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Comment by KMnO4 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure the telcos have statistics to validate this system, but it seems to completely oppose my own personal experiences.

I have never phoned customer support to:

- View my account details (available online)

- Find out about new plans and promos (available online)

- Pay my bill (available online)

- etc (available online)

I have only phoned customer support to:

- Negotiate a better rate (requires a human)

- Argue about excess charges on my bill (requires a human)

- Get put on a off-market plan (ie loyalty, retention, etc -- requires a human)

I guess if there really are that many people phoning support with trivial questions, a voice assistant will free up the phone line for people who actually need a human. I suspect it won't, as they'll reduce the number of support employees accordingly.

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As someone who in a past life worked at a telco..... its insane how common those are. A HUGE part of my job was getting people to use the dang website!

They work REALLY REALLY hard to get people to use the website.

It's mostly older generations, they refuse to use a website for many of those basic things. A lot of it is an issue of trust, they just don't trust websites.

The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming you.

When they have to pay $0.62/message, it cuts down on the crap.

I’m a member of a profession where you’re supposed to read all of their comms. Now that they’ve switched to email, they send way more crap that I have to sift through and I can’t block them.

> The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming you.

Being (arguably) legitimate companies, their unsubscribe links actually do work.

Thank you for unsubscribing from promotional notifications! However, next week we will be rolling out sales notifications, which are completely different and you are opted into them by default.

It doesn’t stop them from including crap in their invoices now that there’s no printing cost.

Then there’s the emails saying: “your bill is ready”, but you gotta login to see what it is and open a PDF.

Paper is more convenient.

Or do it like PayPal: 'PayPal news and your transactions' - 'to view your transactions, please log in on the site. Additionally, here's a bunch of commercial spam.'

That's infuriating, especially because you get that email even if you haven't made transactions on Paypal in months

That's not objective though. For instance I prefer a PDF to a mailed invoice.

Microsoft has a couple of newsletters that you can’t unsubscribe from unless you cancel the thing they are related to. For example, Windows 10 insiders, dec essentials, and I think some Azure thing. It’s really annoying.

> They work REALLY REALLY hard to get people to use the website.

And the telcos make it REALLY REALLY hard to use the damn website.

Websites are hard to use and usually suck. Sometimes you spend an hour looking for something on a website and it tells you to call customer support.

> It's mostly older generations, they refuse to use a website for many of those basic things. A lot of it is an issue of trust, they just don't trust websites.

I don't trust websites. Websites from regulated industries (banking, finance, telecom) are especially slow, confusing and poorly built. Totally understand why people avoid them when they know a better alternative.

Not going to lie, as a tech savy software engineer I often just phone telco's.

Most of the time I'm calling because my internet is down and I can't go to the website. Or I'm calling because I forgot my password for a website used once every N years.

90% of the time I'm calling, I wouldn't expect the website to have the information I need. Looking at Comcast's website I'm not inclined to look around and find out.

And when you don’t have an internet connection... which is why I might be calling in the first place. See the Comcast comment.

Created an account just to comment on this.

I design, implement and support contact centers for a living (think Avaya, Cisco, etc..). For the past five years, we've been preparing ourselves through education and training for this omnichannel take over of voice. While other channels have taken some of the voice pie, it's not nearly as significant as those of us in this field thought it would. I've created chat bots, IVRs and everything in between for automation, and people absolutely hate it and simply want to talk to a human. Most customers push going to the website, but the problem is that a lot of people don't know how to navigate properly. To help this, a lot of customers implement co-browse into their chat solution, but that's only helped a little. We too are using Google's Dialogflow and I'll be looking to deploy my first one in a couple months - very promising compared to other solutions out there like Amazon Connects Lex Bot. Regardless, leaders and technology evangelists in this field still preach that by 2025, the overall percentage of the pie for voice will end up being about 15%. But they emphasize that those humans who make up the 15% will be the most important in the customer service/support space.

Instead of blaming the customer for not being able to navigate properly, maybe the website should be built more intuitively?

Most non-tech companies' websites are absolutely awful. Either the login/authentication system is half-assed and you can't access your own account, or the documentation is not easy to find and there is no good search feature, or the website itself directs you to chat/phone once you finally find what you were looking for.

I work for a government that develops a consumer facing system.

The UI starts in a Word document. Then the comms people toss colours and words into it to the point that I as a developer don’t know what parts of the system do.

Never once have norms of the web been considered in the design.

Computer literacy is often vastly overrated, especially by people in tech.

>In total, across the OECD countries, 26% of adults were unable to use a computer.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

I've worked for companies with large call centers, and anecdotally I don't have a single doubt about it. To close this gap computers need to be easier to use... these people aren't even at a skill level where they can reach the web.

Yeah. Computers have a pretty high skill floor and if you aren't using them enough to stay above that level, you will stop using them entirely and your skills will degrade to zero.

Google is the new IBM.

Saying to your boss that the VP of something is incompetent and made a crappy site will get you fired. Saying there's this new Tech at google coded by god himself will get you a new cost-center and a promotion.

For the company, it will turn out as nice as it turned out to all those places renting mainframe contracts well into the 2000s.

> Regardless, leaders and technology evangelists in this field still preach that by 2025, the overall percentage of the pie for voice will end up being about 15%.

What data points is this prediction based on?

Every thing you listed that requires a human also results in them making less money.

It's no coincidence that these systems make getting to those points harder and harder.

Keeping a customer by giving them a discount actually earns you more money that losing a customer by being difficult.

But you have to talk to a human to cancel too! Checkmate!

It's common in Europe (maybe an EU harmonised regulation?) to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site.

The one time I've talked to a human to cancel a service, it was Three and it was a pleasant surprise because although their retentions team did end up keeping me I got a huge discount over not only what I was paying before, but compared to the competitor I was leaving them for. I have no idea how it's even profitable to give me service at the current price, maybe it isn't and just drives somebody's retention-based bonus?

> to require that if you can sign up from a web site then you can also cancel from a web site.

This is unfortunately not a freedom we enjoy in the US. I recently changed my car insurance provider to a much cheaper one bundled with my home insurance. I called to cancel the old one and talked to the rep for like an hour. He didn't even really try to save my account, made a few half-ass efforts but mostly just chatted. It was early in the pandemic lock down and I didn't have anything else to do anyway so I just talked to the guy for a while. A month later I notice another charge from them. Turns out he just ... didn't cancel it. I think he kept me on the phone so long for plausible deniability if his call got audited, and then just marked me down as a retained customer. When I called to cancel the second time they did actually cancel and refund me back to the original cancel date, fortunately. This was Progressive.

Short circuit to most contact center retention flowcharts:

"I'm moving overseas for an extended period of time." (Implication: to somewhere you don't offer service)

"Where are you moving?"

"I can't really say."

Turns out, most service providers have an exclusion to their retention metrics, where "customer moving to location we don't offer service" is one of the few reasons to just process their cancellation request.

Not an issue for your cable company.

>(available online)

Try loading a modern web form over 3g. Try loading a modern web form on an Android <6.x device. Try loading a web form on a feature phone. Try loading a modern web form in BFE over a landline. For any transaction where you don't need a human and it's painful to use the internet walking through phone menus is a pretty good alternative. They only make it painful to speak to a human. For routine transactions they're basically like using a slow CLI where they give you the help without you asking.

Sounds like we need to build better websites, and maybe cut back on the JavaScript.

Of course a HN reader is comfortable online. Everyone commenting here is comfortable online (a very clear selection bias)

There are a lot of people in this world (especially older people) who are used to doing everything over the phone, and don't know how to use the internet and don't want to learn.

You are never going to encounter those people on an online forum, but they exist.

Like my 70-year-old dad. My late mom was a fairly competent PC user and liked her iPhone for texting and photos, but my dad never got comfortable. He doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, and cut the cord once he realized that DirecTV supplied sports, old movies and The Weather Channel for way less. If only I could convince him to ditch his $50/mo AT&T contract and let me buy him his preferred form of unlocked dumbphone...

I’m worried for him as the presumption of an internet connection and some basic ability to use a website increases, especially for government services.

One example I saw several years ago: The state of Texas switched to a centralized process of issuing birth certificate copies for things like passport applications. For people like us, it’s super convenient - answer some questions, pay $30 with a credit card, paper in hand in two weeks. For him, it was going to be: get librarian to print this form, mail in with copy of driver’s license along with $80 check, wait about 8 weeks.

Needless to say, I ordered for him, explaining what information I was giving each step of the way.

Most of us HN'ers make use of websites to obtain information. There are lot of folks who still find it easier to make call instead of having to deal with the website UX.

I was trying to reach USPS about a subtle forwarding issue that takes someone knowledgeable to clear up and the system kept nagging me about online services and long spiels about the covid. Took a lot of menus and "are you really really really sure you want to talk to someone on the phone, for real?? (you horrible person you)" verifications to finally get to scheduling a call-back.

If you want a person, say the magic words, “I want to terminate the contract”. They’ll more often than not send you to a customer retention representative who has agency within the system.

If you're somehow locked out of your account you usually have to call to do all of those things. There's also still people who don't use the internet much, if at all.

I have some experience in this area and the volume of these kinds of calls in a typical call center is substantial. Especially if your customer demographic is older.

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