[varelse]

I suspect what's great about assistants like Siri, Alexa, and even Google Now is less that they have voice interfaces and more that they have well-funded support teams behind them to deliver exponentially more efficient routing of queries into appropriate knowledge-bases based on the best of contemporary research driven by their respective corporate thinktanks.

Compare and contrast with data mining the logs of call centers into RNNs and hoping for the best. A fun exercise here is to take one's SMS logs and do the same. In my experience, one will achieve an amazing Max Headroomization of one's cliches and trademark expressions, but little else.

When confronted with a voice menu system, I used to scream "OPERATOR! OPERATOR! OPERATOR!" at the top of my lungs and bang on the 0 key repeatedly until I got connected to a human. Recently, I've noticed they hang up on this behavior and even force one to wait through the entire braindead list of choices before allowing pro-users to bypass all the inanity because, after all, one must "listen carefully as our options have changed!"

[JadeNB]

> Recently, I've noticed they hang up on this behavior

I've definitely had them ignore any sensible operator prompts, but actually hanging up? That's a step beyond. Care to name and shame any offenders?

(I've always enjoyed the claim, and once or twice believe I've observed the behaviour—though I am sceptical—that a lot of these systems scan for obscenity, and route to an agent. When I get a robocall while I'm out walking (phone for audiobooks), I always curse at it for a while, just in case. Even though it almost never gets an agent, it's a good stress reliever!)

[michaelmrose]

I've worked phone support for a major cell carrier. Among the things I was told there by a manager.

- That people that spam zero should be hung up.

- We could do a fake accent if we could maintain it through the whole call.

- After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new device as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper procedure to do it themselves on the web and tell them that feature was broken despite the fact that leads could still do this.

- To make up fake things we had in common to establish a relationship with the customer so they would give us better surveys.

Customer service is not their strong point.

[JadeNB]

That sounds terrible, but I'm confused by this one:

> - After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new device as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper procedure to do it themselves on the web and tell them that feature was broken despite the fact that leads could still do this.

Does it mean that you were told to give instructions that you knew wouldn't work, or 'just' that you were told to direct users to the hard way of doing something even though there was an easier way of doing it?

[michaelmrose]

We were told to tell to customers that the feature was broken and that they had to do it themselves rather than pass it to team leads who in fact could do it in order to encourage users to do it themselves. Meanwhile we were providing support for the segment of customers the company considered most valuable. Most were paying $100-$250 a month.

[glitch003]

Frontier airlines absolutely does this. I think it's only during hours when there are not agents working, because I was able to reach an agent when I called again during more normal business hours.

But it did feel really weird hearing the automated system say "that is not a valid option. goodbye" and hang up on me. No indication that I could call back during certain hours to reach a human.

[mjevans]

I really hate when they don't treat 0 (unlisted option) as what it actually is.

The user is telling the menu tree that those who programmed the tree didn't include this use case or that poor descriptions routed the user to the wrong area. Have a human cleanup pass.

Often I do end up pressing 0 when I have a strong suspicion that I'm going to need to speak to a human to get my actual problem fixed and am pretty sure nothing's going to change that.

[EGreg]

And always recently! LOL