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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I once thought that the telemarketer that called me was in fact a bot, given his monotone speech and the yes/no questions he kept asking. It turned out (after ~two minutes of trying to get him to answer an open-ended question) that it was in fact a human being. That made me very sad.

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Years ago I rented movies at Blockbuster Video and one time as I was leaving the store with my rental a young man with a clipboard approached me to conduct a survey about the customer service. Part of the conversation went like this:

Him: Do you feel you had to wait a long time at the checkout counter?

Me: No, it was all right.

Him: How long did you think it took?

Me: About 3 minutes.

Him: Well, I happen to have been standing here with a stopwatch taking the time you were in line, and it turns out you were actually in line for 3 minutes. Now that you know how long it actually took, how do you feel about the wait?

Me: I, um, feel the same as before.

"I feel the same about the wait but pretty good about my own time estimation abilities!"

If I were working as a telemarketer and I had to read from a set script, I'd sure as hell record and replay at least the first few bits of the script to save having to repeat it over and over. Surely call centers use this kind of software now to let the workers push buttons for the first few branches and then jump in when something off-script is required?

Might as well have been a robot.

A lot of people that work in call centers are told to stick to a very specific script. If you ask a question that they don't have a scripted answer for, they end up giving an answer that has little or nothing to do with your question. Tech support is notorious for walking you through steps that you've already done or simply can't do because your environment differs (See relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/806/).

Management makes them do it to cover their ass and prevent an employee from saying something wrong, but it's terrible customer service. Not only does it prevent customers from getting the help they need, it also makes the call reps appear incompetent.

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