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> But because of the quick response, the customer will write back to say they'd rather talk to a human

Is this implying it's because they want to wag their chins?

My experience recently with moving house was that most services I had to call had some problem that the robots didn't address. Fibre was listed as available on the website but then it crashed when I tried "I'm moving home" - turns out it's available in the general area but not available for the specific row of houses (had to talk to a human to figure it out). Water company, I had an account at house N-2, but at N-1 it was included, so the system could not move me from my N-1 address (no water bills) to house N (water bill). Pretty sure there was something about power and council tax too. With the last one I just stopped bothering, figuring that it's the one thing that they would always find me when they're ready (they got in touch eventually).



The world is imperfect and we are pretty good at spotting the actual needle in the haystack of imperfection. We are also good at utilizing a whole range of disparate signals + past experience to make reasonably accurate decisions. It'll take some working for AI to be able to successfully handle such things at a large scale - this is all still frontier days of AI.


> this is all still frontier days of AI

That's why it annoys me how much effort they put into not talking to me, when it's clear that their machine cannot solve my problem.


They don’t care about you. You are a number on a screen that happens to pay their company money sometimes. But by using recorded voices, the company hopes to tap into the empathetic part of your human brain to subconsciously make excuses for their crappy service.

When I get stellar customer service these days, I’m happy and try to call it out, but i don’t expect it anymore. My first expectation is always AI slop or a shitty phone tree. When I reframed it for myself, it was a lot easier not to get frustrated about something that I can’t control and not blame a person who doesn’t exist.


> They don’t care about you. You are a number on a screen that happens to pay their company money sometimes.

Actually that reminds me, I couldn't figure out how to cancel my old insurance online and couldn't get to a person on the phone - I just deleted the direct debit, and waited until they called me to sort it out.




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