The pet peeve thread

[chasfh]

Maybe I posted about this before but I don’t remember, but:

When you’re phoning for customer support, the AI voice gets all your information—name, address, birthdate, last four of social, and a description of your issue—and then when you get passed to a human, they ask you all the same information again, claiming they don’t have it in front of them. This appears to occur in the vast majority of customer support phone call situations. If the support human doesn’t have all the info passed to them, them why is the AI voice asking it of you in the first place?

I don’t know whether I’ve merely lucked into substandard support systems repeatedly, whether the companies intentionally use AI voices to harvest the information and keeps the support human in the dark, or whether the support human gets the info passed to them but is instructed to ask for all the info all over again, but no matter what the deal is, it’s bad.

Furthermore, I have no feel for whether this entire situation is intentionally deployed with the specific goal of training people to stop reaching out to customer support, at least by phone, by frustrating them. There’s a non-zero chance of that, too.

[CMRivdogs]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

Maybe I posted about this before but I don’t remember, but:

When you’re phoning for customer support, the AI voice gets all your information—name, address, birthdate, last four of social, and a description of your issue—and then when you get passed to a human, they ask you all the same information again, claiming they don’t have it in front of them. This appears to occur in the vast majority of customer support phone call situations. If the support human doesn’t have all the info passed to them, them why is the AI voice asking it of you in the first place?

I don’t know whether I’ve merely lucked into substandard support systems repeatedly, whether the companies intentionally use AI voices to harvest the information and keeps the support human in the dark, or whether the support human gets the info passed to them but is instructed to ask for all the info all over again, but no matter what the deal is, it’s bad.

Furthermore, I have no feel for whether this entire situation is intentionally deployed with the specific goal of training people to stop reaching out to customer support, at least by phone, by frustrating them. There’s a non-zero chance of that, too.

 

Having been on the other side prior to the proliferation of AI, it's all part of the script. Since the vast majority of these CS folks make about as much as fast food workers (without smelling like french fries and Jamoca shakes) it's basically required at most companies. If they have the information on their computer screen, there is still the requirement to verify informqtion.

A bit like going to the doctor for a series of tests and every person you run into will ask you to verify your date of birth.