As a millenial, I'm more amazed that someone willingly uses a phone for non-mandatory and not-burningly-urgent phonecalls... why on earth would anyone do that is way beyond me.
I'm Gen-Z and talking to a human representative of a company makes me much more confident that something will happen as a result of my efforts (though still not certain).
I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasing office when I showed up at the scheduled time. Came back later and eventually found somebody - they had not seen anything I'd done with the bot.
Software for small businesses and local governments is often really bad and I'd much prefer to make sure a person knows what I'm trying to get accomplished.
When I was searching for apartments every complex had the same AI program for scheduling. It was horrible.
I got to talk to one of the leasing managers at one of the viewings and I told him it made them seem cheaper, not more tech-savvy. He told me they had spent millions of dollars on it.
Crazy. If they won't let me speak to a person I'd still much prefer just having a generic click-your-timeslot web app than waste time talking to a bot. And for millions of dollars they could just hire a human for a decade or more...
There seems to be a semi-infinite market for garbage software sold to landlords. At my current place I need an account to unlock my door, a different account to open the garage door (because the garage is managed by a third party), an account to reserve the elevator for move in day (which tried to up sell me moving services), an account to get sent my water bill which charges me $15 a month for the privilege (I don't pay me bill though this service, just have it emailed to me) , an account to pay rent and and an account to submit maintenance requests. Part of the trick seems to be to offload the costs onto the tenets who have no choice, but I'm sure our landlord is paying a good chunk for some of these.
If you have minimal to zero scruples, this seems to be an easy market to make a start up in. Landlords will buy anything!
Don't forget the account to open shared mailboxes for packages. "Luxor" for me. It actually works so I don't mind much but I hadn't really considered how much extra rent all the apps might be costing me.
Had the same thing happen for a town home I was interested in buying. Went through their online scheduling app. Got email confirmation with agent's name, but no phone number. Got another confirmation day of. Didn't think anything was amiss. Go out to building, wait for 20 mins and leave after agent was a no-show, no-call.
I called their office and after 20 minutes of trying to go around their obnoxious automated phone menu's I finally got someone who informed me who said they don't use THAT app any more to schedule appointments I need to use their NEW app and sent me a totally different app link in an email. I told them they are probably losing a ton of business because very clearly the OTHER app is still very much out in the wild and still very much being used.
I went with a different company and had much better luck.
As someone a little older I remember being able to talk to a person to get issues resolved fairly easily and reliably. The online help is great when the issue at hand is pretty cut and dry. It is nice for a non expert to be able to explain to support on the phone and just have things taken care of.
Support from days gone by was not perfect (hold times, support reading off a script)but it was often a nice option.
Not sure why throwing in the randomly assigned label of millennial, but fine, I also fall in the category and I've taken to just calling people and companies.
First of all, understand that many especially smaller companies have people who has the job of answering phone calls. Rather than doing a multi day back and forth via email or chat where you're one out of five that "agent" is currently servicing, calling is really really efficient. Clarification and confirmations are instant, alternatives can be quickly discuses. I call because it's efficient.
Also, have you ever noticed that most people SUCK at email? Try sending an email to company with two or more questions. What will happen is that you'll get an answer for the first question and then they forget about the rest. The larger the company the more likely this is to happen, because they can deal with three issues in one support ticket, at least that's my theory. So now you need three email.
I used to hate calling people, but I found that I hated uncertainty more and I hate getting wrong half answers to my questions. Calling people fixes all of this. Always call, but get confirmation in writing.
Fellow millennial, I also hate using the phone for anything, but very often a business provides no other interface to resolve my edge-case issue. Connecting to a human representative to discuss the situation ends up being the only way to resolve it. If they have a [solve my specific problem] button on their website, I'll use that, but often there is no such button.
AI has kind of fucked this, but for me (also millenial) I prefer to speak to real people because they are intelligent beings with roughly the same motivations as me and usually want to help out their fellow man.
For example, I can call a local store and ask "hi, do you have this item in stock, can you check on the shelf and set it aside for me please, I will be there in 25 mins".
By contrast stuff like "click and collect" order flows online are super rigid.
As a millennial I think voice calls sometimes are great. It obviously doesn't always work with big orgs like Facebook, but because so many people are now so afraid of or annoyed by just talking to a real person for a few minutes it's become a real power move to sometimes just go through the minor effort to make a call and expect some sort of immediacy to get things moving quickly. Email or text can be easily ignored and punted off (ex "whoops I didn't see it"), and increases the odds of miscommunication or having things be dragged out going back and forth.
I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasing office when I showed up at the scheduled time. Came back later and eventually found somebody - they had not seen anything I'd done with the bot.
Software for small businesses and local governments is often really bad and I'd much prefer to make sure a person knows what I'm trying to get accomplished.