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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I've, um, heard, that more sophisticated phone trees react to profanity by connecting you to a person more quickly, using the logic that you sound pretty upset and need help now.

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I ran a network & voice refresh project for a national financial institution a few years ago; during the RFT some vendors pitched a stress analysis element for the contact center & IVR systems. The institution demurred, citing (amongst other concerns) the likelihood of it being gamed.

It's probably smart for a few reasons. Given limited support resources, do you really want to spent all of them on furious people? If it takes five times as long to help one irate customer with a complex situation, at some point that has to enter the calculus.

Can confirm I had grammar for testing for various profanity and took that into consideration for whether to send to customer service in the IVR apps I developed.

The client really didn't want people sent to live agents if at all possible, as they only had a certain low number of agents and wanted to keep it that way, so we had extra prompts that tried to convince the user to give the app a try first before we did a transfer to an agent, but it was something that could start the process off.

And this was an IVR app for a Fortune 500 corporation, not a small company.

What about the sophisticated ones that say, "listen to all or of options as out menu has recently changed." When you call back two years later the message is exactly the same. Why don't they make call handling software that has the menu items assigned to random numbers so that the menu is always different?

I think this and "higher than usual call volumes" are really just about plausible deniability. Anyone who's worked retail will have a story about someone who insists that the thing they're buying was cheaper last week even though it wasn't. Telling people up front that things have changed probably at least sometimes defuses that conversation one way or another before it even happens.

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