
Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls - LinuxBender
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/13/if_customer_service_for_verizon/
======
KMnO4
I'm sure the telcos have statistics to validate this system, but it seems to
completely oppose my own personal experiences.

I have never phoned customer support to:

\- View my account details (available online)

\- Find out about new plans and promos (available online)

\- Pay my bill (available online)

\- etc (available online)

I have only phoned customer support to:

\- Negotiate a better rate (requires a human)

\- Argue about excess charges on my bill (requires a human)

\- Get put on a off-market plan (ie loyalty, retention, etc -- requires a
human)

I guess if there _really are_ that many people phoning support with trivial
questions, a voice assistant will free up the phone line for people who
actually need a human. I suspect it won't, as they'll reduce the number of
support employees accordingly.

~~~
canadianwriter
As someone who in a past life worked at a telco..... its insane how common
those are. A HUGE part of my job was getting people to use the dang website!

They work REALLY REALLY hard to get people to use the website.

It's mostly older generations, they refuse to use a website for many of those
basic things. A lot of it is an issue of trust, they just don't trust
websites.

~~~
Scoundreller
The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming
you.

When they have to pay $0.62/message, it cuts down on the crap.

I’m a member of a profession where you’re supposed to read all of their comms.
Now that they’ve switched to email, they send way more crap that I have to
sift through and I can’t block them.

~~~
Bjartr
> The problem is, the second they have my email address, they start spamming
> you.

Being (arguably) legitimate companies, their unsubscribe links actually do
work.

~~~
Scoundreller
It doesn’t stop them from including crap in their invoices now that there’s no
printing cost.

Then there’s the emails saying: “your bill is ready”, but you gotta login to
see what it is and open a PDF.

Paper is more convenient.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Or do it like PayPal: 'PayPal news and your transactions' \- 'to view your
transactions, please log in on the site. Additionally, here's a bunch of
commercial spam.'

~~~
berdario
That's infuriating, especially because you get that email even if you haven't
made transactions on Paypal in months

------
deathanatos
The problems plaguing customer support today are not technical in nature and
AI will not fix them.

> _You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot_

This has always been something I've never understood about customer support.
In particular, chat support is bad about this, but I've had it happen on phone
support too. Prior to getting connected to the human, the bot wants to take
down a short description of your problem. That's fine, but the conversation
often goes like this:

> _Bot: Please write a short description of your problem._

> _Me: Problem I am having._

> _Bot: One moment while I connect you._

> _(a small eternity later)_

> _Support: Hi. How can I help you? "

> _Ctrl+C problem, Ctrl+V problem*

> _Support: I see you are <verbatim repeats problem; with no paraphrasing and
> no demonstration of understanding, I have no idea if the agent "gets it">.
> Is that correct?_

> _Me: :shrug:^W Yes._

… like, why did I ever type that description? Here, a computer (I don't even
know if it qualifies as "AI" given how rudimentary of a task it is performing)
appears to have failed at the simplest of tasks. And this happens all. the.
time.

Phone bots will often "authenticate" me with various credentials, and then
connect me to a human who will immediately authenticate me with the same
credentials. Whose time was saved?

~~~
admax88q
A support agents time was saved because every annoying step like that causes
x% of people to just give up.

------
StillBored
Except these automated systems never have the power to actually resolve
problems. If they did, then someone would exploit them for gain.

I had a problem last year with a major credit card processing bank, where they
decided I needed a new card/number, but apparently were unable to actually
ship said card to me for an extended period of time. During which, I was
locked out of the online/automated phone/etc system because I didn't know the
new card/account number (and couldn't activate it). They literally wouldn't
take my money, and it took mashing the '0' button in the automated system,
which kept requesting my account number, for about 20 minutes before it
decided I was allowed to speak to a human. That human located literally on the
other side of the planet from me, also didn't know what to do about it, and it
took being escalated through three levels of customer support before I got to
someone who mysteriously had the power to ship me a new card within a day or
two so I could pay my bill, activate the new card before traveling
overseas/etc a week later. Thats hardly the first time I've had a problem with
some bank/etc making some sweeping/automated change and not thinking through
all the problems it will cause to various "odd ball" customers.

Anway, automated customer support is a joke unless your just calling to check
your balance or some other activity you should be able to pull off with the
web page/etc. At the end of the day, you need people who can understand the
system, and solve the problems created by unthinking middle managers making
broad decisions.

Companies that are known to have good customer support are the ones that have
given their first line support people the ability to make financial decisions
that could hurt the company if misused. You simply can't (yet) do that with an
automated system.

~~~
linuxftw
I recommend Chase or Amex, I have had good success getting through and
speaking with them about various issues. I'm not sure about not having the
card number.

One thing you can try is the 'lost or stolen card' number rather than the
general request line. They will get you taken care of most usually. Also, it's
likely they already mailed your new card, so your card was indeed lost, only
by them. I think this happened to me once.

------
reportgunner
I'm not a customer support agent but I took a basic customer support training
at my previous company to get better at communication.

If I remembered anything from the education it's this:

 _You have to address the customer 's emotional needs before addressing the
customer's business need._

If you don't you end up with an unhappy customer who had his problem solved. I
don't see an AI satisfying my emotional needs any time soon.

~~~
oldgradstudent
There's nothing more painfully frustrating than a customer service agent that
tries to handle what they think are my emotional needs.

My emotional needs are that they fix their damn service.

------
jasode
Google is very clever! They write AI software to play _both sides_ of the
customer-service interaction. The company side is this Verizon story of
parsing human voices. The customer side is this story:
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-
assistant-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-
makes-phone-call-demo-duplex-io-2018)

I would hope the Google Cloud speech recognition (used by Verizon) of the fake
voice from Google Assistant (used by the phone customer) would have a 100%
accuracy rate.

~~~
QuercusMax
100% accuracy is probably too much to hope for, as there will of course be
poor-quality phone calls.

Of course, maybe Google could encode an alternate data stream inside the
generated voice, which would enable perfect transcription.

Now I'm imagining a future where robots communicate with each other over audio
channels....

~~~
CobrastanJorji
What's wrong with that? We've preferred programs communicate with each other
in human-parsable formats for decades.

~~~
QuercusMax
Nothing wrong with it at all, necessarily. Just seems... a bit too on-the-
nose.

------
abstractbarista
I noticed these systems typically immediately take you to a human if you start
screaming swear words and overall sound enraged.

Try it next time! "____! Give me a _______ human you ____! ____!!" This is
often followed by a prompt click of the line transferring and sure enough
you're in the queue for a real person.

Of course, remember to do the opposite with the person. Be polite and
respectful with the person on the other end of the line. And I've found, they
often can really help you!

~~~
badwolf
This generally isn't good advice and can result in your call being dropped,
marked as "hot," etc...

------
zaroth
I had to return rental equipment after canceling FIOS service last month.

A few weeks ago I started getting automated calls from “Alex at Verizon”
(obviously a computer) reading a script reminding me that the equipment needs
to be returned. The only problem? Sometimes it would call 5 times a day,
leaving a new VM every time.

I think it should be illegal to claim to be human, and generally these
messages should always be delivered by text message with an option to reply
STOP.

On the plus side, I brought the equipment to a UPS store where they scanned
the barcode stickers directly into their system, handed me a receipt and an
hour later Verizon had emailed confirmation of receipt. I didn’t even need to
pack them.

~~~
Lammy
It sounds like annoying you with five voicemails a day is what it took to get
you to do the return so if you’re complaining about their strategy I doubt
they care :p

~~~
zaroth
No, they give you 30 days to return the equipment at which point they charge
you late fees. The calls were totally superfluous.

------
londons_explore
Rather than effort into phone bits, can we just put effort into letting you do
everything from their website?

A well designed service doesn't let phone agents do anything the customer
couldn't do themselves. It is literally called customer _support_ , because
they help you do the things you want to do, rather than doing it for you.

~~~
KMnO4
I used to be with a Canadian MVNO who offer zero phone support agents (Public
Mobile). Everything is done online.

As such, their online portal offers actions typically requiring a phone call,
such as phone number porting, SIM unlocking, choosing a new number/region, and
cancelling your account.

Aside: I once accidentally ported the wrong number over since autofill screwed
up the input box (444 from my personal 444-4444 line and 5555 from my work
line 555-5555). Within 5 minutes I my phone would ring 444-5555. I feel bad
for the owner of that number, because it was assigned to me without any
authentication whatsoever. Really put the 2FA attacks into perspective.

------
corey_moncure
We're going to need a new system.

The profit motive of corporations is directly in conflict with the duty to
social good. As we proceed into an automated future, our labor protections are
pricing humans out of the market. A great deal of unnecessary evil and pain
worldwide results from this conflict.

At the scale of corporations such as Verizon, even a cost efficiency of one
cent per transaction can translate into tens or hundreds of millions of
dollars on the bottom line. Simple state machines with rigorously defined
transitions are very efficient. Creatively handling exceptions and undefined
states is a capability of human employees, and it's often very inefficient to
do so. A million automated transactions could occur for every one bespoke
transaction requiring ingenious human attention. Ideally, corporations would
prefer not to hire people at all, but where does that leave us as a society?

~~~
hanniabu
> As we proceed into an automated future, our labor protections are pricing
> humans out of the market

Not just that, but the skill and knowledge requirements to compete with
automation will continue to grow and less and less people will be able to meet
that demand. Many people argue that many thought this would be the case with
many technical revolutions before, but fail to admit that it's converging on a
singularity. Sure jobs we didn't know would exist are being created where
people can shift their work to, but the cycle for automation is becoming
shorter and cheaper and sooner or later we as humans won't be able to keep up
(unless you meet the high demands which are unreasonable to expect everyone to
adapt to).

------
ProAm
The thing is telephone customer support is you are already starting with an
extremely low bar. Calling Verizon support before was always horrible. So even
if the support stays on par with being bad but using NLP and GA it's a win for
Google and a win for Verizon but the customer still has a bad experience.

------
jameslk
I could see regulations go the other way: tech companies will be forced to
hire quotas of customer service reps to offset the jobs they keep trying to
displace. More specifically, above certain thresholds of revenue and customers
for a digital service, you need X number of customer service employees.

This would be a great benefit to most since it creates jobs and gives us real
humans to speak with. Of course, it would increase prices of things, but
depending by how much (I'm sure there's a sweet spot), it may be worth it for
the better customer service.

------
lecarore
I've worked in call center automation for a while. Clients (big old company)
would complain that people would use the phone line instead of the website.
The thing is, the authentication on the website was atrocious while you would
be very easily trusted on a phone call. It was in part due to regulations.
Because we were building an automated system to handle the calls, it had to
use the same user unfriendly authentication as the website. So I'm really not
sure that this went anywhere. "Now please type your client number, it's
written on a letter we sent you 3 years ago"

------
Scoundreller
My favourite was a Canadian ISP _changing_ its tech support number. This is
before ubiquitous wifi and mobile data, but after electronic bills.

Like, if your service goes down, how are you supposed to find the new number?

I thought telecom tech supports numbers were sacrosanct.

------
quantified
I’ve found Verizon’s people to be useful/helpful in the past. If this puts
them out of work, I’ll be somewhat sad. It won’t lower my bill any, that’s
seems certain.

My Comcast experience probably wouldn’t be hurt by replacing them with even a
slightly malevolent AI.

------
supergeek133
I've worked for large and small companies, and I've never understood the
outsourcing/robot-ting of your phone customer care people. First and sometimes
last line of defense in gaining or keeping a customer.

Best Buy was probably the most egregious example of this.

~~~
3814058
Having worked in a call center for Internet, Telephone, and TV about 3 years
ago. In my experience most people have the same stupid question.

1\. Do I plug in the green wire in the green port or in the red port (They
call before they have even tried to connect things).

2\. My TV isn't working when they haven't pressed "Source".

3\. Something is wrong, restart router.

4\. My WiFi is slow when they have one router for 200 m2 in a house of
concrete.

5\. A few % of the costumers make up the majority of the calls because of how
they are.

~~~
supergeek133
Yeah, of course you're going to have a majority bucket of calls. The issue is
when it goes above and beyond that. There isn't critical thinking.

\- This customer called 3 times in the past two days and we told them to
reboot their router. Maybe it's something else. (I've had personal experience
with this and it took over a month to get someone to replace my line from the
pole to the house).

\- In the case of retail, it is much more complex (returns, repairs, warranty,
pricing, etc).

It turns from an "OK" experience to a very bad one pretty quick when the
script doesn't solve it.

------
magoon
I never call until I’ve exhausted all self service options.

I don’t need to be told every time “Did you know...you can find us online to
X, Y, and Z?”

Verizon customers are paying more because they expect more, so this move by
them is disappointing.

------
sys_64738
I don't talk to computers other than to demand a human. I doubt very much I
ever will. It's why stuff like Alexa and Siri is doomed to fail. People don't
want to communicate that way.

~~~
jackson1442
On the other hand, Amazon's chatbot for order issues is actually one of the
best customer support experiences I've had.

Me: "I need to get a refund"

Bot: "Which order do you need refunded?"

Me: _select order_

Bot: "What's your reason for requesting a refund?"

Me: "Item did not arrive"

Bot: "Alright, I've credited your payment method x#### used on this order."

Fastest refund I've ever gotten-- the product never arrived at the door and
usually a refund like that requires an escalation to prevent fraud; I'm
assuming this system uses some sort of risk analysis score to determine if it
can refund without a return.

~~~
woeirua
You know that it's even faster through their return portal, right? I've had
literally zero positive experiences with chatbots. There's a reason why
they're not taking off.

------
Scoundreller
I remember a Canadian ISP that asked me to call back at a certain number. It
turned out to be the direct number to the call centre where they would
immediately answer.

I published that one far and wide!!!

------
bastardoperator
I just say "f __king human please " and AI seems to understand that pretty
well in most cases.

~~~
mrspeaker
That exact situation is what the article is about. The part truncated from the
article title on HN is "...The human is told what to say by the bot".

~~~
ryandrake
We're implementing Manna [1] one little step at a time.

1:
[https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
dutch3000
chat bots, automated phone systems etc have been an utter failure thus far.
verizon and att have the most convoluted pricing models. telcos should be
nationalized like the airline industry.

------
htrp
the question become's who's in charge of developing the Dialogflow for this
use case. If it's Verizon, I'd certainly expect it to make the human less
useful.

------
bibinou
The key part of the title is left out, making this clickbait.

~~~
bibinou
title changed.

------
tiffanyh
Tough loss for Twilio Flex

