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

The reason why phone menus suck

[drinkypoo]

Is that more than half the time they don't have the option I want. Hence, I need a person. Most of the time I actually end up having to call another number, which is a separate problem entirely.

I'm looking forward to the eventual death of POTS and everyone using some form of IP Telephony, which will remove that problem for the most part. It would be nice if every "phone number" was either an IP address or a FQDN.

Re:Saddams not the only target for bush

[Salsaman]

Now, that *is* amusing ;-)