Pro Tip: talk to customer service representatives as though they are chatbots | Hacker News Reader

Pro Tip: talk to customer service representatives as though they are chatbots

1 pointjononomo2 comments

I have discovered that the best way to interact over the phone with customer service representatives is to pretend that they are chatbots.

You should speak slowly and clearly and spell things out. You should pause often for the CPU to catch up, but not so long that they notice the pause.

Remove all emotion from your voice and be over-the-top unambiguous.

Never ask about their day or engage in any chit-chat, but do say "please" and "thank you" because the robot has been programmed to expect these niceties.

Interestingly, the customer service representatives seem to really appreciate this approach because it makes their job easier.

Also, for all you know, they actually are a chatbot.

...I think you may just be on the receiving end of a lot of chat bots. I'd give the opposite advice.

Once you've got another human being on the line, use them to their fullest capability. Ask them questions, try to gather information from the tools they have at their disposal, begin traversing their internal contact graph.

They are people. Human beings. Even if they are in a crappy position at the moment, even if they generally follow a script, you can get so much more done than you'd ever approach getting done with a chatbot.

Show me a chatbot that can fire off a slack message to their manager, the QA group, hit up the knowledge base, be educated by the caller, and I'll show you a human being on the other end of the line.

Show me the opposite, and I'll show you either a disengaged human, or the work output of an engineer looking to add AI or ML to their resume, or a conscious decision by management to cut cost by burning customer goodwill.

Oh sure, this makes sense -- treat them like chatbots that can actually help you. And by the way, treating them like a chatbot really is treating them like a human being -- it just means speaking slowly and clearly, not adding extraneous information, and keeping your tone neutral. It is all about just getting to the point efficiently and solving your problem.

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