Terence Tao: Solving problems by abstracting away highly relevant information

Slight tangent—have you noticed how call center support seems to be doing just this? Yesterday I had a call to a health care provider’s billing department on behalf of a client. I said that after logging in, my user has no permissions other than to see my user profile. The CS listened and then replied, rather than paraphrasing what I said, they generalized to suggest I was having problems logging in. Uh. No. I’m logged in; there’s just nothing there.

I see this more and more in my interactions. Juxtaposed to the handful of vendors who have virtual CS who prompt you to describe _the reason for your call_, it seems these other vendors are working to develop these assets using the CS department to manually label every call.