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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.""
I buy a lot of stuff on the web. So, every once in a while, a company will screw up. In pursuing a remedy, I always start out pleasant and accomodating. But once they start in with typical incompentent customer service behaviour, like responding to an email with questions that were already answered in the original email, I start to respond with full-scale profanity and insults. Inevitably the profanity gets good results and usually very quickly.
In my opinion this is the stupidest way to run customer service. It encourages customers to mistreat your employees. The good companies never let the problem get to the point where profanity is needed, but I am, quite frankly, surprised at the number of companies that have such poor customer service organizations that the profanity route becomes mandatory.
By the way, I discovered this method one day after going round and round and round with a company so many times that I was completely hopeless. So I decided to vent a little steam, figuring that I was never going to get things fixed anyways and that any self-respecting person would just cut off correspondence once the profanity started. Man, was I surprised at how quickly they jumped to fix things after that, completely the opposite of what I had expected.
Sometime the trick is dialing 0-0. Or *-# or some weird combo. Or, you can try dialing random extensions to get in touch with a real person who has nothing to do with your problem at all, but they'll be happy to transfer you to the correct department.
However, lately it's been sometimes happening that when I try this I get immediately disconnected.
They're catching on.
Two weeks ago I made several calls to the automated Sears Appliance Repair system. I was trying desperately to cancel a service call I had requested. The first time I called I wandered through the maze of "Yes" and "Service Repair" and "Cancel" options only to be put on hold for 10 minutes and then be disconnected.
During the second call I lost my cool and started yelling at the damn thing. My wife came in and wondered what the hell I was doing. I was getting madder and madder. "YES!" "YES!" I SAID YES, DAMMIT!" When I finally got to the point of screaming "YES, BITCH!" the freaking thing said something to the effect of "You have selected 'Cancel' - Thank you" and hung up.
On the third call I was hotter than ever, but made sure I didn't call it a bitch.
FED-EX, on the other hand, immediately defaults to a live person on its system if it doesn't understand something. A much more gratifying experience.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
I once had to call SallieMae to figure out why my regular student loan payments had just suddenly increased after 4 straight years of steady decline. I dialed into their oh-so-thoughtfully designed voice mail monstrosity, and proceeded to get routed back and forth into SEVEN different voice mail sub-systems. Each time I was transferred, the new system would greet me with the classic lie, "Your call is important to us". After five minutes of trawling through this POS looking for a department that actually contained human inhabitants, I finally bellowed "HUMAN!!!!!" as loud as I could into the receiver.
Immediately, I heard a click, then lo and behold, a human voice said, "Thank you for calling SallieMae, how may I help you?"
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
When I worked in a record retail store, we had a policy posted above the cashier that all sales were final. Well, the thing was, if a customer came in and got mad at the counter and wouldn't leave, the manager would refund their money to get them to go out.
I always felt this was shitty - aggressive, loud, selfish people got their money back while polite, friendly, non-confrontiational people didn't. I always thought everyone should be treated the same.
On the other hand, if we wanted to reward some people and not others, why then I felt it should be the other way around - tell the assholes to get lost - call security if necessary - and give money back to people who were polite and nice about it. Geez, it might even begin to instill some politeness in some people.
Then again, I've benefitted from this. At a local art store, they have a policy to give discounts to students. One day, the cashier asked someone in front of me if they were a student, when it came to my turn, I wasn't asked and forgot to provide my student card. When I remembered, just after having paid, the cashier refused. When I asked her to phone the manager, she did so and then turned to me with a very smug look and said she couldn't do it. I left, but was so angry (at her smugness at this point), I went back in and demanded to have the manager to tell me to my face that I didn't deserve the discount. This time I got it.
I guess it is just a case of "the squeaky wheel gets the oil". It is probably not good to encourage this, though.