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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

This is more befuddling - they are replacing one automated system (button driven) with a worse automated system (voice driven). No one wins unless you still have a rotary phone.

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The secret here is that for the majority of companies, the goal is not to support you as a customer effectively, but to rather minimize the amount of time spent organization wide supporting ALL customers. So to that end the automated systems are about frustrating customers to the point that they'll just "Go away" and the voice based systems are more frustrating than the button based ones, and infinitely more frustrating than actually talking to a human being who can actually help you, so it's a win for the majority of companies that just view customer service as a cost centre to be minimized, and it's a win for the SAAS companies that sell these useless, irritating and anti-consumer systems.

I've wondered why companies don't auction top places in line. If they're going to have people queuing, why not attempt to extract some money from them? Implementing such a system and selling it seems like a possible business idea for someone who believes this is a nicely utilitarian solution.

I agree, I like it but a lot of customers will feel nickel and dimed even if they never pay for it.

It doesn't matter that much because the human on the other side is not provided with the tools and information needed to help you.

Customer service, be it commercial or tech support, is always treated horribly.

Yes, it's what rfwhyte said. It's literally an externality to the company that people get inconvenienced for hours on understaffed phone lines and end up losing out on money, returns, support, etc. They benefit by reducing overhead and making the support innavigable (thus reducing successful returns/support overhead), you pay the cost with hundreds of hours of your life on hold.

A SaaS that sells voice-driven customer support wins.

A manager with misaligned incentives that reduced call center costs by 50% and got promoted also wins.

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