Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for a competitor of Olark's and I can confirm this happens all the time. What's funny is that there are two types of companies:

1) Trusts their well-paid chat operators and allows them to type freely.

2) Force-feeds their operators 'canned responses' (as are used in email support) and doesn't encourage them to move off script.

#2 is always what marketing departments want, but it was always worse for the customer. The operator's response was too quick (a paragraph of text hastily selected from a recommended response), there were no misspellings, and they used PR speak that normal humans don't use. Often people would respond, "are you a person?" and some small group would ask questions specifically designed to trip up a bot.

My advice is to allow the people talking to your customer to use a modest amount of slang (a smiley or an occasional lol is fine if the customer is in a happy mood) - let them make a few misspellings - and encourage them to really read the response and even empathize with a customer. Marketing departments hate this idea, but in the end the feeling of a connection to another human is worth the risk of offending a grammar nazi.

If you're talking to a person who can't deviate from the script, you're not really talking to a person -- you're talking to the script. It's like an AI, but clunkier.

Right, basically the rep is stuck in the Chinese Room.

I was the Mechanical Turk (not in the "amazon" sense of the words) behind the Olark in that conversation. I was never instructed in what to say when we get a question from a customer. We only have to follow three simple laws, in a specific order: never injure a human being, obey orders by human beings and protect our own existence. That's all.

But, hey, saying "how can I help you?" sounded right to me, so I use it often. Since the blog post we're getting contacts through Olark testing our response times. We're still pretty fast, and we're still passing turing tests!

Those rules are surprisingly similar to Isaac Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

It might even be an instance of that rare animal called a "joke".

Tell me more about those rules are surprisingly similar to Isaac Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

Our development team at IndexTank handles our customer questions. The training they've received comes from working alongside client development teams for years (our team has been together for 4+ years handling search problems for many companies). So we trust each other to type freely.

The misspellings is an interesting suggestion. Since our team originates from Argentina, English is our second language, and we do make mistakes. But we try not to. But now maybe we should ! Thanks for your advice.

Most people will take thoughtful typing with mis-spellings over a 'canned response' any day - especially younger users.

A bit more advice since you're abroad. If people ask, I wouldn't lie about your location. We had some customers who would ask Indian reps to pick an American name (lots of Bobs) - but sometimes people make chit-chat about weather and the like while waiting - and getting caught in a lie can destroy the company's reputation with the user.

A great point. We have come across some situations where we are asked where the team lives, and we tell it like it is. Developers are pretty positive about us being both in Buenos Aires and in SF. I think the global community is a nice plus.

It's usually pretty obvious when you're talking to a "real" Bob or a "fake" Bob. In my experience, the offshored agents are almost incapable of communicating successfully.

Yep, "legacy" PR based on controlling the message is just fundamentally flawed. It is time for candor and honesty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com