To whom it may concern:
I will not talk to your stupid automated “natural conversation” phone menus anymore.
No commonly encountered societal construct irritates me more highly, or takes me from content to extremely agitated more quickly.
Pressing 0 used to work reliably. I encountered one last week that kept saying “Tell me something about what you’re looking for” when I did so. An enraged, through-clenched-teeth “human being” finally did the trick. Robobitch understood that.
Big organizations, I get that it helps you to do some front-end call routing. And I don’t like push-the-button phone menus either, but I have come to appreciate their lack of ambiguity. Repeating myself to a computer that fake-greeted me and is now fake-apologizing to me for not understanding is something I’m not doing anymore.
So here is your notice, companies with whom I deal electively. When a call to you starts with me having to talk to something other than a person, it pisses me off. If you compel me to deal with a so-called natural language electronic stooge past one or two steps to get him/her the hell off the line, you shall lose my business.
Cortana is different. I choose Cortana. Ditto Kinect. Ditto Echo (eventually). An important distinction, yes?
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I’m more enraged when I get rid of faux robo help, only to get a non-English as a primary language helper, with a discernible echo on the line, such that neither of us can understand the other. On the other hand, when I do find good customer service, I throw all my business to that company, for example, Zappos.
I really should mention that after sloughing off the telebot, the human being I got was 98th percentile.
Price differences any more are mostly noise-level. Service is the only way one merchant can significantly distinguish itself from another.