Worry not, in our dystopia soon we are getting AIs to do that for you
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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We don't have a lot of these robo agents in my country (yet) but for the normal info, advertising and intro bs they always play in the begining of the call before you get to the actual queue that can often be skipped by pressing # It doesn't always work but more often than not. I'm wondering if it'll work for robo agents as well.
Recently ran into this with an old phone Bill that was hanging around on my credit report. I didn’t know the number anymore and that automated system only would bounce me back and forth between “new customer” and “what’s your number” modes. No option for “I don’t know my number. Had to contact the new customer agent before I could get to customer service to clear it up.
God forbid you deviate even slightly from how they expect every call to go.
Recently tried to schedule the family optometry appointments together so we could just make one trip. Trying to get four appointments around the same time by making one appointment at a time because that’s how the robot works. Absolutely infuriating to be told “there are no appointments at 3pm, please choose a different time. There are no appointments near 3:15pm, the next closest appointment available is at 3pm.”
I like how 3:15pm apparently isn't close to 3pm. That kind of response is usually the point when I ask the thing if it knows what the "I" in "AI" stands for.
You might already be trying this, but whenever I encounter IVR systems I don't want to deal with I just repeatedly cycle through the following words:
- Agent
- Human
- Operator
Usually at least one of those is treated as a trigger to forward to a normal queue. Then I usually get to deal with a human forced to do their best robot impression and strictly follow a workflow and response script.
Some of them are wise to this and won’t let you do it. The FedEx call bot actually hung up on me for doing it.
I was hoping there was some law (or at least fear of a lawsuit) that kept that functionality around for accessibility reasons. I suppose with the PSTN phasing out the last of the analog bits they don't even worry about rotary phones anymore. Would still be nice to have the "Shibboleet" functionality...
Say you want to cancel.
I just just follow any topic that I think might get me to a person and then when I get a person I ask them to get me to the real person that can deal with my issue.
It's still difficult though.