ticket including the medical situation, that she had replaced the phone and everything else she did. I knew better than to be full on snarky, but I also did not hold back. I was fuming. 1-2 weeks later I checked again, it was solved, I called her, she said a tech had shown up and been super nice and helpful. I don't recall what the issue was, but they fixed it. I was so proud, and I couldn't even tell anyone about it.
The only reason I did that was that I figured if they fire me from this minimum wage job I can get just another minimum wage job -- but I would not be able to live with myself to just go by the script in such cases. And I had plenty discussions with team and project lead about my average handling time, you bet. But they never fired me -- because I did solve problems, and with things that were standard procedure I was quick, I ended up quitting.
A bot cannot do that, be disobedient. Too few people can even do that.