Talking to Robots

Apparently we live in an age that is highly service oriented. The majority of us now work in service-based industries, and they are often touted as the keystone to our future prosperity. But if service is so important to our economy why do we continue to invent more and more ways to do a lousy job of it?

A prime example of modern service gone awry is the automation of telephones. Trying to find a human being at the end of a phone-line in today’s world is a lot like peeling an onion. Cutting through many pungent layers of prompts, crying more with each successive sub-menu option, one finally gets the opportunity to leave a voice-mail for a living soul who promises to call back at his or her nearest convenience.

At one time this obstructionist process we know today as “voice-mail hell” was practiced almost exclusively by government agencies. Whereas businesses realized that angry customers were more likely to spend or invest their money elsewhere the government had no such constraints. For instance, people who needed to obtain information from Human Resources Development Canada (now paradoxically renamed Service Canada) were instantly bounced to an automated line and subjected to unbearable renditions of contemporary music before a representative was made available. The main intention of this seems to have been to frustrate petitioners and wear down their will to ask for assistance.

And wear them down it did. People became so used to such treatment that businesses, accurately reading the public’s growing feeling of resignation, began to depersonalize their operations too. This movement started with the banks and utilities, whose record of customer service had always been suspect, but quickly spread to the rest of the retail sector. The newly installed robot receptionists caused some amount of tension, but eventually a soothing generic phrase was developed to counter frayed nerves. The meditative mantra: “Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us and will be answered in rotation…” was randomly dubbed into the bland continuum of nauseating Muzac, thus adding another layer of annoyance to an already exasperating experience.

Of course the only thing more aggravating than being forced to listen to soft rock is the constant interruption of a computerized voice urging patience, which is why a labyrinth of menu options was imposed on the already agonized caller. These lengthy, robotically read lists were an attempt to streamline waiting times by having people move to a model of self-service. Successful navigation required callers to pay very strict attention a torturous set of ambiguous prompts and respond to them using the keypad. Unfortunately the keypad on most modern phones resides on the handset, and the handset was almost always glued firmly to the ear so as to not miss an option and have to repeat the whole menu from scratch. In addition, for security purposes an account number or PIN was frequently required, and if you didn’t happen to have this number memorized… well too bad.

In the early years of this not-so-merry-go-round system one could simply punch in zero at any point to be directed to the queue for a customer service representative. This still necessitated listening to Richard Clayderman reinterpret the hits of Coldplay, but at least the need to “listen closely to the following options” was avoided.

Lately though information technology wizards have taken to burying this easy exit in a sub-menu. If you want to skip through the prompts and marketing messages they insist on inserting, you’ll have to be savvy enough to guess which combination of keys will lead you to a voice mail or, if your very lucky, a service agent with a clue.

I’m not against self-service, in part because I know that I’m likely going to enjoy my next root canal more than a call to any organization that employs a computerized telecommunications strategy. What annoys me to no end is that our service industry seems to be building a wall of technology to protect itself from our urgent and/or easily answered inquiries and offering us more and more bureaucracy when what we really crave is just a little bit of simplicity.

Google Alternatives

A while back I bitched about the lameness of Google's search page. It's a multi-billion dollar company with a horribly antiquated and useless main page. Unforgivable. My main complaint was that it did not offer enough options with respect to the dating of web sites—a fairly important consideration I think. Anyway I have discovered a few sites who base their searches on Google's engine but do what I derided Google for not doing, namely giving the option to date searches (among some other nifty features.) So if you share my disdain for Google's lame search page check out these alternatives:

http://d8search.com/
This is a basic search page with the option to search by certain date parameters.

http://www.faganfinder.com/google2.html
This page provides a whole wealth of Google search parameters in an easy to use (if not very pretty) format.

http://www.spific.com/
This page aims at being a bit more of a smart search engine that can find sites based on themes or subject areas (still using Google as an engine). I don't know if it's all that but it might be worth a try.