- “I can say, ‘you’re a piece of s—!’ But if I say it with an upward fluctuation at the end of the sentence, the AI likes it."
I have a 3CX phone system. I am certified to design them. It's perfect for what I need to do, also grossly outsized. I can handle 16 simultaneous calls but the system can be built out to thousands. It was designed for call centers, can also be used for hotels. I can put up a big-screen leaderboard of which of my top 50 agents for converting calls and I can arrange wake-up calls and room service.
I don't do any of that but that's okay, the system is extensible and deeply customizable. It has API fingers into Salesforce, it has fingers into Zoho, it has fingers into Hubspot. It speaks to Google very easily - the fanciest thing I have it do is take calls that are routed to "page", have the system phone-pool all of my midwives, have it record their message, have it send that message to Google, have Google convert it from speech to text and then have the phone system simultaneously email a monitored inbox and text everyone in the pool so that my midwives get not one, not two, but three independent notifications that someone called and get a written summary of what they called about so they can look up their notes before they call the patient back. I can also "barge, listen and whisper": we have used this in limited quantities when we want one of our students to learn how to communicate with patients while having a midwife supervise and advise without the patient knowing our student has training wheels.
So I could build this. me. It'd be easy. I'd route any phone call to the google speech-to-text as a "whisper" on every conversation. I'd take the output of that speech-to-text and feed it into chatGPT. I'd need the training data? but it sure as shit sounds like HomeServe USA just fuckin' rolled on it and is training as they go.
Ultimately? It sucks working in a call center. It's the sort of job that you'd like to automate out of existence. But as with most automation, it's gonna be shitty for a while and the people who experience the worst of it are gonna be the people it's replacing.
- “I don’t think anything is off limits because we have to enable our customers to transact in whatever means they’re most comfortable,” said Mr. Rusin, the CEO. “So my philosophy is—automate everything. The choice will ultimately reside with the consumer.”
Call centers are high-turnover shitholes. They've never not been. But there are also a half million people in the USA - 15 million worldwide - who rely on them to earn a living. And their jobs are going to get worse before they disappear - Comcast's AI is hilarious because the more you shout at it the faster you get a human. You can literally cut your wait time in half if you shout "NO FUCK YOU LEMME TALK TO A GODDAMN HUMAN" and then the human gets scored on how chipper they are while eating your shit.
The ultimate goal of any call center operation has been to reduce headcount to zero. AI is not yet capable of doing that? But that won't stop companies from trying.
If AI makes your job easier now, AI will make your job extinct later... and it will do it in an excruciating fashion.
I worked in a call center years ago doing tech support for broadband issues. I'd say 80% of calls fell into 1 of around 20 problem categories (cannot connect, web pages don't load, reset my password, help me clear my search history before my wife comes home). Lots of repetition with slightly augmented instructions depending on the callers needs/ability (pacing, alternative descriptions, more/less commanding depending on their ability to stay on topic). Call times mattered, so like a priest in a brothel, you were always searching for the fastest way to finish things up. Sometimes that meant going slower, sometimes it meant being slightly rude and cutting people off mid-rant so that you could get to the part where you flip the switch and the problem is solved. Wrap-time (time 'wasted' between calls) mattered, so if you had a ranty bastard screaming at you on a call for 10 minutes, you (the human, with human behaviors and soft feelings) had to "get over that shit" in seconds and switch to your baseline state for the next ranty bastard in the queue. On any given day I would converse with something like 100 people for roughly 5 minutes. It's like if speed dating was your job, but instead of flirting, you have to fix their printer while they glare at you. It was a constant stream of human interactions which neither party wanted to have. It made me HATE speaking on the phone with people. It made me great at blocking out peoples current emotional state and get them aligned and working on a goal, or said another way: "Fuck your feelings, we got shit to do and then we never need to speak to each other again!". That isn't normal now is it. So my guess is that AI will be a shit show at the start but it will eventually end up being BETTER for customers in the end, you get to rant to someone that sounds real, they will respond in the most efficient way to help you vent. They will sound authentic and genuine when they express remorse for your lack of service. And they will forget you instantly when you hang up.
People rag on Comcast? Because it's a terrible company? But for most people, Comcast is the worst company they know. They're unaware of the abysmal nature of Cox, or Time Warner, or Ziply, or Frontier. Comcast is, in my opinion, doing this the right way - the 80% of calls that go into basic troubleshooting categories are shunted off onto a text robot. They know you're going to get less mad at an SMS because expressing rage through emoji is infantilizing and they declare their robotic nature front and center so carefully wording your outrage just takes time (cools you down) and increases the likelihood that the robot will misunderstand you. Where they go wrong is in protecting the fuck out of the phone tree such that if I have an actual problem caused by actual Comcast, I have to battle robots for ten minutes before I can get a human to roll a truck. Worse, my entire interaction with the robot is washed away and I get to start over with the human. I can see AI improving the shit out of this. Give the AI the chat, let it wrap up when it fails, send a summary to the human, and then butt the fuck out. I can absolutely pull up a panel that says "waiting calls" "serviced calls" "abandoned calls" "longest waiting" "average waiting" and "average talking." It's one button on my app. I've never given a shit because I know that all my receptionist's calls are complicated AF. And I think that's my basic beef more than anything - when you have a "phone pool"-type employment class, the technology makes you look for ways to punish the humans that aren't molding to the tech. The proper way to do it is to utilize the humans' expertise to the fullest. And if you have created a worker class that does not require expertise but still requires them to interact with technology that drives them like plow horses? You should be ashamed of yourself.
When your boss is tracking your brainThe first example that I came across was a few years ago. Train drivers in China on the Beijing-Shanghai [high-speed rail] line are required to wear caps that have electrodes embedded in order to track their brain activity to see if they are focused or fatigued. There are even reports of tracking of the emotion levels of factory workers. The workers can be sent home if emotional levels signal they could be disruptive on the factory floor. I thought, I’m glad that isn’t happening in the U.S. But it turns out that it is happening in the U.S. Some companies have started to look into technology that could allow them to track fatigue levels and also attention and focus.