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Curse Your Way to Live Support
EtherMonkey writes "Wired is reporting on new software developed at University of Southern California's Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory. Researchers there have come up with working code to detect the frustration and anger level of callers working their way through automated attendant phone systems."The system works by analyzing not only what callers say, but also how they say it. Callers get transferred if they start to spit out expletives or if they simply sound angry.""
As if taking live calls in a helpdesk weren't bad enough already, now they want to ensure the caller hits maximum frustration and anger before we let them talk to a real person. Great. That'll make everyone's jobs much easier. Oh, and I'm sure it'll increase customer satisfaction as well.
Buy the President
So, what, because I am the epitome of human patience I get to speak to machines all day, while captian rage gets transferred to a human automatically?
... oh wait, it works!
What a bunch of complete ****
This is truly useless software. Is anyone who calls support happy? If you are, are you after wading through 100 voice menus and waiting 30 minutes to get to a real person? And, can you be happy when you talk to someone who knows absolutely nothing, transfers you and your call gets dropped?
A better solution is for companies to simply provide good technical support staffed by knowledgable and competent people.
The fact that such a system is even being developed is proof that an overwhelming number of people detest being put through an automated phone system.
Instead of giving live support (and thus eliminating the entire problem alltogether), money and resources are being spent on bandaids such as these.
...but will it detect irony ? "... yes but of course I am willing to take the server offline and install an other operating system so your tool you sold me for a lot of money will work..." Or is the time measured untill you hang up ? If the caller hangs up early he was very angry. If he/she hangs up after being one hour on hold, she was not angry. Analyze who is often angry and give them premium service. Analyze who is not angry and sell them premium service.
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
On the other hand, one can readily claim that this is a tool to allow companies to better define and pursue the lower bound of just how little money and manpower they can allocate to customer service. As an asshole, you get to barge to the front of the line and berate live support that much faster; as a normal person, you'll either wait an eternity for support or get angry enough to trigger the system. The callers and tech support both lose, but the company sees an immediate reduction in support costs.
Now, which way do you all think this will swing?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Not to mention the idea that a company would be unwilling to provide actual human help to one of their customers until said customer was frustrated enough to start cursing into a telephone. Gee, that's just impeccable customer service, don't you think?
I should know; I've been one of the people cursing into the phone before. This should come as a surprise to no one: the company in question was a major "fast-running" (wink wink) cell service provider. I had recently moved, and was trying to get my number switched over to the local area code. Never have I dealt with so much frustration in my life, before or since.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Y'know, not everyone is serious when the post to Slashdot. Educate yourself.
I hate seeing this sort of stuff. Because a customer is angry, you decide to give them better support than someone who treats you well. The obvious next step is that if someone takes his anger out on the help desk worker, they get to speak to a manager / higher level support person. Is his actual problem any more real / difficult to solve than the person who contains their frustration and treats the employees with respect? Who would you rather have as a customer?
That all said, there is a good use for this technology. Detect where in your phone tree people seem to be getting angry. Log that and analyse that for future use. If there are consistent places in the tree that people get frustrated with, you know where to focus your redesign efforts to make it better. Of course, you may see the anger develop two or more steps down the tree from the unclear question that causes the pissed-offedness. It'd probably take some careful analysis / research to really use this effectively.
no, the problem is minimizing service costs. They want to provide the minimum service they can get away with. No service qualifies as such and so if they can discourage you and have you dump out of the queue, they win.
HTH
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Where a human being answers the phone.
Nothing pisses me off more than being kept on hold by a series of robots. Especially when it's long distance.
Setting it up to reward foul-mouthed assholes with live support just pisses me off more.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This could produce some interesting performance data for the support tech. If they can use it as a 'satisfaction rating' along with call time and all the other metrics they track in big support shops, maybe it could identify the good and bad support people. There's bound to be a lot of difference between individual callers, but if the data is normalized over a few thousand calls, it should keep things 'fair'.
Of course, this assummes that a happy-sounding customer is a satisfied customer. For instance, if a support person had a think accent, was curt, was cursed with an unpleasant voice - whatever. You probably can't dump a guy because he has a bad voice, but you might be able to if you could prove that he isn't as effective as the rest of the phone jockeys.
"For the call center it is frustration -- you don't want to lose the customer because they are becoming frustrated."
i understand that they want to use the automated systems as much as possible to take the load off of people, but if they are finding that the systems are causing so much frustration that they need to guage the amount of frustration in a person's voice in order to potentially keep them as a customer, then there's obviously flaws in the system already, and perhaps super crazy automated phone systems isn't a great customer service idea to begin with.
If this system becomes popular it will enforce "bad" social behaviour.
Want better or more expensive service? Swear your head off.
Want to be treated like an 7-digit number? Be polite.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Do you call the company's support line before you buy their product?
Do you pay more $$$ to shop at companies that have smart, well-trained, live people on their phone lines?
If you want to buy stuff with high-touch support, you generally can. Just don't expect it to be as cheap as stuff with "screw-you automated phone support".
I just wonder what this trains people to do in society?
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I would like to take this opportunity to request you to please spend the rest of the week responding to the rest of the /. dicks with no sense of humour. You have that special gift of getting to the point and having a good insult thrown in for good measure.
Stay tuned for new sig...
What you fail to realize is it's the meek who are the problem!
Society penalizes you for being a polite person already.
The 'jerk' effect is pretty common: given someone who's not complaining and someone who is, the establishment will take care of the person who's complaining first, in order to get them to shut up. No one likes the jerk, everyone likes the polite person, but the jerk will get seated at a restaurant first, will get their money back easier when returning something, and the like.
As a polite person, the establishment knows they can ignore you for a long time. But the jerk will cause them problems immediately.
Sad but true.
Do what Symantec did (still does?):
Charge for support! That's right, paying for techies or other operators to man the phone lines costs money. We can easily pass those onto the customer who needs them...after all, not everybody needs these services if you can do it yourself. Charging people a modest $2.95 a minute (or $29.95 flat fee!) to speak to somebody will assure an efficient and speedy customer...otherwise they can try the online support.
Secondly, do as Symantec did and make sure those online documents are nowhere in sight! Hide all information in an idiotic search system that returns 500,000 hits no matter what you search for! (including document ID#).
Outsource e-mail tech support to a third world nation in which nobdoy speaks English! Northwestern China (near Mongolia) works well for this.
And, lastly, make sure the second-tier support has a 3-5 day turnaround time (in business days, and don't be open on the weekend) for those nasty calls. And when you do get them, feed 'em cherries and give 'em right back to frontline support with a free ticket number!
Cutting costs: That's what I meant by "to do that without having to hire a real person to answer FAQs?"
That's good advice... assuming the options lead you to a person eventually. However, more and more automated systems don't ever give you the option of speaking to a person. This is insanely annoying when you just want to ask a simple question that isn't one of the 10-20 that you are "allowed" to ask.
Good systems subdivide you, give you a list, then have an option to talk to someone if nothing they list is what you want. But for the other 75% of systems, it's good to know how to avoid the whole mess.
That's why you have a "product proficiency quotient"(tm). The customer answers a few relevant questions about the product and the problem that they're having. This (running tally)score gets stored in the customer profile. Each time the customer calls, the phone queue mgmt sowftare decides where to insert the call into the queue based on past calls and their ppq. Mr CCIE gets injected straight to the engineer(L3) queue, no L1 or L2 support at all. Mr "i can't print, and btw aol is slow" goes to L1, and gets the benefit of basic troubleshooting.
The key is that there is value to each support level, but requiring all users to go through every level every time is inefficient, i.e more expensive.
This is the most worthless software I have ever heard of.
The purpose of the automated calling procedures is to save money, not to connect callers with tech support.
What Pointy Haired Boss would ever buy this? It's a waste of valuable capital (from the perspective of the almighty immediate dollar).
My thoughts exactly. Let's reward those that have little or no patience. While we are at it, we must punish those that have self-control. If one has the self-control to not lose their temper with an inanimate object then one's length of time on hold will be increased.
The real answer is to put people to work answering the phone. Yes, they cost more than the computer system costs in the short term, but all your customers are happier in the long run also. Besides that, if more people are working the cost can be distributed to more customers and the economy improves, etc.
In the long run everyone would be better off! Well, except the guy that invented and probably patented this concept. And if we crush his patent aren't we better off also?
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
Keep in mind that if calls are recorded "for quality assurance purposes," it's possible that some unscrupulous employees might have access to those recordings. I forsee a web site or two devoted to funny recordings of people having irate "conversations" with automated call centers. So if you're tempted to try beating this system, at least make sure CallerID is blocked first. :-)
I renew my call for a "Clueless" moderation category.
I just shudder to to think that this will train people, to the point where eventually most tech support calls will sound like this. Do the people who came up with this actually think they'll be making things easier on themselves?
For other tech support stories and recordings like the mouse one, see http://www.techcomedy.com/new_stories.php. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the website, I just remembered reading some funny things there that popped into mind when I read this story.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Not that a tech support job is any good to begin with, but it sounds like this system will gaurantee that the ONLY people you speak with are really pissed-off.
Hey, why limit yourself to the "humorous" aspects of Tourette Syndrome (note the lack of possessive, you dyslexic fuckwit.)
y .h tm
Scenario - person different from self calls helpdesk. Hijinks ensue:
Cerebral Palsy: "MMMmmuuughghg ghghghanllggh"
Black: "Now whea dat button fo' watermelon 'n' chitlins?"
Slashdot dork (nasally voice caused by the crushing weight of coke-bottle glasses): "I've certainly learned that you're a whiny cunt."
Oh yes. This is such highbrow humor. ANYONE who is offended MUST be humor impaired.
http://www.tsa-usa.org/about_tsa/images/notfunn
Shouldn't the need for this tell companies that real people want to talk other real people when they use the phone?
One problem is that people are becoming more passive-aggressive and non-confrontational. Part of the whole corporate customer-support business model is based around making it as inconvenient as possible to seek help. Gone are the days when a support 800 number was available, much less obvious.
Admittedly, people are getting dumber and have shorter attention spans than ever, and the new customer support business model exploits that by making it very difficult to get help. Customers are treated with apathy and disrespect from the moment they make contact nowadays.
The only way to fight back is to FIGHT BACK.
I hate to say it, but every time I've not censored my opinion on an issue, I get things resolved.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Always ask for the person's name you're speaking with - immediately. This puts them on the defensive and makes them behave a little better.
2. In most cases, you should NEVER deal with tier-one support. Immediately ask to be "escalated" - the first tiers are morons whose main job is to make you feel guilty you called in the first place and get you off the line ASAP.
3. Still having problems? Contact the PRESIDENT of the company or the highest accessible executive. You will be AMAZED how quickly you can get a problem resolved. A friend of mine had a billing problem with a local ISP/telco. He sat outside the president's office -- until he came out and was forced to field my friend's issue. The President assigned a special assistant to my friend to deal with the problem and made it go away fast. I'm sure the President said to his assistant, "Do whatever you have to do, but I don't want to see these people again." - and it worked!
I also like to remind them that hell hath no fury like a pissed off customer, that you'll write letters, put up a web page, or other things. In the past, I got a $17,000 settlement against a company after I put up a web page addressing the problems I had. While some companies don't give a damn, others do, and in several circumstances I've made it clear that if they don't resolve my problem, I'll shout about it from the rooftops and it'll cost them a thousand times my loss in bad PR for them.
Speaking of problems, I recently got ripped off from a company called Big Impressions out of Arkansas. I highly recommend you avoid these sleazebags.
customers start using the anger detection to get a rep because no one really likes talking to a machine, i can relate. so now, in an effort to keep your service on track, you add a few more people to handle the increased call volume because more people are getting to talk with a person... fair enough.
so, my question is, why not hire more support staff and simplify your menu options to "for sales and billing press 1, for all other requests press 2"? i mean you're going to be pushing more calls to staff anyway, why not get more staff and give the customer what they want?
scott king
Do people reading Wired really need waveforms explained to them as "wiggly things"?? Are they really that dumb? :)