The Return Of The Live Human Being

Metism writes: "The voice on the other end of the phone does not tell you to 'please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed'. E-mail inquiries do not pretend as though they were never sent. More and more companies are finding out that people actually want to interact with other real people, not pseudo-intelligent machines that can't respond to simple things like 'Hi, how are you?' Did pseudo-intelligent humans forget something so obvious? Companies like LivePerson help clients from large ISPs to small libraries communicate one-on-one with people via the web. Softroad takes the concept of live help one step further by allowing anyone, anywhere access to their live Internet surfers via SMS, 2-way pager, or other mobile device. There's nothing like human ingenuity when it comes to questions more complex than 'what's my balance?' or 'what's the weather in Miami?'. But are more companies going to listen?"

Comments

Offtopic: bug??

[new_breed]

can't find a place to put this, so I might as well put it here..
For a time, my top 10 list of user comments had stuff like (5,funny) behind the topic. Now, it just shows (5,). What's going on here? Anyone else having this?

Prisoners.

[simetra]

I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that a lot of the customer service reps for various airlines were actually prisoners, making very little, and costing very little money.

I imagine a phone encounter with a whiny-ass customer going something like this:

"whine, whine, whine, I hate you, you representative of company X!"

"Oh, you got problems? I just got fucked up the ass by a guard! Go screw yourself. Oh, Thank You for calling Company X, Goodbye!"