Answering machines and the law of unintended consequences
I spent a ton of time the other day hooked up to a phone tree that went around in circles and ultimately failed to answer my question or even deal with it at all. I finally gave up.
But while I was engaged in listening to the chirpy pseudo-helpful voice giving me the numbers to press if I wanted assistance with this thing or that thing or that other thing (all leading to recorded help rather than a real live individual, of course), and hearing the intermittent blare of unpleasant music, I recalled those halcyon days when answering machines first came into being.
At the beginning, they seemed wonderful. They had not yet evolved to their present purpose of saving money while maximally annoying the customer/consumer/caller through avoidance of all human-to-human contact; back then, they actually routed you to someone who could answer your questions, if need be. It seemed a huge advance over the earlier method, at least for big companies with a lot of phone traffic, because in the past all you’d get would be a busy signal that could last all day.
But be careful what you wish for. We all know where it has led.
The same is true, to a great degree, of home phone answering machines, and later voicemail. At first it seemed a great way to make sure your message got through, rather than fruitlessly dialing with no answer when someone happened to be out. But then—slowly, over a period of many years—it seemed that more and more people were screening their calls. The practice began with those who were being harassed by someone, and so it made sense for them to screen calls. Then it morphed into those who were just too busy to answer. And then, with the advent of caller ID, it seemed that an increasing number of people—I really don’t know how many—never answered their phone at all, and have come to consider all telephone conversations to be a bother. And although in retrospect this denouement seems almost inevitable, who would have originally thought that this would be where our brave new world would lead?
tele-marketers
My GF drives me nuts with HAVING to answer any phone call. I’m talking hands full of groceries that must be dropped right then to do it. I haven’t considered any phone call that important since i was going steady with Marlene Holt in 7th grade.
Most of the time, I just start punching “0” to get a live person.
texexec: oh yes, I learned that trick some time ago (I also sometimes yell “Agent, agent, agent!).
But phone trees have evolved way beyond that now. Many of them respond to such ploys by feigning lack of understanding. You simply cannot bypass them and get to a person.
We have a replacement for the third biggest lie:
1) I gave at the office.
2) The check is in the mail.
3) Your call is very important to us.
A helpful site with tips, wait times and work arounds for customer service is
Get Human
http://gethuman.com/customer-service.html
you are confusing answering machines with VRU.. voice response units… not the same…
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF keypad inputs.
The term voice response unit (VRU), is sometimes used as well.
since i wrote software for some of the earliest, i use the old VRU term…
Research in speech technology predated the advent of digital computers. It began with a speech synthesis project at Bell Labs in 1936 that resulted in a device called “the Voder” which was demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair. A link between speech and mathematics resulted in a breakthrough, in the early 1970s. Leonard E. Baum, and Lloyd R. Welch, invented an approach to recognition based on a statistical concept called the Hidden Markov Model. The Baum—Welch algorithm is used to find the unknown parameters of a hidden Markov model.
In 1961, Bell System developed a new tone dialing methodology. Bell unveiled the first telephone that could dial area codes using DTMF technology at the Seattle World Fair in 1962. DTMF telephones enabled the use of in-band signaling, i.e., they transmit audible tones in the same 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz range occupied by the human voice. The blueprint for IVR was born.
and i have always wondered… why do you have to scream out your credit card number when you can dial it and dtmf cn translate it? its actually VERY easy… (you used to need 10 chips… not one)
I think it’s funny how that even though almost everyone now has voicemail and those old box-next-to-the-phone answering machines are long gone, in movies they still use them because they need them to tell us, the audience, what is going on. Therefore, even though none of us has come home and punched the “play” button on an answering machine and walked around the living room while all the messages are played, they still do it on the screen.
Having been in sales, and talking to others, it is considered that it takes four messages left to get somebody to call you back so you can give him the information he was so anxious to have.
I’ve actually returned to an answering machine from voicemail. I rarely check my msgs, but I was tired of having to call to check messages, and pay all that money for something I don’t even like.
My home phone bill is about $10/month, with my local toll and long distance with a 3rd party provider. That comes in between $3-12/month.
I’d much rather get a text or an email. My dentists texts to confirm appts.
VRUs – some measure the tension in your voice now, so if you sound very upset or angry, you will get routed to an operator sooner. Myself – I’d rather go online to ‘talk’ with someone. It’s just easier, and there are NO accents to deal with, or crappy connections with the reps.
So now I can put away my home phone with speaker phone capability, and switch in a rotary phone I bought not too long ago. I think there was a discussion on here about old phones, and it motivated me to buy one!
My brother helped design the VRU for a business that employed him for two decades. I told him that when he dies, he will have to answer to St. Peter for having helped design a VRU.
VRUs — some measure the tension in your voice now, so if you sound very upset or angry, you will get routed to an operator sooner.
I can’t decide whether that’s clever or creepy. Maybe both.
And yes, Gringo, your brother will have to atone for that particular sin. 😉
Alice Kahn said it best:
“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press 3.”
The telephone itself is/was a problem. I forget where I heard it, but this is exactly how I feel about phone calls:
You give total strangers the power to set off an alarm inside your house.
Phone menu systems ultimately reduce the cost of the product. Those firms that give you the option to pay more for live help (by a native speaker) are making the economic trade-off more plain.
It is common for us to say we would be happy to pay a little more for better customer service, but the data doesn’t seem to support our claims. Or our idea of “a little more” isn’t enough to get the kind of service we think was available before cost-saving technologies were implemented.
I dunno, does this work?…
http://gethuman.com/customer-service.html
The company we were getting our water filters from recently switched to imports from China so we shopped around on-line and found some still made in USA. When the first and second company we tried to contact finally called back it was with great pleasure that we told them we had already bought a case from a company that had answered the phone.
If you think the VRU is annoying, you aren’t really thinking about what life would be like WITHOUT them. The VRU has the ability to handle huge volumes of complex traffic that humans do not have the capacity for. And those jobs would not be here in the US, either, if not just for the reason that we would not have enough people willing to take those jobs.
As for the answering machine… I only have a landline so that I can hook it up to the answering machine and let it screen every single call for me. I do not give someone a license to interrupt me in my home.
Two pieces of essential, if not misunderstood, technology.
A phone tree is a method for spreading info via a network of people. What you’re talking about is the “Electronic Wall”. Good luck getting over it, particularly if you’re dealing with a governmental entity.
Most VRU systems, and most call-center-based customer service processes, are very poorly designed. The activities of the employees are micromanaged in extreme detail…scripts for exactly what to say…but the overall flow of the process for resolving the problem, making the sale, or whatever is usually very poorly thought out. The analogy is to an auto assembly plant where the time-and-motion boys have told the workers exactly how to tighten each bolt..but the seats are being put in before a bolt under them is tightened, which requires each seat to be removed and then replaced for every car.
What is this “home phone” you speak of?
Technology is your servant, if you find that it is the other way around, you can make changes.
Screening calls. A couple of decades back, wondered why when I called my pilots I always got an answering machine; but when I started a message about a charter to a garden spot, the guy would pick up and explain that he was just…whatever.
Finally, someone clued me in to the game.
I think it was “Miss Manners” who described the answering machine, when it was relatively new to home use, as the modern butler.
“I’m sorry, sir, but Madame is not at home at the moment. May I take your card?”
I love answering machines– instead of spending twenty minutes explaining, over and over again, the reason I called I can lay it out in about two minutes and the person can replay the conversation.
I’d like the “push 1 for” type systems if they weren’t designed with the assumption that all their customers are flaming morons. Same reason I don’t like the customer service systems where they have to read off a script, rather than being able to go “OK… so you already restarted the system, tried a cool-off, reseated all the cards and your memory system, tried a different electrical system, swapped out monitors and have narrowed the fault down to X, Y or Z.”
Don’t get me started on Asuris NorthWest’s “customer service.” Six months straight they kept accidentally adding a $50 charge to my bill, six months straight it took an hour for the poor support person to dig through the system to fix the problem, and the email system people simply didn’t have access to anything but a copy of the bill and thus couldn’t do anything at all. Figure an average of $10/hour, which is conservative since no less than three paid people were involved in each call…. *shudder*