Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I was rather disappointed in Lohr (author of this piece) as he is smart and was around in the 1990s for Solow’s famous quip “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”.

In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a flop (especially in the US’s then-backwards wireless environment). It takes time for people to understand a new capability and for it to reach the point where it’s worth ditching current practice. My aging parents still like to have a meeting (with their lawyer for example) that could have been a phone call or even email; they still visit the bank in person etc. I can’t be bothered with any of that.

The call center makes a good example: I have seen a company that uses machine learning to make the outbound call: it can wait patiently on hold and even do some transactions with the human in the call center. Things like that don’t show up in the stats yet; the real change will be replacing most of the call center ppl with an API, and with the humans there to handle the really hard problems.

The call center seems to be like the standard MBA case of a cost center to optimize but where efficiency is only half correlated with positive customer experience. I mean if you can route people to the right place, and get peoples questions answered quickly it's great, but that leaves a long tail of people in the nightmare situation of digging through phone trees, dealing with untrained staff, or having someone try to cut a call short rather than give you the best experience.

The only real advance in call center tech in the last twenty years (imo) has been the “press 1 to be called back in the order your call was received”.

My dentist has a PBX setup so that when you call and you don't get anyone or leave a voicemail, you get a link in a SMS with a link to schedule a call back.

The only real advance for the customer (if you don't count voiceprint authentication, natural language IVR, agents having all your customer details ready as the call connects saving lots of tedious dictation).

On the business side, you have real-time load metrics to feed your automatic workforce management, rerouting of calls based on staffing and load, highly accurate transcription and sentiment analysis that's always on (even when you think you're on hold, always mute your phone), the accessibility of enterprise-grade contact centres to SMB, and about a dozen other things that weren't possible 20 years ago.

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word.

I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

For sure! I’m definitely hoping to see more workers and employees used to short conference calls while growing up on Skype and Discord. So perhaps as the new generations come into the workforce we’ll see it much more. Definitely seems like I’m much more efficient with my peers while discussing stuff over voice than text.

Although I've been using networked email as a primary communications channel for my entire computing life (since ~1978), I did work for a couple of large companies before it was widely adopted and you simply cannot imagine the amount of infrastructure required to produce and move physical paper documents around, not to mention disseminating mass communications. Moving that all online was a massive improvement, even with its drawbacks.

Now it's been ubiquitous for a while, people now try to deal with the drawbacks.

The cliche of 'started in the mailroom' is expired by now but it was there for a reason. Businesses had a whole division whose job was to collect, shuffle, and deliver manila envelopes. Someone would come around with a push cart and drop them in the inbox.

Working in the mailroom was an entry-level, menial job, but one which rewarded intelligence and afforded a unique view into the function of the company.

Depends on the context. Just yesterday, I called the city parking, because I had made a payment the previous day, but I never received confirmation. After the separate ten minute queues just to be hung up on really frustrated me. I sent a short email to an email address I could find, and they fixed my issue within two hours of sending it.

> refused to get on the phone

So your solution to this attitude is to insist more on meetings and phone calls ?

Did anyone ask that person why they came to hate getting on the phone that much ?

I've observed similar issues: https://seliger.com/2015/08/02/how-computers-have-made-grant...

Lowering the friction of process often results in more process, but not more result.

Email has its place for lower priority communication where fast response and interaction is not important.

Text chat is good for interaction but it can bog down with a lot of back and forth and sometimes the meaning is hard to get across. The latency while better than email is still slow and people will often not ask questions that they should.

When those channels are not enough I'll initiate a quick voice/video call with one or a few people to go over a specific topic. Generally we can clarify the situation through some quick questions and answers. The latency is low and answers often invoke other questions. You can usually reach an agreement very quickly that way.

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