Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.
Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can't solve their problem without human intervention - if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).
Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.
The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold:
1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user's time.
2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.
I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they're wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.
While back in most European countries if I get pissed off with such attitudes, I just need to report the company to the consumer's protection agency and they will take it from there.
It might not be as fast as one would like, but it usually does the trick.
lol, I've never had worse customer support than while in Europe. I had no idea how good we had it in the US until living in Europe.
I'm not sure what my threshold is for reporting a company to a bureaucratic institution in hopes for resolution, but I think it would have to be very high.
Just introduce a law that when the client tells the magic sentence three times they have to invoke cancellation part of the agreement no questions asked. Let people record their conversations and hold companies accountable.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain that's already the case today - except the "magic sentence" is a physically mailed "please cancel my account" letter sent by USPS with signed-delivery to the company's registered head office address. All registered companies in all US states must respond to bona-fide customer correspondence sent to their registered address.
It's just unfortunate that mailing a physical letter is such a pain.
It could be worse: it was only 4 years ago I needed to cancel my HVAC installation with Sears Home Services and invoked my right to cancel the contract under WA law - and Sears required me to send an actual telegram (yes, the old-school, hand-delivered, all-caps short text messages) to their head-office address. I used this company: https://www.americantelegram.com/timedatestamp.php - to send it (and yes, it worked and I got out of the contract). But wow. I don't know how this can possibly be legal as it places an unnecessary undue burden on consumers unless there's some archaic legal carve-out for telegrams specifically?
> It's just unfortunate that mailing a physical letter is such a pain.
In France you can send a registered letter from the post office's website for just a few euros. Upload your PDF, they print it, deliver it and email you a receipt when it's done. For a little more you can request a signature from the recipient. Since they keep a copy and record, it acts as a cheap form of notarization and is valid for many legal purposes.
I think if the company allows the client enter into contractual obligation by phone it should also be possible to invoke the cancellation part of the contract the same way. These days we get into so many contractual obligations (I can't even count the number of different subscription services I use) exactly because it is easy to make them and the law should protect users by preventing companies from making it hard to cancel it.
So, if a company allows the client to create a contract by phone or Internet, it should also be easy to cancel it the same way.
Or just information would be sufficient. I'd like to know the walkthrough for backing out of a contract as experienced by an actual person before I sign.
My company's head office has been vacant for six months while everyone works from home. Nobody's reading the mail. No wonder our cancellations are way down.
Then what happens when people stop paying for said accounts? To my understanding once sent and deliver confirmed, as a client, that's all I have to do. Try to sue for not paying the service and I have USPS confirmation of said letter. Easy day in court for the client.
> All registered companies in all US states must respond to bona-fide customer correspondence sent to their registered address.
I’ve never heard of such a law before, but if one exists, it would be individual state law since corporations are incorporated at the state level. Do you have a link for this?
> but if one exists, it would be individual state law since corporations are incorporated at the state level.
Correct. My understanding is that every state has an equivalent law. I can't give any citations really, though - my own state (WA) buries the responsibilities and requirements for registered business' registered or agent addresses in multiple separate sections in the state law website.
Every state requires a registered agent with address within the state. But that is not the same thing as requiring a business to reply to correspondence.
Not if only bona fide requests need a response. If it came before a judge, you'd need each of those requests to mention valid actions regarding valid accounts without absurd/abusive redundancy.
Obviously, there should be a SaaS API for sending templated physical-mail cancellation letters. The company could even keep a notary on staff to notarize everything they send at no extra cost.
There was a startup called AirPaper that would do this for cancelling Comcast, $5/pop. It's no longer around, which I know because I was trying to look them up the last time I needed to cancel Comcast.
There's a law in California that if you sign up for an account online you have to be able to cancel it online. However I've come across a lot of companies that just ignore it, most recently Zipcar. I guess I could try to sue or something, but I feel like companies can just call the average consumer's bluff that you're not really gonna bother suing over this so they can just ignore the law.
In Germany a company must process physical mail requests, there is are sites with templates for a large number of companies, e.g. https://www.kuendigung.org/vodafone-kuendigung-vorlage/. In many EU countries, post within the country almost never takes more that a few work days to arrive. Just trying to broaden the perspective, not start a heated discussion :)
It's also a good idea to cancel services via mail and to demand a written response confirming the cancellation. Otherwise, Vodafone (from your example) may conveniently forget the exact date of your cancellation... and good luck proving you cancelled an account on time if the confirmation SMS is now stored on a no longer valid SIM card, you cannot prove anything.
Yeah, Vodafone ... still sending invoices which deny I cancelled my contract half a year ago.
Consumer protection is definitely lacking in Germany in this regard. Especially the automatic 6 month renewal of contracts if you don't explicitly cancel 3 weeks before the end of the contract!
It really irks me. Automatic renewal is definitely not enforceable under e.g. UK law and I'm pretty sure also under EU law and yet it persists in Germany somehow. Argh!
No, your contract doesn't get renewed automatically.
In Germany usually your contract says it will automatically extend for a year unless cancelled. This basically makes your contract open ended with cancellation option, which you need to exercise if you want to cancel. You can also cancel your contract in case the other party change anything related to it.
There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to read what you sign. And it's a common practice, not a surprise. If you want to be sure your contract will not extend, you can always hand over the cancellation request at the time of signing the contract.
> No, your contract doesn't get renewed automatically. In Germany usually your contract says it will automatically extend for a year unless cancelled.
I don't understand what distinction you're trying to draw there. It definitely feels as though the contract is automatically being renewed. Contrast with what I view as "a mere extension" - you contract for two years, and then after that two year period is over, it extends on a month-by-month basis and you can cancel at any time.
>There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to read what you sign.
This is a silly argument. The idea that large businesses and individual customers are equal has been disproved multiple times. It's like arguing that the American and European health care systems are equal. I can't modify the contract to have a fair and reasonable cancellation terms. But the business doesn't need to have unfair and unreasonable cancellation terms to provide a competitive product. It's just that they can say "These are the terms on which we will do business. Accept them, or accept the equivalent terms from another business."
In Germany, consumer rights basically don't exist and the playing field is heavily tilted towards big business.
You should still be able to access the SMS messages stored on a disabled SIM. It just won't connect to the network. (Also, obviously you can copy the message to the phone memory, screenshot it, etc)
CA has a law that requires companies to accept cancellations in the same way you can sign up, online for instance, but it is mostly enforced against more serious scams, not legitimate companies that make cancellation difficult
I know that in France (and I think in the EU in general) this exists. You send a letter, but in France a email is also valid, and they have to cancel your subscription asap.
I actually worked for a company that implemented an AI to try to recognized those email to automate the cancellation process (there was still a human at the end to validate the cancellation to avoid false positive).
The magic sentence is usually pressing 0 a number of times until you get an operator. A more sophisticated approach is this https://pleasepress1.com/ -- they give you the sequence of numbers to get past menus to a human
Interestingly, the common understanding of this is somewhat false. It's not that easy to simply divorce anyone in Islam. There needs to be arbitration by both families beforehand, and a three month waiting period.
>Upon talaq, the wife is entitled to the full payment of mahr if it had not already been paid. The husband is obligated to financially support her until the end of the waiting period or the delivery of her child, if she is pregnant. In addition, she has a right to child support and any past due maintenance, which Islamic law requires to be paid regularly in the course of marriage
Reality is, as often, more complex. I highly recommend the feature length fly on the wall style documentary 'divorce iranian style'. Entirely recorded in an Iranian divorce court:
The GDPR, the EU Privacy law, allows processing personal data if the person consents to it. Consent can be withdrawn, and, as the law says, “It must be as easy to withdraw consent as to give it”.
That simple formulation is easier. “It must be as easy to cancel a service/subscription as to sign up”. Able to sign up online? Then it must be possible to cancel online
So why can't we simply refuse to pay? We should be able to just cancel the payment and that should be the end of it. They'll cancel the service for us when they see we didn't pay for it. No user interaction necessary.
This seems like a great credit card benefit. CC's offer all sorts of "cash back", "insured against loss/damage", "miles", and other things to attract customers. How about a "no hassle cancellations service". How about: "Switch your monthly Comcast bill to pay through us, and cancel any time with one quick call or do it online!" CC company gets a nice stream of monthly charges out of it.
I completely agree. Cancelling a service should be as easy as asking the bank to block the payments. The problem will solve itself.
Gotta be careful with online service accounts though. Doing charge backs actually violates their terms of service and will probably get people's accounts banned/deleted. Not a good idea to do a charge back on something like a Steam account with over $2000 spent on it. The woes of DRM...
Their refund policy is generous. If you haven't played the game for less than 2 hours, you can get a refund, no questions asked. Normal customers generally don't need to apply chargebacks because of this policy.
Credit card thieves however, make purchases that are charged back eventually. Steam goes thermonuclear on such accounts, reducing the incentive for credit card fraud on their store.
Maybe in cases where the fraud is proven. After the consumer buys tons of stuff on an online store, the company shouldn't be able to just delete their accounts unilaterally just because of one chargeback. There's a huge power imbalance here and consumers need protection.
> Their refund policy is generous.
What they offer is the bare minimum really. And they had to be condemned by a court of law in order to implement that policy. They also suffered zero consequences for years of consumer exploitation with their sales plus lack of refunds strategy in order to trap impulsive buyers. It's not a coincidence that Steam sales became a lot less generous after the refunds policy was implemented.
That's not legally sound. They can claim to have still been providing the services you contracted for (whether you used them or not) and get a court judgement against you.
If the merchant attempts to continue to charge you, it's because they have some argument that they're authorised to (e.g. they didn't receive your cancellation request). Getting a credit card charge you can dispute gives you more visibility and makes it easier to show good faith.
I could see this having problems for credit dispute.
For example, your Chase card pays Piracy.com. Some vendor makes an unauthorized charge on your Privacy card. Now you have to deal with Privacy's policy instead of your bank's policies to dispute
I would prefer this to any cash back scheme they can cook up. I would rather the card company didn’t take a significant share of the purchase and run as lean as possible. I’m sure that I am in the minority viewpoint here though.
In most cases you can. If you've taken reasonable steps to cancel in good faith and the merchant is uncooperative then canceling the payment is the logical next step.
They can still send your account to collections or ding your credit record, but you can still refuse to pay; ultimately the only way they legally force you to pay is by going through the courts system but I expect that if you have documentation of your (unsuccessful) efforts to cancel the case should be in your favor (which is why this will never reach the courts in the first place).
Because legal consumer protections in the US are not very strong, and if you are wronged, you are instead supposed to go to arbitration, or file a lawsuit.
Good luck with that. Many banks will charge you to stop recurring payments, for one thing. I actually cancelled an entire credit card once to get rid of a gym membership.
That we don't have this sort of control over our finances (or need to opt in to some special feature one bank might have) is one of our society's most ridiculous failings of the regular joe.
I shouldn't have to "cancel my gym membership". I just stop giving them money and my keycard stops letting me in. I shouldn't have to remain eternally vigilant with my credit card statements lest someone keeps pulling money from it, that simply shouldn't even be something that is possible.
So bizarre. This kind of one-way certainty is what I like about cash and thus Bitcoin. For example, it's kind of win-win that more shady websites (file lockers, mega.nz, porn, etc.) tend to use Bitcoin because it's also a weight off your shoulders.
Abandon pull payments systems. Instead introduce push payment systems. You create an account, they say "include 54623UCHAB54U in your reference", you push some money in and voila, it's activated. Then next month you don't and voila, it's deactivated. Then later on you push money in it's reactivated.
I mean, I know it's a dreamland. It could come about if contracts between businesses and consumers are basically regulated into standardisation as they should be.
AOL pioneered and optimized this cancellation game like no one ever had before and made millions from people who could not cancel. IIRC there was a class action lawsuit about it years ago.
EDIT: looks like they settled for $1.25 million, a ridiculous salon on the wrist when their take home was many many times that
If they want to go that far, why not just charge you a cancellation fee? Making you wait is already a way of extracting a fee in the form of a proof-of-work; but, unlike an actual cancellation fee, a cancellation proof-of-work can't be spent.
Thanks to such practices Apple Pay subscriptions services are so competitive. Unfortunately, Spotify got burnt by it and many other honest actors. Just like AdBlockers all over again
Hold times really have more to do with queueing theory then sending people away (plenty of people wait).
The only way to make sure someone answers when you call would be to have 10 times as many agents as you need. Instead, they try to find a balance and make sure the agents are more often then not on the phones (much higher efficiency), which ends up meaning long wait times on average.
High turnover (45%) in the call centers also makes the problem much worse, this means in practice that the centers are constantly understaffed
This problem is much less problematic with chat-based support, as you can hop between a few separate conversations without leaving customers waiting.
My company has maintained <60 second response times on our support 24/7 for a few years now, and although obviously it does require some level of additional staffing to cover peaks in demand, it's significantly less than you might imagine - I'd say maybe 1.5-1.7x.
We did optimise this by filling the lower demand periods with other tasks which can comfortably be completed more slowly - eg reviewing identity documents for KYC, etc.
I see it as being that the overall bandwidth you need being pretty close to the same, just choosing to have very low latency for specific tasks, and making sure constant context switching is manageable.
I absolutely detest most chat-based support. 60 seconds is way too long for an interactive medium. I'd rather be waiting for a sound from a phonecall than waiting for a browser tab. If I'm going to be using a keyboard, don't make me wait there by my computer or on my phone browser. Just let me send an email.
This sounds like an opportunity for an audio in a chat feed where between lines the computer spits out typing sounds and a virtual agent saying please hold on while I look into that.
Of course a better fix would be a combination of the two. Have some agent read your original email sent through some secure internal site and build and classify a case in the system with email attached and then reply to let you know there is a secure reply with a chat link to the complete case detail with time frames reserved for high responsiveness.
I am fine with it when the chat happens on a platform I am already using. I often use Facebook Messenger to contact companies as I have realised a lot of them actually have chat support there, even though it is not listed anywhere and their website only mentions calling (and they usually answer way faster than email!).
But if I am having to stay on your website and use your chat widget I expect a faster reply!
It’s intended for people who are in meetings or doing work to have a disjointed brief conversation that may span a half hour or more - eg, feature support.
This is a great comment. It's full of business knowledge and explains the reasons behind the technology. Nonetheless, if you've actually experienced this type of technology as a customer, you're super frustrated with the exactly 60s response times to every single chat message, and the useless back and forth to actually get the task accomplished. The task which, usually, costs the company money, so they're reluctant to make these interactions faster.
Should have been more specific. Current stats are 51s to the first response, typically more like 40s for subsequent ones, 2.7 responses required in total to fully resolve the issue.
I'm not even complaining about hold times, if I can just get directly to being on hold, and especially if they give me a time estimate that is anywhere in the correct ballpark, that's the best case scenario.
I'm talking about how they bury the human agent help option, you often have to sit through and pay attention to minutes of different options to find the right path. E.g. "if you want to check your account balance, press 1. To pay a bill, press 2". Who are these absolute psychopaths that are calling the support line to check their bank balance or pay bills, instead of using the app/web site like a human being?
The only explanation for this is 1. There really are tons of people confusedly calling the help line for things they could trivially do online, and the automated options actually do handle this load or 2. The help options confuse people so much that they give up and just keep paying for the thing because it's too difficult to cancel, or to handle whatever their issue is.
I'm sure there's some of both, but I suspect there's a lot more of 2 going on and it has been increasing over time in recent years. More and more businesses have learned from the gym model that if you make interacting with their accounts difficult enough then people just won't be able to churn.
Better is call-back to your calling number; often my time is somewhat fungible so I don’t mind being called an hour or three later so I can skip the wait.
I used to do ivr software. There really is that many people calling in. At least, ten years ago there were, I’m sure there’s been some shift but I don’t think it’s nefarious
Google might fingerprint Duplex voice so it could detect each other, maybe if two Duplex realized that both of them are Duplex, they will use dial-up like sound to exchange data.
I agree. Imagine the big brains at work here and what those brains could be doing elsewhere. Honestly at this point the FAANG are starting to seem like a black hole for brains. I’m starting to wonder if these companies are starting to hold us back by sucking up all the talent. I don’t fault individuals here. We all have to eat and put a roof over our heads. This just seems like such a frivolous waste of resources.
Here in NZ, I cannot imagine a company surviving if they made it so hard to contact them that systems like this were neccessary. I have waited a few minutes on occassion, but it's far more common to get a "enter your number and we'll call right you back" in that case.
Something is broken with US competition law if this is a commercially viable system.
What I find pretty funny is that "call-back when operator is ready to talk" systems are pretty simple to implement these days. I've done a few in Amazon Connect, and it took about 10 minutes to set it up and an hour or so to train a few operators. Obviously, training operators at scale would be a completely different situation, but it's not impossible.
In Europe I know a few service providers (not many!) who let you have them call you back.
You either go online, or set it up from the voice bot, and when it's your turn the provider just calls you back. We're at the point where phone calls are so cheap that I doubt it costs them more than the salary of the representative.
So what Google does is pretty much using AI to work around the fact that service providers don't provide this simple service.
It’s an arms race, and Google is providing technology to both sides of the arms race. Seems like a good business strategy! Eventually, when Google is providing voice assistants to both the consumer and the business, the bots can simply deal with each other directly, and skip voice entirely.
Ah - now I want an assistant that doesn’t just offer to hold for me, but can also play the cancellation script system for the optimum length of time, then give me options for continuing at the reduced price or completing the cancellation process ;-)
> Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.
Not without waiting for 40 minutes and using up your minutes and possibly paying for the air time!
To fix the problem, all the idiots have to do is turn off the annoying music so you can wear your headset until your call is served. That hold music really is the crux of the problem. If you could just hear a tiny bit of noise indicating that the line is up and a really brief "please continue to hold" message every five minutes, it wouldn't be so bad.
Haha yes, I had the same feeling when I started using captcha buster in Firefox. It basically solves the captchas for you by using voice recognition and input the words in the audio captcha for you. I think you can even make it use google’s voice recognition so that the loop is complete and they’re solving their own captchas for you.
> if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).
It really should be illegal especially if you already have an online account you log into not to be able to cancel. Idk if I was just stupid but I struggled to cancel my Scribd account so I cancelled it from the PayPal side cause I was so over the awful UX and it was probably me trying to find the payment stuff on the Android app which wasnt there cause I didnt subscribe through Android.
Companies do the most awful things. I want to make the world a better place by making it easier to cancel a simple subscription from any and all institutions.... Should be the pitch for a glorious startup.
First thing I thought is you can in effect put the support person on hold to wait for you ;<). It's using technology to give power back to the user and I like it.
This is AWESOME and I can't wait for Apple to hopefully build their own version as well.
But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if representatives will actually stay on the line to wait for you.
If you're accidentally on mute or they don't hear you, sometimes they'll hang up very quickly, within just a few seconds. (Not always though.)
I hope that because it'll play a message for them instructing them to wait for you, they'll wait... but I also assume they'll set an internal policy on how long they're allowed to. Will it be 30 seconds? 15 seconds? 60 seconds?
Maybe Google could record your real voice saying "uhhh can you hear me? hold on how about now? yes i can hear you"
or some random garbage filler words like that, and play that to the customer service rep while the phone gets your attention to get back to the phone. Hopefully you'll be back just in time before your pre-recorded fluff finishes playing.
Phone tree systems are such a jumbled mess of garbage, that I wouldn't doubt the agent wouldn't know whether the please wait message came from their own system of from the customer's side.
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
Yes, that's what I said, if you "read further down" in my comment (see the word "because"). My concern is whether the representative will actually hold.
Not anymore apparently! Trump just calls up directly whoever he feels like venting to. Woodward mentioned once Trump randomly called his house phone while he was working on the lawn or something and his wife had to go get him while the president waited on the line.
That's what I was thinking; here all these services let you wait for 20-40minutes and then they hang up if you don't IMMEDIATELY answer when they say; 'hello sir???????'.
I guesss we'll see if that message works or not... I guess it'll take a lot of tweaking per country and even regions of the country. Where I live they typically don't wait even if you don't speak the accent; they act like they cannot hear you and hang up.
How we did it: We hired the AT&T lady to make a recording that said, "Press 1 for your next caller". We played that on a loop for operators. When we detected a DTMF "1" we'd call your cellphone and connect the calls. We had most of the big companies in the app, but failed in the end because we couldn't find a business model. My first VC-funded startup. :)
Site is still up! (But not longer mine) http:/www.fastcustomer.com/
What I'm up to now: http://www.happymonday.com/ (helping people find work based on mutual values, priorities and functional work culture fit.)
Yeah, it's an interesting space, trying to help companies and people have less friction.
We were solving a very real and emotional problem, received a lot of press coverage. TIME magazine named us one of their "Top 10 of everything" in 2011, for example. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288... (look at that old iOS interface :)
Each time we were covered, we got more downloads, and were able to raise some more money. I don't think the money was misplaced. It was a good bet, sometimes they just don't work out.
Do you think about revisiting this space again with today's current context?
For instance, here are some features that I wish existed in the market with current automation phone techologies + respective APIs.
- Default voicemail, but having the flexibility to store, edit, record multiple voicemails that can be triggered based on context. If the phone number is not in my contacts / not recognized / no previous-history/interaction, play this voicemail. If my mom calls on the weekend, play her this one letter her know I'm out of the office. Spam number calls, automatically have automated voice say "I know you are a spam bot, reporting now.... please hang up as you are being recorded"
- grant auth to another individual to receive sms forwarding for a particular number. I.e. customer support text messages forwarded to my phone number, I would like to grant individual X to receive them, and when they reply back, it passes through my phone and to the end customer, who thinks they are interacting with me.
^^ just a few but I have a list somewhere. If this is interesting, I'd love to discuss/collaborate or minimally get your advice + thoughts.
I think it's a tough space. I'd start by trying to make sure people would PAY for whatever you want to build. The needs you're talking about are pretty specific.
I couldn't afford to fund development of it myself. It was a small team, and we were careful with the capital. We raised $750k. Making the phone calls was also a cost that scaled up (Twilio, etc)
More often than not, when someone takes you off from hold they expect an answer right away, and will hang up on you if there's no response. I've had this happen in cases where I put myself on mute and couldn't hit the un-mute button fast enough.
So I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. At minimum, I would be anxious the whole time I was waiting, ready to hit the return to call button at a moment's notice...
Call centers are going to have to become more accommodating about this. If they make customers wait for hours but can't wait seconds for someone to get on the line, they should be considered effectively unreachable by phone.
>If they make customers wait for hours but can't wait seconds for someone to get on the line, they should be considered effectively unreachable by phone.
I think thats part of the playbook for most support call centers.
Australia's Centrelink, the unemployment/student payment government body, is notorious for doing this. They have physical centres which usually tell you to call the hotline.
In 2015, the hotline got the busy signal for 29 million callers (Australia has 25 million inhabitants). 7 million were hung up during the wait time. I myself have been in their queue for hours at a time.
There are zero legal ramifications for this behaviour.
For the company that's operating the call center, that's a feature rather than a bug. Anything they can do to just make you go away, including making you wait for two hours in the first place, saves the company money.
That doesn't make sense though, right? Barring regulatory reasons that force companies to have call centers, if the company wanted to provide customer support then they would want to be able to fix customer problems, right? And I've heard call center employees are paid based on minutes on the line so why wouldn't they want to wait a bit longer to solve someone's problem.
> if the company wanted to provide customer support then they would want to be able to fix customer problems
You've clearly never had to deal with a company in a monopolized industry like telecommunications. The call center needs to be there on paper, otherwise it will give people the option to cancel their contracts or even initiate lawsuits because something doesn't work and the company is unreachable.
The call center doesn't need to provide quality support however; as long as it is there on paper it is all that matters. In reality the call center is costing the company money and they'd rather not have you on the phone as long as you keep paying your bill (and most people will keep paying even if they receive subpar or lack of service because of the lack of consumer protection laws in the US, forced arbitration, the fear of a hit on their credit report or the lack of competition).
I'm fully aware of that reason which is why I mentioned "barring regulatory reasons"
The people in this thread are acting like call centers are all bad when the real problem is the monopolized industry and not the customer service agent.
The company wants problems to go away. Fixing them or making it so people don't bother the company about it are both ways to accomplish that goal. And as long as the lack of support doesn't impact sales, it doesn't hurt the company and saves them money in not having to pay for more/better call center staff.
Also in more benevolent companies, providing support over the phone is the most expensive way to provide support. So as much of that that can be shifted to automated systems, better products, etc the better because it avoids the high cost of a call center.
While a call center employee may be paid by minutes on the line (though I think that is rare), they would be penalized for taking too long on a single call or helping too few customers. There's little incentive to spend time on longer more difficult calls when you could just focus your effort on solving many of the simple calls instead.
In the vast majority of consumer-facing sectors, non-captive markets only exist in the pages of introductory economics textbooks.
Even in B2B, most commercial transactions are with an oligopoly, or monopsony, as one party to the transaction. Competition-driven customer service doesn't exist here. For instance, not even enterprise-level customers can get meaningful customer service out of the likes of Google.
Or it will make the wait even longer, since the queue time is going to increase if a large amount of people use this feature and take 15-30 seconds to answer their phone when a representative is available, instead of being able to answer immediately.
Call centers that give a shit about customer service usually have the option to just leave your number and they call you back. Call centers that don't want/ need to be accommodating will just hang up.
Maybe the feature should switch the phone to loudspeaker mode when the call is answered, so you'd immediately hear them speak and could also immediately reply before picking the phone up.
Considering how little they already care about their customers, I find it extraordinarily unlikely they are going to suddenly become more accommodating for some random Google project.
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call. We gathered feedback from a number of companies, including Dell and United, as well as from studies with customer support representatives, to help us design these interactions and make the feature as helpful as possible to the people on both sides of the call.
The lack of such a feature is not a technical problem; it's misaligned incentives. The company does not want you on the phone; the annoyance of being on hold is a feature for them and not a problem that should be fixed.
In a healthy market this behavior would cause the company to lose marketshare to a competitor offering better support, which is why the only companies still using call centers as their primary (and often only contact) are those in monopolized industries like telecommunications. Every other industry has moved on to better solutions (async email, chat, etc) because consumers demanded them.
The real problem here is monopolies and misplaced regulation (harmful regulation that prevents competition combined with the lack of regulation that would force the incumbent to actually provide good service).
Exactly. In fact some callcenter systems have a feature called something like 'expectation management'. It can make you wait even if there are people available, just so you don't get used to the quick response and be less happy at busier times. Or to dissuade people from calling for minor issues I guess. It's often used on cheaper support tiers also to make paid support more interesting.
I'm not joking, this is an actual feature. I used to build callcenters and it surprised me when I saw it in the documentation. None of our customers ever implemented this but I can imagine some would otherwise it wouldn't have been in there.
That sounds quite customer hostile. To play devil’s advocate I’ve heard of two examples supporting that logic. Web browsers that wait for most resources before painting are perceived as faster than those that load in piecemeal. An airport got complaints about having to wait for luggage. In the next renovation they moved the baggage pickup farther away so by the time you walked over there your luggage was almost ready. Perception is reality.
I suspect for a huge number of call centres, "the customer" is the bank/telco/insurance company that's outsourced to them, and the key metrics and incentives of their relationship with that customer _totally_ make "expectation management" make sense. The call centre company has no incentive to make life better for account holder or phone users or people who's house just burnt down - beyond extrememly narrow interpretations of the responsibilities in the contract they have with their customer - which is presumably as poorly written and as easy to game as any software project requirements doc you get from those kinds of clients...
Exactly.. Outsourcing tends to bring out the worst incentives in companies. Especially because the lowest bidder wins the contract, which means the one that cuts the most corners.
In the company I work for now, they tried outsourcing but moved all their support back in house because they are a market leader so keeping customers is more important to them than gaining new ones. Hence more focus on good support than agressive sales. It makes a world of difference.
Roughly speaking in terms of (inbound) callcenters there's 2 kinds of attitudes.
- There's the callcenter type that actually cares about their customers and strives for the best metrics possible in terms of satisfaction (usually measured by after-call survey) and the shortest waiting time. This type of callcenter is often overstaffed to make sure they can handle peak times without pressure on the staff (which will reduce customer satisfaction because the staff will be stressed and the customers wait longer). In these callcenters it is common to see staff sitting 'idle' during which time they are supposed to do some elearning or support emails, or even kick back and relax. The metrics they care about will be customer sat ratings and waiting time (as in lower is better)
- There's also the kind of callcenter that is all about productivity. These are typically outsourced and get paid per call. They tend to have the minimum staffing so they reduce staff idle time: Hours not on call are 'lost' hours to them. Staff will be managed more on calls per day/hour and handling time per call (lower is better). Less time will be available for training (if any). These are the kinds of callcenters that want features like I mentioned. For one because it dissuades customers to call for minor issues and use email support instead, which is a lot cheaper to provide per customer interaction. And also to keep distance between the 'regular' and 'premium' support tiers, to make the premium waiting times shorter. This kind of callcenter will usually want to tweak the system to generate the best statistics for the customer that outsourced to them.
Obviously the first type of callcenter is much much better. Both for the customer and the employees. But the second type is very common too, especially for things that are commodity (as in easy to provide, not much knowledge needed), like number information services.
The only thing worse than the second type is the outbound sales-driven callcenter which are real sweat shops. Luckily the company I worked for didn't really deal with outbound.
I hope this google assistant will start talking to them while it waits for you to notice the notification, essentially putting them on hold until you answer.
Didn't look into it so no idea how it behaves, but sounds like a realistic solution to this problem and would have very interesting consequences!
The most likely interesting consequence will be companies burying a line in the ToS saying they can deny you service if you use a tool to reduce your opportunity costs of sitting in a hold queue.
The purpose of a hold queue is to reduce the number of customer service calls a company has to field. They will not take lightly to any service which defeats this.
Alternatively, they'll hire staff to answer the phone, say a few words to break out of Google's hold music detection algorithm, then put you back on hold, this time with ads instead of music. Repeat every few minutes to make sure you're still stuck on the line.
There's no limits to what's possible when you realize the purpose of anti-customer service is to harm customers rather than help them.
They could, but google could pretend to be you and answer basic questions until you pick up. Or just pretend to be your secretary. We're at a point where it becomes impossible to tell if you are talking to a human or not, at least for the first 10-20 seconds. I don't think those companies/call centers can win here, they will have to adjust sooner or later.
Presumably, your phone would say something like. "The person calling you is using a google service to listen to hold music for them... they should be with you momentarily."
I’ve had Brands interactions on Twitter where they ask me to go into private, then ask for my phone number, call me and send me directly to a holding queue, i guess it would fair to respond in kind.
I thought the exact same thing as well, I assume that the program will annunciate a message when it detects someone on hold, like to does with their Screen Call feature (which I love)
I'm not 100% sure if it was intentional, but there was a span of time when AT&T's customer service queue (for land lines) behaved like this. You'd call in, your call would be placed on hold (with their terrible hold music), then if you hung up it would call you back when an agent answered your call. I only discovered this behaviour because one day I was fed up with waiting, hung up the phone, and then an hour or so later got the call back. Repeated this a couple times after that call and it worked the same way. I have no idea if that ever worked for their cellular accounts, or if it was peculiar to their land lines.
It is a somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks, though I hadn't heard of one that did it automatically without your consent. The feature costs the company using it money, since they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.
> they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.
It's probably a wash: their outgoing call to you costs as much or less per minute than their toll-free incoming lines. At least in North America where Calling-Party-Pays isn't really a thing.
In cellular plans that don't include long distance calling, it could cost you more to receive a call when you're out of your home area, while the same toll-free call is (usually) never long distance.
> somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks
Maybe on the sales side, but on the service side, many vendors (particularly b2c) prefer that you give up entirely and never call them ever again.
To give an example of the cost,
Plivo[0]:
Make call: $0.0065/min
Recieve call: $0.0025/min
Twilio[1]
Make call: $0.0045/min
Recieve call: $0.0020/min
Flworoute[2]
Make call: $0.00833/min
Recieve call: $0.0050/min
So double to triple the cost from some providers for just this feature sounds very expensive. But perhaps with large commercial pricing this difference shrinks.
Yep. Surely the phone system costs for AT&T calling their own customers is so close to zero as to not matter even at telco scale, compared to the minimum wage they're paying the people on their end of the call.
(Also, isn't there some weird thing in the US where cell phone users get charged for _inbound_ calls? They might even make money on these...)
I expect that the hourly rate for the CSR dwarfs the cost of the telecommunications, and efficiently allocating resources and being more convenient for the customer vastly outweigh a few fractions of a cent per minute cost.
You missed the rates for receiving toll free calls, which are generally higher than both incoming and outgoing regular calls. For example, Flowroute is $0.00975/min.
Surely the incoming rates on a toll free number are higher than the outgoing rates for a regular call. I wish the call costs were large enough to move the needle - eg encourage the company to hire one or two more reps, which would drastically reduce the queue. Alas.
Besides the obvious business incentives (eg Comcast wants to make their phone experience as bad as possible), I'd guess the main obstacle holding this feature back is the specific PBX system a business is running on.
A cellular company faces disconnects more often than others, and can plausibly attest that customers prefer to be called back when disconnected, since the company is the provider for disconnect support — when other companies might not be able to without permission.
It helps that they can link your caller ID conclusively to your account since it’s their own systems.
Working for a .edu in the UK, we do/have done this during Clearing[0], which is where prospective students who didn't quite make the cut can apply to empty spaces on the course(s) of their choosing. The user dials up our number, is placed into a queue and is told that they can hang up. They're still in the queue, and we'll dial them back when they reach the front. In our case it's profitable because we _want_ to talk to people on the phone, whereas sales departments might not want to talk to people who want to cancel their contract.
Over the last year or two the Phone app team has been knocking it out of the park. My other favorite feature is automatic screening of calls and declining of robocalls: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, although on a totally unrelated team.)
I used to work helpdesk at an ISP, and we played the local classic rock station as our hold music. One of my best shifts was when a customer I put on hold asked to be put back on hold because they were really enjoying the songs they were playing. Done!
Nobody can hear the hold music any more because the vocoders are voodoo and the mobile networks drop 99% of the packets. Only people on landlines and VoIP have any idea what your hold music even is. On mobile it's just undifferentiated screeching.
> On mobile it's just undifferentiated screeching.
Maybe the caller was a Norwegian death metal fan? ;-)
"What's that awesome track you were just playing? I tried Shazaming it, but it just came back with Beyonce. I can't find a death metal band covering any of her songs?"
The best 'hold music' I've experienced is from a small aircraft manufacturer; they play recordings from the tower at Oshkosh during Airventure, so much fun!
Unfortunately if you’re Dell and you try to do this you actually have to pay for every song they play. But first you have to know what song they are playing.
The obnoxious part is where companies like Apple who actually choose and license nice music play it in such a way it sounds absolutely horrible on the phone. What a waste!
The frequency passband on old-school analogue POTS isn't wide enough to play music with acceptable fidelity. The upper frequency limit for POTS services is 3.4KHz, which is far below the ~15Khz needed for half-passable music fidelity.
Modern digital is worse because it combines the frequency passband of analogue with combinations of codecs and bit rates that can't support the audio complexity of music.
It's a challenge to make music sound nice on the phone. From Apple, I'd expect they'd try to get their hold music setup for 'HD Voice' which would help, but just stuffing it into POTS is going to be pretty icky.
Surely if Apple though it was worthwhile, it'd be pretty simple for them to remotely fire up iTunes and play your iTunes Favourites playlist at full iTunes streaming quality through the phone app while on-hold with them. (And for the lulz, make it play every song you've ever skipped when you're on hold with Google. Which'd be one of those wait-10-years-before-anyone-finds-it type of easter eggs, 'cause that's approximately the time between real people finding an actual working support number for Google... ;-) )
The worst hold music I've heard was an advertising jingle for the company I was calling. Listening to that over and over will drive you insane and make you hate the company for putting you through it.
I don't mind hold music, but it's the constant fake interruption with advertisements that interrupt the hold music every 30 seconds that destroys your ability to multitask while waiting. Looking at you AT&T.
I might buy a pixel 5 just for this feature...I waited 30 min on the line for just to make a doctor appointment recently. Wait time are fucking absurd for some of these services since Covid, especially with banks and medical offices.
I’m waiting for the day my doctor’s office puts a calendar link on their website and lets you directly request an appointment. So far they bought one of those EMRs with a website that allows you to send a “secure message.”
They should get on Zocdoc (shameless plug - I work there). Not having to wait on hold with a doctor's office is one of our main selling points for patients.
Why? Making a phone call removes middlemen from the process.
When I order food over the phone, the only people who need to take a cut of the transaction are the restaurant and maybe the credit card company if I don't pay cash. I can also be confident that my tips are going to the person whose hand I place them in.
When I order online, there are umpteen different companies taking my data and the restaurant's money, and they often obscure where fees and tips go. To me, it seems absurd to involve so many parties in such a simple transaction.
The experience is also usually fungible. Talking to someone doesn't take longer or introduce more error in my experience, so I usually prefer it because there are less externalities and fewer complexities.
Tell that to my plumber. The plumbers with nice automated systems still use people to pressure you. And you're paying for those systems and people in your bill. One of them quoted me $2500 for 2 faucets. The local dude did it next day for $350. Those ads at football games and fancy systems and trucks don't provide revenue or better service. So I'll deal with the crazy dude who's likely cutting a wall or soldering something talking to me on bluetooth.
Also with a lot of these people, they can't really schedule, stuff is just a queue. This dude is definitely a queue.
I remember asking one of the $350-type contractors if they've heard of the Travelling Salesman Problem... it seemed like they could use the knowledge. Dunno if my explanation changed anything, but its their mileage not mine (except indirectly it is). Le sigh.
Or you can service a small region and spend little time driving. That's what this guy does. Stays in a 10 mile radius. His phone is constantly blowing up.
Alternate history fiction idea: Telegraphy was expanded to allow individuals to make asynchronous communications without an intermediary. Replacing telephones, for the most part, are machines like an ASR-33 teletype with a receiver for voice calls, on which people can do things like instantly place orders or book travel -- in a pre-WWII setting.
For booking complex, non-fungible services (like Doctor's appointments, plumbers, etc) phones are great for high-bandwidth communication for follow-up questions, triage, etc. Phones also allow a certain element of salesmanship which doesn't come through on a form, which a big reason why service providers like them.
As soon as you want a special order, phone for food is the quickest way to order. In some of my local resturants I skip the service fee the website adds, too, that way.
The problem is that there has to be a better alternative, and it has to be better for the businesses implementing it, and the switching cost must be low.
Off-topic, but related: I've always wondered why someone hasn't offered a muzak-type service that is built around algorithmic generation of music.
In my estimation, the state of algorithmic music doesn't currently allow for the compelling listening that we're used to with most "human" music, but I can see it being good enough for situations like call-holding or similarly ambient situations like restrooms or lobbies. It could be somewhat bland, but it's content shifts subtly enough to avoid irritation over the course of ten minutes.
In my head, I hear something like the kind of minimal techno that Ricardo Villalobos is known for. Long, evolving, beatscapes that slowly transform over the course of an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZWdWzMdndc
I was once put on hold at a music equipment rental shop and heard a decidedly "non-muzak" drum and synthesizer loop. When the rep took me off hold they explained that I was hearing a live feed of some electronic instruments that they had running in the back room. He then put me back on hold in order to demonstrate him playing around with the synthesizers that were on loop. That really made my day.
With hands-free phones I never felt like I was wasting my time on hold. However, this might save my sanity by not making me listen to the awful music over and over.
Probably more than half the companies I've been on hold with interrupt their hold music with periodic recorded voice announcements (e.g. music music "Try our new flavor of Ovaltine!" music music). Event with a hands-free phone, this is probably the worst possible hold experience.
The ones I hate are the ones that ask "have you tried doing it online?" to get you out of the queue. I wouldn't be calling you if you allowed me to do what I'm trying to do online.
The problem is that unfortunately there are a lot of monkeys out there that actually do call for things that can be done online, either because of laziness or incompetence such as not being able to manage passwords to login online (I used to work in a customer-facing role selling phones and the amount of idiots buying high-end smartphones while not even being able to login to their email was mind-blowing - I did more password resets for Hotmail/Gmail/Apple than my main duty which was to deal with carrier- and network-related issues).
Of course the real solution is to make phone support paid (with a refund if the problem ends up being the company's fault or something that can't be done self-service) as to discourage this behavior.
And "your call may be recorded for training and quality purposes" and "your call is important to us". The former is s legal requirement but I really wonder why they often include the latter. I'd my call is that important, just answer me instead of telling me so!!!
> "your call may be recorded for training and quality purposes"
I reply "Thank you" when it says this. I mean, it's permission right? Saves me remembering to ask the person who picks up if it's OK for me to record our conversation.
I recall an even more evil example (I forget the company) where they'd interrupt the music, have this sound effect that sounded like someone was picking up a phone or breathing into it, and then instead of a human it was one of those "Did you know, you can upgrade your service to the MoarPlan today!" irritants. The effect gave your brain just enough hope to yank your attention from whatever useful thing you were trying to do while on hold.
I wonder if this service can handle these messages. I have had holds where an automated voice would tell me the estimated wait time every few minutes. Can google's system differentiate between a customer service rep and a series of unique procedurally generated messages?
> * Every business’s hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes onto the call. Hold for Me is powered by Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes hold music but also understands the difference between a recorded message (like “Hello, thank you for waiting”) and a representative on the line.
My favorite was the DMV every 2-3 minutes making a call transfer sound with some ringing to get your hopes way up. Then after 5-6 loops of this hanging up on you with “we do not have any agents available.”
My hypothesis is that the horrendous music is on purpose, as a way to get you to hang up and stop bothering them. Sure, the 2-hour wait times could just be because they're too cheap to hire enough staff but what reason could there be to make the music so bad?
I'm assuming there is some ML model running on-device which can detect whether or not the hold music is over.
When features like this are rolled out they almost never mention:
a) Battery usage
b) Heat
When I use my phone to record a video, it heats up.
When I use the Google Maps AR directions, it heats up and also drains the battery like crazy.
If your phone is heating up, and you put a skin or shell on it, is the phone and feature designed for this scenario? So if I'm on hold for 20 minutes, am I risking my hardware because they built this feature?
Users ought to reject advertising like this unless there is disclosure of how it will impact these things.
Also for how long can this feature run before killing my entire battery? What if I'm travelling and calling the airline from the airport with 25% battery? If this luxury costs me 15% battery for a 15 minute hold, I don't want it.
It’s hilarious that Google think an agent in a call centre that’s working to a revenue target will wait while you answer the phone.
Almost as hilarious as the Duplex demo when Duplex called the hair salon and booked an appointment.
How it actually would have gone:
Duplex: dial +15556789012
Salon: Hello, how can I help?
Duplex: I’d like to book an appointment for next week, what times are available?
Hair salon: who do you normally have?
Duplex: Melanie
Hair Salon: Melanie’s amazing isn’t she, she has so many clients. She’s off at the moment because she’s in Bermuda with her new boyfriend - he’s so hot, hey Natalie is taking on her clients, you might have met her - she usually does blow dries.
Duplex: [ERROR] I’d like to book with Melanie.
Hair salon: She’s in Bermuda. I just said that, Natalie can fit you in at 3:15 on Thursday. Is that ok?
Sure, but that’s the happy path and a simple example.
What about when the restaurant says something unexpected, as humans do:
“We’ve just taken delivery of some great lobsters but we need 24 hours notice if you’re ordering a full one, would you like to pre-order?”
“due to social distancing, I need to let you know that we greet diners at the door now so please don’t come into the restaurant until you’ve been greeted.”
etc (probably bad examples but you get the idea)
My point is, the only way this works reliably is when the call recipient knows they’re talking to a machine and act accordingly. It’s what we all already do to communicate with call centre AI.
Of course I see the benefit of another thing making the reservation, I just don’t think a synthesised voice calling a human is anywhere close to the best way to do it.
It will cause problems and inconvenience for businesses until Google offer them a tool to answer the phone. Then that’ll be an even worse experience.
Those seem like good examples. It's a valid point, but presumably Duplex has (or can have) a catch-all response to anything it doesn't understand, such as "oh, I'll need to check about that... can I call you back?"
I was on the fence for the pre-order. This did it. Pre-ordered.
But right after I ordered, I'm now struck with wondering if the Fi version I ordered is the same as the one from the Play Store. I hope it's International. That's why I use Fi.
For the Pixel 5, I believe I read that the hardware is the same everywhere (although verizon and some other carriers may have the phone carrier-locked, at least temporarily).
The 4a 5G does have a different version for Verizon.
Disclaimer: I work for google, but have no direct knowledge of these sorts of hardware details. This is based purely on what I read in the press.
I never had good experiences with callbacks. Sometimes they never call back, and I end up calling again days later and talking to a human, or sometimes I get random callbacks where no one is on the other end of the line.
Customer support does not rank high in some companies and industries and they understaff their support call centers. Staying on hold for a long time serves them as a filter to narrow down the 'really severe problems'.
This new Pixel 5 phone (featured in the article) doesn't have WiFi 6 or BT 5.
I'm extremely disappointed and I think that's going to be the reason I decide not to upgrade to it from my iPhone.
My place has some of the new fancy metal insulation in the walls, and AC WiFi struggles to pull 50Mbit through the walls on my Macbook, but my desktop with WiFi 6 works perfectly in that situation well over 100Mbit.
This misses the point entirely. The problem is that we’re put through IVR (1) and put on hold (2) because:
1. The call recipient doesn’t know why we’re calling
2. There’s not enough agents to deal with particular issues.
Deploying AI in the face of these problems is ridiculous, we just introduce more reasons for error.
We face these problems because telephone numbers only connect us to call centre boxes which rely on touch tones to navigate a system - it’s from the 50s.
A better solution is to interrogate a phone number for information before a call is made - this could be IVR menu options so we can navigate the call centre before we make the call; or add ourselves to a call back queue through online resources rather than through an antiquated telephone system.
A small team and I are working on a way to store and retrieve machine readable data for domain names - https://www.num.uk
We want to do the same for telephone numbers by issuing the holder of telephone numbers with domains like 441234567890.num.net where they can store structured data.
I'm a proponent of always plugging but how are you solving the issue of putting the burden to migrate on yourself as opposed to requiring changes from the customers or the call centers?
We can pre-populate the DNS of 441234567890.num.net with useful info until the rightful owner claims it. Which as I see it, is better than what we’ve got now - which is that phone numbers are not resolvable on the internet except through closed APIs and even then in limited examples.
The long term plan is to use a TLD for this eg .telephone (or whatever) but the bigger picture is that if you own a phone number that’s a unique identifier - it needs to be represented on the internet so we can interrogate it and then find WhatsApp / Skype / Zoom alternatives.
It was doomed because it was delegated to each country and there was registries and registrars appointed in each country and almost all failed to get the point across.
I think ENUM had huge potential but the execution was horrible. It was also victim to proprietary system trend - Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp audio
What we’re proposing (which is public in DNS) doesn’t replace ENUM - we still need a way to covert phone numbers into SIP to connect VOIP calls using an open standard.
What we’re proposing helps connect the proprietary systems to those phone numbers. As well as caller ID and other really useful stuff - like alternative ways to connect on social media etc.
When have you actually phoned a company the last time and were put on hold?
In the day and age of live chats, mails and whatnot, I haven't made calls to any company for quite some time. If it's important, somebody will call me. That's the way it should work, not me going on my knees and begging to talk to someone who takes money from me.
Last week to cancel a credit card. Maybe there was a live chat available, but I block 3rd party JS and they might still need a phone call to pass security anyway.
I feel like this could lead to massive wait times, as people stop dropping out of the queue. If I have a problem that isn't urgent, normally I would hang up after waiting for a while, but with this you don't have any reason to so peak wait times could go up a lot.
Putting your customers on hold is treating them as adversaries. It's usually a signal that whatever product you're calling about is a scam. Unfortunately, participating in some scams (ie healthcare) are pretty much mandatory.
What I want is an app that can actually navigate the menu system to get a live person for me. Could try "0" or "#" to see if that works first, and get more complicated from there. If the call drops in the process, should be able to call back to keep trying.
That process is the most frustrating part for me. I'm already able to put my phone on speaker and do something else during the hold part. It's getting to the hold that is the most maddening.
Could even have an optional cloud-backed version that memorizes common companies' phone trees.
It's nice but then the other side will wait for you to return to the call. I actually though that Google Assistant would talk with me during the hold time and attempt to resolve my request by caller-defined Frequently TalkedAbout Topics before reaching the human. Or maybe in the future just let the Assistant know what you need and let the Assistant talk with the representative without your intervention. Then I would return to the phone hour later and the Assistant would tell me the summary of the call.
Although your world wonders me
with your majestic superior cackling hen
Your people I do not understand
So to you I wish to put an end
And you'll never hear hold music again
The problem is not the music. The problem is the hold. What’s on the other side of the line is celebrating the absence of music as if the music is the problem. It’s on the other side of the line because of how many people had to buy into the idea of “no music” messaging. The proposition that music is the problem and how Google solves it.
Just press 0 until an operator comes. That's what I do. You don't need AI for that. This is too high tech for no reason. Might as well use an AI on your toothbrush that tells you where you need to brush more with an accelerometer and camera in the brush. Overkill.
Tech users tend to have an issue putting tech into everything. They will insist/injecting on strange changes like moving with a drone for short distances instead of vehicles or other changes that have little benefit.
Strike One: Only works on Google-branded phones. Which among other things means Google harvests data from it, because otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Strike Two: Stupid kludge. The right solution is a DTMF code that plays iff a real human answers, so it only requires two transistors rather than a 50-kilowatt tensor network to recognize. That would have to be legislated, of course.
Strike Three: Hiring Mechanical Turk to "wait on hold for me" is probably easier.
I spent a lot of time on hold with a regional telecom company early in pandemic WFH trying to upgrade our internet. The hold music was interrupted every 20 or so seconds with a "hello, thank you for calling..." message that startled me into thinking I was off hold every single time, but was really just an advert for other services.
In the new world, signing up for anything is instantaneous, but opting out takes hours of hold music. It's easy: if it costs you money, it's quick and easy. If it costs the company money, it will be like pulling teeth.
Incorrect health insurance bill? Waste a few hours of your time and we'll fix it! Want to disconnect your $10/mo subscription? Talk to you tomorrow, so long as you don't hang up!
Want to add a premium TV channel or upgrade your internet to a faster speed? Just click a button on their web site. Want to downgrade it back to like it was before? You can't do it through the web site. You must call and listen go to a sales pitch before they'll make the change.
I take a Ronin approach in these matters and never walk into a place I don't know how to walk out of. If there are any horror stories from would be leavers to be found online, it's an absolute deal breaker, no matter how attractive the proposition is otherwise.
That seems like an unusually small amount of times for 10 years. I could understand in a year but 10 is - wow - you must've gone out of your way to avoid being on hold.
I've been on hold a lot more often than a handful in the last decade and I don't make many phone calls. IRS, companies that messed up an order, cancelling services, government agencies, various small businesses that I call locally, and so much more that I am sure I am forgetting. Sometimes it's only 30 seconds of being on hold. Sometimes it's literally hours and - sadly - the connection gets cut off and I lose my place in line and I wasted a bunch of time having to listen to that noise in the background and unable to do much of anything else because of it.
The worst offenders are those that crank the music volume so high that it clips practically all the time - but then there are long times of silence or low audio - and then the music comes back clipping again... AND then when you finally connect, the person is so quiet that you can't hear them at all and they say, "hello? hello? bye" and they hang up.
I hope Apple gets this feature soon as I've been dying for this when I have to call some of those pesky places!
you must've gone out of your way to avoid being on hold.
I'm not OP but buddy you have no IDEA the depths I will go through to avoid having to pick up the phone and call "support" and deal with their endless IVRs or horribly implemented voice response systems or the endless transfers or the constant re-entry of my "customer verification info" because the last segment of the call didn't relay it to the next segment, or "yes I restarted my modem before I even called you look is there someone else I can talk to perhaps anyone in cargo shorts with a penguin poster in their zoom background? Does the word 'shibboleet' get me anywhere?"
Calling support and actually enduring the experience these days feels like it should be its own Olympic sport.
(However I absolutely love USAA's support system. Start on the app, if the app's "AI" attendant can't help you, a button comes up, press it, it immediately calls support and the person who answer already knows why you're calling based on your interaction with the app. MORE OF THIS PLEASE)
I'm there with you - just saying that even with all the avoidance... you can't really avoid it unless you give someone else the task or have some special resources at your disposal to get direct lines to people.
That's impressive. Nothing bugs me more than having to punch in my account number (or play the voice recognition game) and then have to go through it all again with the agent.
What would be really cool is AI technology that answers calls from unknown numbers and figures out if that is a legitimate call. If so, it alerts you, if not, it can be told to try to keep the spammer on the line for 10 minutes or so by having a conversation with them.
I used LucyPhone back in the day and it was great, but sadly it looks like it's no longer around, would love to have something like this as well. FastCustomer still exists but hasn't been updated in over 5 years...
This is a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. It's bad for everyone for people to be on hold. Many organizations have started doing the smart thing: asking users for a number and calling them back when it's their turn. This should be the SOP.
Then it wouldn't exist. But it does so that means you're wrong, follow the chain of logic backwards and you'll find out where.
Is it bad for you? Yup, wastes your time, annoying, etc..
Is it bad for them? No, it wastes customer's time, which deters further calls that are wasteful. This increases website visits so users can do basic things like check their recent bill, update payment info, things that shouldn't waste an agents time.
So with that being said, it's actually a good idea for companies to not make the phone support experience better for customers.
I initially read that as "Say Goodbye to Old Music".
I thought they were rubbing it in that they were throwing out all my music I had uploaded to Google Play Music (last time I checked, outside the US, it isn't possible to move the music to Youtube Music).
I wonder how it works with the automated hold off-ramp that tell you 'We are now connecting you to a representative...' but then essentially puts you back on short hold until they pick up.
I'm not going to lie: my first thought was that Google was cancelling yet another product. Only issue I had was that I'd never heard of a product called "Google Hold Music."
A small team and I are working on this problem. We’ve recently announced a DNS-based protocol (1) to store structured data for domains, in time we hope to issue domain names for every telephone number (e.g. 44123456789.telephone). To claim a number you answer a call to that number.
It would enable us to store open data for phone numbers, making phone numbers something we can interrogate for IVR menu data before a call is made - helping navigate it automatically - it could also present caller ID when receiving a call. However, we’ve got _lots_ of work to do on this.
Is this a new moneymaking business unit or is it a demo?
The degree of entitlement here... this is an OPPORTUNITY for someone else to do this, but for all the other languages! Why does it have to be Google who do everything?
Let's be honest. Is there any Google product that isn't "a demo" at this point? When I updated to Android 10 last year, on a fully stock Pixel, it broke on me. I had to wipe the data for the MediaStore content provider to regain the ability to use anything related to media files. And that's me who figured it out by knowing what to look for and reading logs because I've been making Android apps since 2011, the average user would've had no idea. After paying $700 for a phone, I do kinda feel entitled for it to not break after a system update.
As far as the new products go, I'm just a bit tired that everything actually interesting and useful that Google puts out remains US-only for about forever. That's it.
On a second thought, the search and the ad network probably aren't demos.
> this is an OPPORTUNITY for someone else to do this
The article says "To determine when a representative is on the line, audio is processed entirely on your device and does not require a Wi-Fi or data connection". So presumably it uses no move minutes/data than would be used by waiting on hold for real.
It's such a common inside joke that people even make variant jokes in reference to it, like maybe: "Subject: An update on evmar / Body: No, I'm not quitting, I just got a new puppy!"
HN title is improperly capitalized - the actual title of the blog post is "Say goodbye to hold music" - so I thought it's a Google product called "Hold Music" that's getting axed.
It took me 3 reads to dismiss the idea this was about Google Music (which is getting the axe anyway :(. Somebody should get fired over failing to build an audience for this great service)
This was exactly my thought. Did I completely miss an entire Google product cycle for some sort of poorly supported spotify competitor? Surprisingly, no!
Even though this is not related, you may have missed Google Play Music which was Googles Spotify competitor. It's getting axed in favour of YouTube Music.
How well will this cope with everyone's favorite idiotic invention, the hold feature that interrupts the hold music with a brief silence followed by a pre-recorded human voice saying "DID YOU KNOW THAT BASIC FEATURES ARE AVAILABLE ON OUR WEBSITE" every minute, making you think that maybe you've finally reached an agent, but haven't?
Some support manager discovered that adding those damn interstitials led to a massive reduction in human interactions (and thus cost) from a boomer population wishing to handle all account management tasks by phone conversation with a person, but at least had some percentage who could be convinced to use a website for routine tasks. We've been living with the fallout ever since.
Huh? Google already controls the entirety of the Phone app — if you're convinced they want to eavesdrop on your calls, they certainly don't need you to enable this feature to do so.
The privacy concerns of Google doing nefarious things with tinny renditions of elevator music?
And it's an optional feature that you explicitly have to activate each time to boot.
... and hello to forgetting why you were on the phone in the first place.
User calls financial institution, user is put on hold, user invokes "goodbye to hold music" feature, user goes on with their life and regains time, user forgets they are on hold and goes to the bathroom... you can see where this is going.
This isn’t a new problem. Before every phone had a speakerphone option, it was easy to put down the handset of your landline phone while waiting on hold and just check in every once in awhile. Same is true of online chat-based support.
Also you could build a feature next which asks you why you’re calling and maybe tells the agent why you’re calling before transferring/connecting you...
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
So you can go use the bathroom while you wait (if you're quick about it, or you're willing to risk the representative hanging up on you).
This is Google solving an analogue problem with an analogue solution and a digital bolt on. One of the richest companies in the world and this is the best they can come up with!? Where’s the investment in innovation? It’s disgraceful.
Google - give every phone number an open digital presence and it creates a world of possibilities. Not a Google locked down digital presence, a real digital presence - eg 44123456789.telephone, hell even call it 44123456789.googlenum - just make it portable.
Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can't solve their problem without human intervention - if you don't want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn't it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).
Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.