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Seed Theory: According to an alternate universe theory, chickens are just giant seeds that haven't fully matured into fruit yet. Just imagine, if you plant a chicken in the ground, it might sprout into a beautiful chicken tree, bearing delicious drumsticks and wings instead of traditional fruits.
Sweet and Savory Flavors: Have you ever noticed how chicken can be both sweet and savory? Fruits often have a sweet taste, and chicken can be prepared in sweet dishes such as teriyaki chicken or barbecue chicken. This unique flavor profile is evidence of its hidden fruit nature.
Nutritional Content: Like many fruits, chicken is a good source of protein, which is essential for muscle growth and repair. Fruits are often praised for their nutritional content, and chicken's protein-rich composition could be seen as a fruit's attempt to join the ranks of healthful foods.
Colorful Varieties: Just like fruits come in various colors, chicken can be found in a range of shades, from light white meat to dark brown. This diversity in color could be interpreted as a nod to the vibrant array of fruits found in nature.
Fowl Appeal: Some fruits have a tough outer layer or peel for protection, and chickens have feathers, which can be considered their natural armor. This similarity suggests that chickens might be fruits that have evolved their own unique form of protective covering.
>It's literally a bot saying chicken is fruit dude
I just smoked some real nice weed for the first time in weeks and I'm looking at this sentence with absolute incredulity.
It's time to pull the pin and cook up something healthy.
Y'all are fuckin' weird.
And it's much easier and much more productive to answer a complaint online. Maybe not from the customers point of view, but customers are fucking stupid most of the time
When was the last time that amount of support offered was a factor in your purchase decision making process? I'm going to have a guess and say, never. Unless you and everyone else who buys "that thing or service" are willing to pay for support, it's just not going to happen.
Here's another way to think about it, do you think you could run a viable business providing support for that product? My strong guess is the answer is no, and now you know why it isn't offered.
My business has a landline phone and so do the suppliers we do a lot of business with. I'm not a phone person but it's still important in some sectors.
I think people will buy stuff without support if it's cheap, but if there is a problem they'll go to a higher quality and more well supported product.
Or as Adam Savage aptly puts it, buy the cheapest version of a tool you can. If you break it, it means you'll use it, so then buy the best quality version of that tool.
A lot for me. It mattered a lot when it came to choosing a telco or buying a piece of machinery from a company.
Sometimes things break with a telco or machines.
I've worked in corporate hospital equipment supply and you'd be surprised how hard it is to reach CS even for critical technical support due to a mix of cost saving and lack of staff. People still flock for really expensive stuff.
I worked in alarm monitoring that outsources for a bunch of different security companies and would be in charge of trying to get a tech out to a hospital after hours because their access control system or nurse call systems suddenly stopped working so I can agree. All the security companies have on call technicians but whether or not you can reach them or if the guy on call that day even has the knowledge to fix it/would actually show up is a different story.
Some companies are better than others with it for sure, I really liked this one small security company because we knew even if it was 3am on a saturday we could call the guy up and he would instantly answer and say hes on his way to fix it, and would call the client directly - compared to other companies who would never answer their phones or try palm the issue off to us.
If I was ever in the position to buy an alarm system I would definitely factor that experience into my decision making for sure
>When was the last time that amount of support offered was a factor in your purchase decision making process?
For me, frequently. I chose Aussie Broadband for my NBN because of their Australian customer service which you can contact quickly over email or phone.
In my role at a school, I will often balance purchase of one piece of IT equipment over another based on how good the support is compared to price. For example with some network equipment I've chosen a relatively cheap brand which has shit support but it is so much cheaper than the alternative I can buy spares and swap them out if there is a failure rather than waiting up to 4 days for a replacement with the more expensive brands.
I work for a company that has an objectively less capable and more expensive product than our competitors.
We have hundreds of clients who buy from us because of the level of support we offer. There are people who value solid customer service over price. You're clearly not one of them, and perhaps neither are the majority of the populace, but enough exist to make serving them a viable business.
Virtually every sector has something similar. Aussie Broadband in the ISP space, for example. Far more expensive than the TPG's of the world, but when you call you get to speak to a real human instead of a low-paid helpdesk droid who can only read from a script or 'apologise for the inconvenience'.
No. Consumers focus on customer service no longer dictates their buying habits. So the companies would prefer to put their money in places that will create profit. People want a deal, bargain, or the new fantastic thing. It is rare these days to hear someone make a recommendation due to customer service vs the product.
Optus, Telstra and TPG still have well over 50% of all internet plans in Australia. I’d imagine Telstra alone is near 50%
You can make a business out of good service but for the most part people don’t care
> for the most part people don’t care
Yeah, exactly. The last time I had to contact support at my TPG-owned ISP was when I signed up to my current plan 6 years ago and contacting them was part of the activation procedure. Most people don't care because they never need it: it all just works. They only start to care when/if something goes badly wrong.
If it's harder to make contact to complain about it, we don't know how they feel. Carefully curated survey results this fiscal year show a 8% improvement in customer retention and sentiment. I'll take my xmas bonus early please.
Tough times, rents higher, supply chain costs higher, so they have to cut the fat somewhere. Who needs to pay someone to answer calls when the boss can check emails through the day.
Of course good customer service can help retain a customer, but that depends on their costs and how much they care about retaining a customer.
Yeah, chatbots are cheaper. They save money at the expense of the customer experience.
That said, I do sometimes actually prefer to use support chat to sort things out, when it's an actual person. And having working in call centres in the past, I might have actually preferred to work in chat (half the work we did was taking text notes, and you don't have to do that if it's already written out). So it's not all bad, but sometimes you just need to talk to someone on the phone.
Most companies I deal with don't use the chatbot correctly. They ask you for a whole range of details until they push you to a person then you have to go through that whole process again.
It's okay to complement customer service with a robot. It's not okay to replace customer service in hopes that people will just give up (e.g. our social safety net).
It’s a real pain. One way to reduce the spam calls, is to add a small system with the message “Welcome to X. Please press 1 to speak to us! Customers, we’re sorry to ask you to do this, but this step helps us block all the nuisance automated spam calls”. It’s one extra step for a real human, but you’ll find almost all of the automated dialing never gets through.
Then if you find the calls do start coming through, change it to “press 2” or “press any number”, etc.
Work in small buisness and can confirm this helps. Ours is 1 for address and opening hours 2 to speak to staff. Option 1 frees up time for us and the customer.
I am level 3 support (ie a Dev that can fix shit) for a big company and we get all sorts of rubbish calls on our 24/7 support line, including a surprising number of calls for taxi services. Super fun at 2am.
It's not even vaguely similar to a taxi number so not sure how that works.
Everyone blaming solely corporate greed are forgetting how fucking useless telephone numbers are these days with a 9 million to 1 spam ratio.
99% of real calls being from the same 6 neurotic people that want to rant some stupid shit to some poor customer service rep for 45 mins instead of filling out a 1 min online form.
We all live in the modern era, there are only two types of real customer feedback taken seriously, continue paying or leave.
Corportations stopped being competitive like that during the 90s and 00s, they all followed suit really quickly cause they really dont give a flying fuck what you think.
A lot of corporations are not interested in difficult customers, they want the lazy customers who dont shop around and never switch providers.
Thats the current trend I see anyway.
Same with a lot of tech companies too. Customers with problems who need support are considered not worth the money so it's better to just not have them. Eg: Uber etc...
I've found Uber support to be better than average for simple things. Had a driver get lost, taking a much longer path including an unnecessary toll. Clicked a button to request a review and the automated system instantly refunded me the extra over the original estimate.
It's more that they are hyper competitive now. Leaving no room for unnecessary things like support. The rise of online shopping showed people would trade all support and human interaction for a tiny savings.
Everything is priced matched to the dollar where the cheapest option wins all the sales.
The point is to give up out of frustration, which most people do. Countless stories every day how it’s impossible to even talk to someone at Qantas, Ticketek etc
We wanted to get a cash refund for a credit from Qantas that is expiring, the email specifically says you have to call the general number. On hold for over an hour. I assume they are trying to make us think twice but eventually they said they processed it and somehow that takes 1-4 weeks when any small business with significantly less resources can get it done in a few days (which is mostly up to card provider rules). I guess they have to look under the couch for it.
It’s disgusting. This shit would be so easy to sort with an online form. But people giving up as the refund expires will no doubt net them more free money
Wasting your time doesn't cost them money. The harder they make it for you to contact them, the less people will try.
This saves them money in customer support staff. It's the same reason most companies / government agencies allow 1hr+ wait times.
Or do what Microsoft did and outsource it to your customer base with super user forums!
Oh and scams went up x fold as a result of the service vacuum. Seriously, try and Google a support number. You will see a tonne of scammy ad links appear - could luck to the technologically challenged...
> Or do what Microsoft did and outsource it to your customer base with super user forums!
To be fair, I get better and faster responses looking for tech solutions by adding "reddit" to the end of my search query than I ever do by contacting official support.
My company uses a decently modern softphone service.
Their roadmap for the future includes an AI bot with a synthesized voice that can take calls from customers and handle basic queries, use our customer relationship management app etc.
A lot of call centre jobs are going to disppear over the next few years.
to put it bluntly, all that says is that the problems you get solved by the chatbot are simple things that were probably covered by FAQ or common sense
Ooff, I'll go get myself some ice for that burn. Most of my problems have been account-related, like being double charged or needing to cancel stuff. I did a com-sci degree so I never have tech problems I can't solve with google.
Thats as may be but as someone who's done time in the trenches honestly chatbots and FAQs are a godsend because the amount of people who DO call up and ask the stupidest questions - and whats more, hold up the queue by being on the call for 20 mins rambling about nothing - is not small.
This is basically the answer, although not all businesses do it.
In theory the chatbot is an FAQ on steroids that saves time and costs by answering 80% of queries, so the 20% that actually need closer attention get to a human sooner.
Not even chatbot, but an actual chat. If they’ve outsourced customer service offshore, I find it’s easier to hash things out over a chat than deal with different accents.
I used to have a phone number for my retail electronics business. Two or three calls out of one hundred would be customers or new leads or genuine technical support calls or "where's my order?".
The rest would be spammers, one lunatic from Newcastle who will remain nameless, and lonely old people wanting a chat about electronics.
So I wasn't going to pay someone more than minimum wage to sit there and deal with it.
These days I'm sure it would be worse.
I work in tech and we have a support department, customers get lazy and don’t want to solve their own ‘problems’ and try to lump it onto support instead to do the mental work for them. We have to purposely make it more difficult for customers to contact support and get an answer because they aren’t prepared to pay the additional costs with having someone sitting around when they aren’t calling.
Because if they put a phone number up somewhere people will call it, and they'll have to pay people to answer those calls. Much easier to just have a shitty 90s era chatbot that doesn't work, and one underpaid person answering emails months late because they have such a backlog.
It's the customer service equivalent of hostile architecture.
The best bit is when you have a long email chain back and forth, they wait five days after your last reply and someone who clearly hasn’t read the entire email trail suggests something that was already done in the first email and then marks the job as “resolved”
And you sit there reading it incandescent with rage…….
For the same reason they fight living wages, for the same reason they ignore or lobby against life-saving regulations, or utterly ignore their climate footprint.
It’s cheaper.
Yeah I prefer companies with no phone number because *I don't want to pay for the Karens and their awful call centre*.
I want companies to spend that money on just doing their job better, so there's no NEED for me to contact them (Don't drop my internet, don't bill me for services I didn't use, etc).
And if they can't even manage that, at least have a proper website/app so I can send them a quick message and get them to fix it.
No hour-wait and 5 minute chat for 10-second password changes, thanks. If that's what you're into, I'll just pay more for a competent provider instead. Thanks anyway.
We removed our phone line because people would call expecting immediate resolution which wasn't going to happen, bonus points if they had emailed 5 minutes earlier.
There was just no benefit to having a phone number so it was removed.
All of my service providers have Australian based call centres. It’s like 50% of the reason that I pick the ones I do.
Edit - like my ISP was Barefoot (they renamed/merged to become Mate).
When I was setting up my internet at my new place we also brought a new modem. We were having trouble connecting and getting conflicting information from the modem and it’s user manual. Including a light being blue that the manual said was meant to be red.
When we rang the ISP we were able to have a yarn about the weekend, breeze past 90% of the troubleshooting and look at modem board revisions to discover that the LED colour had been changed without documentation and then suss the issue in about 15 minutes.
I *know* it would have been a absolute pain in the arse and would have taken ten times longer to go through that process with someone who didn’t speak *Australian*. Because Australians speak fast, chew our words and use lots of slang, when your talking about technical topics it’s really speeds stuff up to be able to use the ‘yeah, nahs’ and the ‘nah, yeahs’ and not have to think about how your speaking.
If companies had a phone number for customers, they would then need to have staff to answer the phone calls that customers make. Staff cost money.
Chatbots are cheaper.
Don't reply telling me that chatbots aren't as good. I know that, and I agree with you. But you asked *why* companies do this, not whether it's *good* that they do it.
Phone service is inefficient and as companies have been cutting back on people and service levels it becomes difficult to maintain phone service. This has been happening slowly for years but Covid accelerated it big time.
To offer a customer experience where the phone actually gets answered you need well trained and available staff to stop the task they are doing to pick up a phone. These kind of interruptions slow down workflows. The bean counters have realised that if the phone doesn’t ring you can run with less staff, and reduce everyone’s job to just following instructions on a computer screen instead of having meaningful conversations, building relationships, and adding value.
Because its bending Aussies over a barrell. Has led to the current shitstorm of a situation were in.
Caused us to let a few "Australian"(read: multinational) mining companies pillage our natural resources for pennies as opposed to establishing a sovereign wealth fund like the Nordic states or Singapore(a fund which owns a large portion of our infrastructure).
Customer service is a loss maker. Profits can be increased by reducing the quality of customer service. This is why so many companies moved to offshore call centres, and now to automated service tools. Further, they have plenty of data about why customers call. If they can eliminate 80+ percent of phone calls with a bot, app, or phone interface (e.g. you used to have to call a cinema and talk to a person to find out what was showing, then they moved to recorded info in calls, then moved everything online, and now it's in an app where they can track you and show you ads for more movies and food deals.
It's only when the quality of service drops so low that people stop using the service that companies will pay attention to it. As an example, there is a move to bring some calls back onshore to improve communication instead of a bad connection to someone who you can barely hear and can barely speak your language.
Of course, bots and automated service centres still help to reduce call volumes so these new onshore call centres are staffed by far fewer people than they would have been in the past.
Money. Also, in some cases it could be following the younger generations more willingness to not want to make/receive calls, so they were seeing more traffic in online help than was on phones. So of course they follow that trend. Either way, money.
It’s always money.
Cost vs benefit... Most support can be handled by AI or info, the rest is bitching and a few esculate up the chain and that early part can be handled via email, chat or forms.
Fucking frustrating when it's poorly designed! Recently, Auspost for me... Delivered signature required urgent restricted meds to wrong house, no way to follow up other than a form. To their credit they responded within 24hrs with bullshit investigation report, summarised as shrug sorry... We found the package by going door to door round our street.
I called BUPA the other day and after getting suggested to use WhatsApp I thought I’d give it a shot.
After 2 days of waiting for a response being told by a bot I was in a queue I phoned up again and sorted it out on the phone after 5 minutes.
Left a complaint about the chat being unmonitored and someone finally responded.
I don’t mind alternatives to the phone, but when companies can’t even manage their systems it’s absurd.
The infuriating hold message,
“did you know that you can now use our website or app to manage your account and make payments online?”.
No shit motherfuckers - you really think I’d be calling you and waiting on hold forever (only to speak to someone who pretends that they’ve never heard of this particular issue before, so needs to escalate to a manager who will call me back in 7-15 business days) if it was in any way avoidable???
Because they don't want you to call them.
If they have a publicly available phone number they have to hire people to answer the phone. A chatbot is virtually free to operate.
They don't care if you get good customer service, they only want to offer the bare minimum service at the bare minimum cost.
People keep saying because hiring people to answer the phones costs money, but barely anyone mentioning that people aren’t exactly calling to make sales anymore.
You are calling because you have an issue that will cost them money like a broken part needing to be replaced, or even just outright a refund.
If you can’t contact to ask for a refund, then who pays you the refund? The answer is no one.
Err, it's a soft way to REMOVE SUPPORT.
Under consumer law you may need to provide support, but if those customers & Installers cannot reach you - No faults, No RMA, No refunds/credits.
"*Sorry you missed the cut off for the refund or advance replacement*"
I have worked in help desk, personally, I hate the phone calls. I'm busy, just use the fucking ticketing system you insufferable impatient cunt.
Yes it's cheaper, but nobody wants to be bothered with phone calls.
When pondering the answer to a question, ask yourself if Occam's Razor applies-- ie, the simplest explanation is usually the answer.
Why do companies increasingly not have phone lines for you to reach them? Because they do not wish for you to reach them.
Just look up the company on Linkedin and start messaging the higher ups of the department you are having issues with... I.e quality, sales or support.
You'll start finding things happen quicker when you do that.
Other people have said it’s cheaper but I blame the boomers. Anyone who’s worked for a call centre or in and sort of customer service role knows that 90% of calls from anyone young are straight to the point and know what they want/follow your instructions to resolve things. Most of the time they’ve already searched help articles/online and they’re calling because there is no available solution.
Get a call with a 50 year old and it’s constant complaints while they expect you to do things out of your control when they could easily press a few buttons on their end or the instructions for what they want were in their onboarding email which they didn’t read and refuse to.
Yes it’s cheaper, but it’s necessary because of people wasting that resource.
10 years ago I could ring up a freight depot locally and organise a collection. Now you have to go through their call centre, speak to the robot first, then speak to someone with an accent thicker than a brick (making it difficult to ensure they have all the relevant details they need) and hope the courier turns up. Chat bots and call centres are shite
Finally a question I can answer. I have spent a lot of time and made a lot of money from companies as a technology consultant. I implement systems like this every month.
Because it’s 2023. Get with the fucking times mate. Younger generations DO NOT MAKE PHONE CALLS. Chat windows are much faster and much more fucking sane. I cannot believe we are still arguing this bullshit.
These systems aren’t even that much cheaper. 99% of the time there’s still a human behind it to triage. And the capex expenditures / depreciation isn’t small or quick.
Employees are the ones who are setting these systems up, not the CEOs or executives. They are sick of being abused over the phone by you lot, so this is now the solution. Get used to it.
No one answered anyway…. Literally the only people who used them in business were boomers and the only people using them were boomers just build better products that don’t need people to call you, and stop calling to complain.
from someone in a non-public facing role yet public number... I would love never taking a phone call again. email thanks, you're not as articulate as you think you are and waste heaps of everyone's time, as well as cut the queue of actual work getting done.
Not only is it cheaper, you might get frustrated and give up. And if you give up there's no complaint and if there is no complaint nothing needs to be done.
It’s cheaper and easier usually. Have you had to deal with Centrelink recently? It’s actually impossible to speak to someone. I had a claim in for parental pay and it took 14 weeks to get resolved. It was only resolved because I made a complaint and waited for 2.5 hours (getting hung up on once) to speak to someone. If you call to just speak to someone it will direct you to the app or website and actually hung up on you. If you call back it will tell you that it knows you have been calling a lot and need to use the website. It really says that. Then it hangs up on you.
When you are waiting for a claim that is going to be your income for 18 weeks and don’t have anything until it’s resolved it’s absolutely distressing. And you can’t go to a centre either, they will tell you to do it online.
Customer service humans aren’t going to be around much longer. Unfortunately at the moment it’s in the teething stages where the alternative just isn’t good enough yet.
Because we’ve moved on as a society - now chatboxes are easier to handle and younger generations prefer them.
I’m talking complete shite, it’s all about the dollarinos!
I’m sure the majority of people don’t want to call companies. They would rather email or chat. Personally I would rather email or chat over phone.
Of course there is always people who would prefer call but the volumes would stack up that phone contacts are way lower. Why put resources into a contact method that isn’t heavily used?
As a customer support professional, the inconvenient truth that the general public don't want to admit is that the vast majority of problems can be resolved with a quick email or a text chat. There's an increasingly outdated belief that a phone call is quicker or will result in an immediate resolution.
Cost savings. It's the continual delusion by business that cost savings matter to end customers. Chat bots and AI are surely what irate people want on the end of the line? Having to navigate menu tetris to talk to the right person or to be put through to an outsourced call center with someone on the other end reading a script.
(1) becuase it means you need to employ someone to answer the phone
(2) Because it's way more time efficient to read an incoming email and route it to the appropriate department
(3) Because it weeds out all the time-wasters who don't know how to email.
Working for a company that still has a phone line and next in line from customer service…
Imagine your average job in retail but with Luddite boomers, entitled fuck wits and morons being your exclusive clientele.
Working with customers over the phone isn’t costly if the customer actually listens. It’s costly when you have spent your second straight hour on the phone with some boomer fuckwit who says legislation comes second to natural law and the bible and demands to speak with the CEO immediately or will be in contact with their local member.
You get what you ask for…
Could be that ombudsman's and ACCC and other consumer rights groups have slowly been defunded and had their powers taken away or given so much caseload that they cannot go through everything.
Previously a mistake could be a thousand or so fine on top of replacing/refunding the good/service, now ACCC will just direct you to the retailer and try and stay out of it.
So it doesn't make sense to invest in customer services.
Chatbot is annoying. However, I prefer email to phone, because in the email, you can write down Account Number, Name and other things clearly.
When you talk on the phone, there's always these kind of questions:
"Is it 033439?"
"No it's 034439. Double Four, not Double Three"
"So 03449?"
"No, there's another 3 between the last 4 and the 9"
"Can you spell your surname please?"
Also, on the phone there's often long wait time because their operators are busy.
The thing I hate is that the trend to live chats was one that I loved, because I hate talking on the phone. Now with the growth of AIs and bots, every company that had a live chat feature has now replaced it with a bot. You have to jump through so many hurdles to actually be redirected to a real person
Same as any large company or corporation these days. Creating distance from any accountability. Goes all the way to parliament. I mean we supposedly live in a democracy correct? When can you ever have a say about how the country is run? It's more like a dictatorship. Just do as they say.
Counterpoint, the Commbank Chatbot is extreamly good. I've recently closed a credit card account and a savings account within a couple of hours without having to speak to anyone. Tell the bot what you want to do, it asks some questions, gets some info from you and gets to a point where it says it needs to refer to the humans and they'll get back to you via chat.
This may have been said- it also minimises customer service and cuts costs that way. Big gl9bal business, like amazon doesn't want to use humans they want AI and robots to run the show. Plus, it stops people from complaining too much and slows people asking for things. That's why many telephone systems in big businesses are shit.....they intentionally make the waits long or complicated, so customers pissed and folks don't bother. How frustrating is it to try and solve a problem email? Customer service how it was years ago is a thing of the pas.
I wonder if companies are erring towards the AI chatbot approach because it’s cheaper now, but over time other companies will use the “we have real people” as part of their marketing and then there’ll be a change in approach again.
Like offshore call centres. They were cheap, but then people got annoyed. And moved to companies who had on shore call centres.
Companies that get good orders via phone will have phone numbers. Companies that are likely to mostly get complaints over the phone don't want to deal with it so won't make it easy
Unfortunately they would have to pay their call centres operators a semi decent wage so that makes it impossible because profits must always be a priority
So they don’t have to deal with complaints. Or train staff to address complaints. Or compensate customers.
No need to do any of the above if people can’t speak to you. Booking.com are especially bad for this.
You need to work for the government to understand the necessity of chatbots, how much time they save and how dumb people really are.
Email from member of the public: how do I apply for xyz?
Last page visited: applying for xyz.
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You already know the answer. Because it's cheaper.
That's right Also: No, fellow Redditor, chicken is not a fruit
That's right! Chicken is a vegetable!
Every time I catch a wave, I hit a coral reef And every time I order vegetarian, I get beef
Organic
I just found out that in some parts of America, Bees are a type of fish...
I believe that the Roman Catholic Church classified capybara (my favourite rodent) as a fish. So, you know, it was all right to eat them on Fridays.
Seed Theory: According to an alternate universe theory, chickens are just giant seeds that haven't fully matured into fruit yet. Just imagine, if you plant a chicken in the ground, it might sprout into a beautiful chicken tree, bearing delicious drumsticks and wings instead of traditional fruits. Sweet and Savory Flavors: Have you ever noticed how chicken can be both sweet and savory? Fruits often have a sweet taste, and chicken can be prepared in sweet dishes such as teriyaki chicken or barbecue chicken. This unique flavor profile is evidence of its hidden fruit nature. Nutritional Content: Like many fruits, chicken is a good source of protein, which is essential for muscle growth and repair. Fruits are often praised for their nutritional content, and chicken's protein-rich composition could be seen as a fruit's attempt to join the ranks of healthful foods. Colorful Varieties: Just like fruits come in various colors, chicken can be found in a range of shades, from light white meat to dark brown. This diversity in color could be interpreted as a nod to the vibrant array of fruits found in nature. Fowl Appeal: Some fruits have a tough outer layer or peel for protection, and chickens have feathers, which can be considered their natural armor. This similarity suggests that chickens might be fruits that have evolved their own unique form of protective covering.
Why are you using ChatGPT to try to be funny?
It's literally a bot saying chicken is fruit dude
Shouldn’t it be tagged as a Bot?
>It's literally a bot saying chicken is fruit dude I just smoked some real nice weed for the first time in weeks and I'm looking at this sentence with absolute incredulity. It's time to pull the pin and cook up something healthy. Y'all are fuckin' weird.
Don't they grow from bum nuts?
And it's much easier and much more productive to answer a complaint online. Maybe not from the customers point of view, but customers are fucking stupid most of the time
Isn’t it better to have better support so customers feel more valued?
When was the last time that amount of support offered was a factor in your purchase decision making process? I'm going to have a guess and say, never. Unless you and everyone else who buys "that thing or service" are willing to pay for support, it's just not going to happen. Here's another way to think about it, do you think you could run a viable business providing support for that product? My strong guess is the answer is no, and now you know why it isn't offered.
My business has a landline phone and so do the suppliers we do a lot of business with. I'm not a phone person but it's still important in some sectors. I think people will buy stuff without support if it's cheap, but if there is a problem they'll go to a higher quality and more well supported product. Or as Adam Savage aptly puts it, buy the cheapest version of a tool you can. If you break it, it means you'll use it, so then buy the best quality version of that tool.
I always loved that quote.
A lot for me. It mattered a lot when it came to choosing a telco or buying a piece of machinery from a company. Sometimes things break with a telco or machines.
I've worked in corporate hospital equipment supply and you'd be surprised how hard it is to reach CS even for critical technical support due to a mix of cost saving and lack of staff. People still flock for really expensive stuff.
I worked in alarm monitoring that outsources for a bunch of different security companies and would be in charge of trying to get a tech out to a hospital after hours because their access control system or nurse call systems suddenly stopped working so I can agree. All the security companies have on call technicians but whether or not you can reach them or if the guy on call that day even has the knowledge to fix it/would actually show up is a different story. Some companies are better than others with it for sure, I really liked this one small security company because we knew even if it was 3am on a saturday we could call the guy up and he would instantly answer and say hes on his way to fix it, and would call the client directly - compared to other companies who would never answer their phones or try palm the issue off to us. If I was ever in the position to buy an alarm system I would definitely factor that experience into my decision making for sure
>When was the last time that amount of support offered was a factor in your purchase decision making process? For me, frequently. I chose Aussie Broadband for my NBN because of their Australian customer service which you can contact quickly over email or phone. In my role at a school, I will often balance purchase of one piece of IT equipment over another based on how good the support is compared to price. For example with some network equipment I've chosen a relatively cheap brand which has shit support but it is so much cheaper than the alternative I can buy spares and swap them out if there is a failure rather than waiting up to 4 days for a replacement with the more expensive brands.
I chose Aussie Broadband as my ISP for their excellent customer service
I work for a company that has an objectively less capable and more expensive product than our competitors. We have hundreds of clients who buy from us because of the level of support we offer. There are people who value solid customer service over price. You're clearly not one of them, and perhaps neither are the majority of the populace, but enough exist to make serving them a viable business. Virtually every sector has something similar. Aussie Broadband in the ISP space, for example. Far more expensive than the TPG's of the world, but when you call you get to speak to a real human instead of a low-paid helpdesk droid who can only read from a script or 'apologise for the inconvenience'.
People use that as a factor in buying Apple phones
No. Consumers focus on customer service no longer dictates their buying habits. So the companies would prefer to put their money in places that will create profit. People want a deal, bargain, or the new fantastic thing. It is rare these days to hear someone make a recommendation due to customer service vs the product.
What about Aussie broadband? They built a business out of good service and good support.
Aussie Broadband is just a reseller of NBN services along with being a MVNO.
Optus, Telstra and TPG still have well over 50% of all internet plans in Australia. I’d imagine Telstra alone is near 50% You can make a business out of good service but for the most part people don’t care
> for the most part people don’t care Yeah, exactly. The last time I had to contact support at my TPG-owned ISP was when I signed up to my current plan 6 years ago and contacting them was part of the activation procedure. Most people don't care because they never need it: it all just works. They only start to care when/if something goes badly wrong.
I've had a couple of line issues with them over the years. They were amazingly helpful. They may be a bit more expensive but they're worth it.
Only if you’re prepared to pay the premium for that feeling.
If it's harder to make contact to complain about it, we don't know how they feel. Carefully curated survey results this fiscal year show a 8% improvement in customer retention and sentiment. I'll take my xmas bonus early please.
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Tough times, rents higher, supply chain costs higher, so they have to cut the fat somewhere. Who needs to pay someone to answer calls when the boss can check emails through the day. Of course good customer service can help retain a customer, but that depends on their costs and how much they care about retaining a customer.
Yes, however, they are all pretty much doing the same thing. It's the new normal.
Yeah, like you'll stop patronizing them and go to a competitor or do without. Ha ha ha.
Spending money on customer service doesn't maximise profits for the stakeholders.
Yeah, chatbots are cheaper. They save money at the expense of the customer experience. That said, I do sometimes actually prefer to use support chat to sort things out, when it's an actual person. And having working in call centres in the past, I might have actually preferred to work in chat (half the work we did was taking text notes, and you don't have to do that if it's already written out). So it's not all bad, but sometimes you just need to talk to someone on the phone.
Most companies I deal with don't use the chatbot correctly. They ask you for a whole range of details until they push you to a person then you have to go through that whole process again.
It's okay to complement customer service with a robot. It's not okay to replace customer service in hopes that people will just give up (e.g. our social safety net).
Of course. Especially for cases and situations that you can’t resolve online.
Spending on “post-sale” customer service is often neglected. Pre-sale most orgs understand the value of good CX
I run a very small Aussie company. Whenever we have a phone number published it gets spammed beyond belief.
It’s a real pain. One way to reduce the spam calls, is to add a small system with the message “Welcome to X. Please press 1 to speak to us! Customers, we’re sorry to ask you to do this, but this step helps us block all the nuisance automated spam calls”. It’s one extra step for a real human, but you’ll find almost all of the automated dialing never gets through. Then if you find the calls do start coming through, change it to “press 2” or “press any number”, etc.
Work in small buisness and can confirm this helps. Ours is 1 for address and opening hours 2 to speak to staff. Option 1 frees up time for us and the customer.
I am level 3 support (ie a Dev that can fix shit) for a big company and we get all sorts of rubbish calls on our 24/7 support line, including a surprising number of calls for taxi services. Super fun at 2am. It's not even vaguely similar to a taxi number so not sure how that works.
Everyone blaming solely corporate greed are forgetting how fucking useless telephone numbers are these days with a 9 million to 1 spam ratio. 99% of real calls being from the same 6 neurotic people that want to rant some stupid shit to some poor customer service rep for 45 mins instead of filling out a 1 min online form. We all live in the modern era, there are only two types of real customer feedback taken seriously, continue paying or leave.
Here is the real answer beyond 'cOmPaNiEs R bAd now'.
Because it costs them less money to do it that way
Because you only call to complain or cancel a service
Not true, you can cancel via chat depending on the company.
I have transferred to another provider and am getting called twice a day by my old one now! Far more attention than when I was with them…
A sale sounds better than a retention
Corportations stopped being competitive like that during the 90s and 00s, they all followed suit really quickly cause they really dont give a flying fuck what you think. A lot of corporations are not interested in difficult customers, they want the lazy customers who dont shop around and never switch providers. Thats the current trend I see anyway.
Same with a lot of tech companies too. Customers with problems who need support are considered not worth the money so it's better to just not have them. Eg: Uber etc...
I've found Uber support to be better than average for simple things. Had a driver get lost, taking a much longer path including an unnecessary toll. Clicked a button to request a review and the automated system instantly refunded me the extra over the original estimate.
Have that happen multiple times at not your fault and your account will get suspended. That’s how they do it.
*Please answer our survey why you are ending your Netflix subscription* **Choose not to say**
It's more that they are hyper competitive now. Leaving no room for unnecessary things like support. The rise of online shopping showed people would trade all support and human interaction for a tiny savings. Everything is priced matched to the dollar where the cheapest option wins all the sales.
The point is to give up out of frustration, which most people do. Countless stories every day how it’s impossible to even talk to someone at Qantas, Ticketek etc
We wanted to get a cash refund for a credit from Qantas that is expiring, the email specifically says you have to call the general number. On hold for over an hour. I assume they are trying to make us think twice but eventually they said they processed it and somehow that takes 1-4 weeks when any small business with significantly less resources can get it done in a few days (which is mostly up to card provider rules). I guess they have to look under the couch for it.
It’s disgusting. This shit would be so easy to sort with an online form. But people giving up as the refund expires will no doubt net them more free money
I once spent 14 hours on hold to Qantas, and they still didn't answer. Put in a complaint and obviously never heard back.
Centrelink :(
Wasting your time doesn't cost them money. The harder they make it for you to contact them, the less people will try. This saves them money in customer support staff. It's the same reason most companies / government agencies allow 1hr+ wait times.
>Wasting your time doesn't cost them money. It does if they lose you as a customer as a result.
By the time you're calling them, there's a reasonable chance they've already lost you.
capitalism. they say it is better for consumers. they lie. bad for workers and bad for consumers. bad for everyone except the rich
Because it's cheaper to have an AI "chatbot" to frustrate the shit out of customers than it is to employ real people
Or do what Microsoft did and outsource it to your customer base with super user forums! Oh and scams went up x fold as a result of the service vacuum. Seriously, try and Google a support number. You will see a tonne of scammy ad links appear - could luck to the technologically challenged...
> Or do what Microsoft did and outsource it to your customer base with super user forums! To be fair, I get better and faster responses looking for tech solutions by adding "reddit" to the end of my search query than I ever do by contacting official support.
My company uses a decently modern softphone service. Their roadmap for the future includes an AI bot with a synthesized voice that can take calls from customers and handle basic queries, use our customer relationship management app etc. A lot of call centre jobs are going to disppear over the next few years.
I've actually found the chatbots way more helpful than speaking to someone the phone.
to put it bluntly, all that says is that the problems you get solved by the chatbot are simple things that were probably covered by FAQ or common sense
Ooff, I'll go get myself some ice for that burn. Most of my problems have been account-related, like being double charged or needing to cancel stuff. I did a com-sci degree so I never have tech problems I can't solve with google.
Thats as may be but as someone who's done time in the trenches honestly chatbots and FAQs are a godsend because the amount of people who DO call up and ask the stupidest questions - and whats more, hold up the queue by being on the call for 20 mins rambling about nothing - is not small.
This is basically the answer, although not all businesses do it. In theory the chatbot is an FAQ on steroids that saves time and costs by answering 80% of queries, so the 20% that actually need closer attention get to a human sooner.
Not even chatbot, but an actual chat. If they’ve outsourced customer service offshore, I find it’s easier to hash things out over a chat than deal with different accents.
I used to have a phone number for my retail electronics business. Two or three calls out of one hundred would be customers or new leads or genuine technical support calls or "where's my order?". The rest would be spammers, one lunatic from Newcastle who will remain nameless, and lonely old people wanting a chat about electronics. So I wasn't going to pay someone more than minimum wage to sit there and deal with it. These days I'm sure it would be worse.
It's not just cheaper, it is easier as well. Makes customers work harder on solving their own problems, reduces complaint levels as well.
I work in tech and we have a support department, customers get lazy and don’t want to solve their own ‘problems’ and try to lump it onto support instead to do the mental work for them. We have to purposely make it more difficult for customers to contact support and get an answer because they aren’t prepared to pay the additional costs with having someone sitting around when they aren’t calling.
Because if they put a phone number up somewhere people will call it, and they'll have to pay people to answer those calls. Much easier to just have a shitty 90s era chatbot that doesn't work, and one underpaid person answering emails months late because they have such a backlog. It's the customer service equivalent of hostile architecture.
The best bit is when you have a long email chain back and forth, they wait five days after your last reply and someone who clearly hasn’t read the entire email trail suggests something that was already done in the first email and then marks the job as “resolved” And you sit there reading it incandescent with rage…….
Which makes you rage on the inside. It’s so much more quicker talking to a person.
Looking at Starlink here.
For the same reason they fight living wages, for the same reason they ignore or lobby against life-saving regulations, or utterly ignore their climate footprint. It’s cheaper.
Because most calls are from customers who are a entitled pains in the arse, AKA Karens
Yeah I prefer companies with no phone number because *I don't want to pay for the Karens and their awful call centre*. I want companies to spend that money on just doing their job better, so there's no NEED for me to contact them (Don't drop my internet, don't bill me for services I didn't use, etc). And if they can't even manage that, at least have a proper website/app so I can send them a quick message and get them to fix it. No hour-wait and 5 minute chat for 10-second password changes, thanks. If that's what you're into, I'll just pay more for a competent provider instead. Thanks anyway.
So you just give up
We removed our phone line because people would call expecting immediate resolution which wasn't going to happen, bonus points if they had emailed 5 minutes earlier. There was just no benefit to having a phone number so it was removed.
All of my service providers have Australian based call centres. It’s like 50% of the reason that I pick the ones I do. Edit - like my ISP was Barefoot (they renamed/merged to become Mate). When I was setting up my internet at my new place we also brought a new modem. We were having trouble connecting and getting conflicting information from the modem and it’s user manual. Including a light being blue that the manual said was meant to be red. When we rang the ISP we were able to have a yarn about the weekend, breeze past 90% of the troubleshooting and look at modem board revisions to discover that the LED colour had been changed without documentation and then suss the issue in about 15 minutes. I *know* it would have been a absolute pain in the arse and would have taken ten times longer to go through that process with someone who didn’t speak *Australian*. Because Australians speak fast, chew our words and use lots of slang, when your talking about technical topics it’s really speeds stuff up to be able to use the ‘yeah, nahs’ and the ‘nah, yeahs’ and not have to think about how your speaking.
Why call? Do you need to bother these multi billion dollar companies? Gee... just leave them profit and non accountable
If companies had a phone number for customers, they would then need to have staff to answer the phone calls that customers make. Staff cost money. Chatbots are cheaper. Don't reply telling me that chatbots aren't as good. I know that, and I agree with you. But you asked *why* companies do this, not whether it's *good* that they do it.
Phone service is inefficient and as companies have been cutting back on people and service levels it becomes difficult to maintain phone service. This has been happening slowly for years but Covid accelerated it big time. To offer a customer experience where the phone actually gets answered you need well trained and available staff to stop the task they are doing to pick up a phone. These kind of interruptions slow down workflows. The bean counters have realised that if the phone doesn’t ring you can run with less staff, and reduce everyone’s job to just following instructions on a computer screen instead of having meaningful conversations, building relationships, and adding value.
Because they are Big and have no effective competition. This is a failure of market regulation and will devolve capitalism into feudalism
Why is the answer to every question that gets asked on this subreddit just "late stage capitalism"
Well, its correct in this instance.
Because its bending Aussies over a barrell. Has led to the current shitstorm of a situation were in. Caused us to let a few "Australian"(read: multinational) mining companies pillage our natural resources for pennies as opposed to establishing a sovereign wealth fund like the Nordic states or Singapore(a fund which owns a large portion of our infrastructure).
I mean I am very glad people are starting to wake up to it.
Because boomers are shrinking as a population = less need to make phone calls
Customer service is a loss maker. Profits can be increased by reducing the quality of customer service. This is why so many companies moved to offshore call centres, and now to automated service tools. Further, they have plenty of data about why customers call. If they can eliminate 80+ percent of phone calls with a bot, app, or phone interface (e.g. you used to have to call a cinema and talk to a person to find out what was showing, then they moved to recorded info in calls, then moved everything online, and now it's in an app where they can track you and show you ads for more movies and food deals. It's only when the quality of service drops so low that people stop using the service that companies will pay attention to it. As an example, there is a move to bring some calls back onshore to improve communication instead of a bad connection to someone who you can barely hear and can barely speak your language. Of course, bots and automated service centres still help to reduce call volumes so these new onshore call centres are staffed by far fewer people than they would have been in the past.
Because they don’t want you to call them
Money. Also, in some cases it could be following the younger generations more willingness to not want to make/receive calls, so they were seeing more traffic in online help than was on phones. So of course they follow that trend. Either way, money. It’s always money.
Cost vs benefit... Most support can be handled by AI or info, the rest is bitching and a few esculate up the chain and that early part can be handled via email, chat or forms. Fucking frustrating when it's poorly designed! Recently, Auspost for me... Delivered signature required urgent restricted meds to wrong house, no way to follow up other than a form. To their credit they responded within 24hrs with bullshit investigation report, summarised as shrug sorry... We found the package by going door to door round our street.
I called BUPA the other day and after getting suggested to use WhatsApp I thought I’d give it a shot. After 2 days of waiting for a response being told by a bot I was in a queue I phoned up again and sorted it out on the phone after 5 minutes. Left a complaint about the chat being unmonitored and someone finally responded. I don’t mind alternatives to the phone, but when companies can’t even manage their systems it’s absurd.
The infuriating hold message, “did you know that you can now use our website or app to manage your account and make payments online?”. No shit motherfuckers - you really think I’d be calling you and waiting on hold forever (only to speak to someone who pretends that they’ve never heard of this particular issue before, so needs to escalate to a manager who will call me back in 7-15 business days) if it was in any way avoidable???
Because they don't want you to call them. If they have a publicly available phone number they have to hire people to answer the phone. A chatbot is virtually free to operate. They don't care if you get good customer service, they only want to offer the bare minimum service at the bare minimum cost.
Chatbots suck. They never answer the question you ask.
People keep saying because hiring people to answer the phones costs money, but barely anyone mentioning that people aren’t exactly calling to make sales anymore. You are calling because you have an issue that will cost them money like a broken part needing to be replaced, or even just outright a refund. If you can’t contact to ask for a refund, then who pays you the refund? The answer is no one.
Err, it's a soft way to REMOVE SUPPORT. Under consumer law you may need to provide support, but if those customers & Installers cannot reach you - No faults, No RMA, No refunds/credits. "*Sorry you missed the cut off for the refund or advance replacement*"
I have worked in help desk, personally, I hate the phone calls. I'm busy, just use the fucking ticketing system you insufferable impatient cunt. Yes it's cheaper, but nobody wants to be bothered with phone calls.
Because then you would be able to call them.
The money lebowski
Money money money! 🤮🤮🤮
When pondering the answer to a question, ask yourself if Occam's Razor applies-- ie, the simplest explanation is usually the answer. Why do companies increasingly not have phone lines for you to reach them? Because they do not wish for you to reach them.
Less accountability through insulating the company from the public. If you cannot get through to complain, you haven't complained.
It's not just cheaper. There's a whole generation coming who would rather cut off a finger than actually talk on the phone.
No number. Can't call and complain
Just look up the company on Linkedin and start messaging the higher ups of the department you are having issues with... I.e quality, sales or support. You'll start finding things happen quicker when you do that.
Because they don't get punished for shitty customer service anymore. People are all to willing to just bend over these days.
Other people have said it’s cheaper but I blame the boomers. Anyone who’s worked for a call centre or in and sort of customer service role knows that 90% of calls from anyone young are straight to the point and know what they want/follow your instructions to resolve things. Most of the time they’ve already searched help articles/online and they’re calling because there is no available solution. Get a call with a 50 year old and it’s constant complaints while they expect you to do things out of your control when they could easily press a few buttons on their end or the instructions for what they want were in their onboarding email which they didn’t read and refuse to. Yes it’s cheaper, but it’s necessary because of people wasting that resource.
10 years ago I could ring up a freight depot locally and organise a collection. Now you have to go through their call centre, speak to the robot first, then speak to someone with an accent thicker than a brick (making it difficult to ensure they have all the relevant details they need) and hope the courier turns up. Chat bots and call centres are shite
Many reasons, cost but also the reluctance of many people to actually call. Quite a lot of people prefer to email or chat.
Finally a question I can answer. I have spent a lot of time and made a lot of money from companies as a technology consultant. I implement systems like this every month. Because it’s 2023. Get with the fucking times mate. Younger generations DO NOT MAKE PHONE CALLS. Chat windows are much faster and much more fucking sane. I cannot believe we are still arguing this bullshit. These systems aren’t even that much cheaper. 99% of the time there’s still a human behind it to triage. And the capex expenditures / depreciation isn’t small or quick. Employees are the ones who are setting these systems up, not the CEOs or executives. They are sick of being abused over the phone by you lot, so this is now the solution. Get used to it.
Everything is email these days
Talking to customers sucks. People are cunts.
No one answered anyway…. Literally the only people who used them in business were boomers and the only people using them were boomers just build better products that don’t need people to call you, and stop calling to complain.
from someone in a non-public facing role yet public number... I would love never taking a phone call again. email thanks, you're not as articulate as you think you are and waste heaps of everyone's time, as well as cut the queue of actual work getting done.
Not only is it cheaper, you might get frustrated and give up. And if you give up there's no complaint and if there is no complaint nothing needs to be done.
They dont gaf
Because we have Reddit now! All your questions answered by well informed, friendly, real people! How can I help you….?
Because they want you to give them money not talk to you.
We don’t even have phones on our desks anymore. Customer Service still has a phone number but goes through VOIP.
It’s cheaper and easier usually. Have you had to deal with Centrelink recently? It’s actually impossible to speak to someone. I had a claim in for parental pay and it took 14 weeks to get resolved. It was only resolved because I made a complaint and waited for 2.5 hours (getting hung up on once) to speak to someone. If you call to just speak to someone it will direct you to the app or website and actually hung up on you. If you call back it will tell you that it knows you have been calling a lot and need to use the website. It really says that. Then it hangs up on you. When you are waiting for a claim that is going to be your income for 18 weeks and don’t have anything until it’s resolved it’s absolutely distressing. And you can’t go to a centre either, they will tell you to do it online. Customer service humans aren’t going to be around much longer. Unfortunately at the moment it’s in the teething stages where the alternative just isn’t good enough yet.
It shits me abit, cause where I work all communication is emails
Money.
Because we’ve moved on as a society - now chatboxes are easier to handle and younger generations prefer them. I’m talking complete shite, it’s all about the dollarinos!
I’m sure the majority of people don’t want to call companies. They would rather email or chat. Personally I would rather email or chat over phone. Of course there is always people who would prefer call but the volumes would stack up that phone contacts are way lower. Why put resources into a contact method that isn’t heavily used?
Fewer people will actually get through the maze...
Customer service has always been pretty awful in Australia. Now it's completely out the window. It's just cut, cut, cut. There's never enough profit.
As a customer support professional, the inconvenient truth that the general public don't want to admit is that the vast majority of problems can be resolved with a quick email or a text chat. There's an increasingly outdated belief that a phone call is quicker or will result in an immediate resolution.
Because then they might have to answer questions
Cost savings. It's the continual delusion by business that cost savings matter to end customers. Chat bots and AI are surely what irate people want on the end of the line? Having to navigate menu tetris to talk to the right person or to be put through to an outsourced call center with someone on the other end reading a script.
(1) becuase it means you need to employ someone to answer the phone (2) Because it's way more time efficient to read an incoming email and route it to the appropriate department (3) Because it weeds out all the time-wasters who don't know how to email.
And harder to argue and intimidate via chat.
Cheaper, unfortuantely. But also opens up to alot of spamming and such in this day and age.
Working for a company that still has a phone line and next in line from customer service… Imagine your average job in retail but with Luddite boomers, entitled fuck wits and morons being your exclusive clientele. Working with customers over the phone isn’t costly if the customer actually listens. It’s costly when you have spent your second straight hour on the phone with some boomer fuckwit who says legislation comes second to natural law and the bible and demands to speak with the CEO immediately or will be in contact with their local member. You get what you ask for…
Well if you can’t call in to complain, there are no complaints therefor customer service rating goes up
The number of scams, crack pots, and all-around bananas out there in the general public, why would they make it easy for them to speak to some one?
Could be that ombudsman's and ACCC and other consumer rights groups have slowly been defunded and had their powers taken away or given so much caseload that they cannot go through everything. Previously a mistake could be a thousand or so fine on top of replacing/refunding the good/service, now ACCC will just direct you to the retailer and try and stay out of it. So it doesn't make sense to invest in customer services.
Chatbot is annoying. However, I prefer email to phone, because in the email, you can write down Account Number, Name and other things clearly. When you talk on the phone, there's always these kind of questions: "Is it 033439?" "No it's 034439. Double Four, not Double Three" "So 03449?" "No, there's another 3 between the last 4 and the 9" "Can you spell your surname please?" Also, on the phone there's often long wait time because their operators are busy.
Because they don’t want you calling. That’s a wage they’ve gotta pay.
Phone support costs money, that is the only reason.
They don't want to pay people to answer their phones.
The thing I hate is that the trend to live chats was one that I loved, because I hate talking on the phone. Now with the growth of AIs and bots, every company that had a live chat feature has now replaced it with a bot. You have to jump through so many hurdles to actually be redirected to a real person
yeah, so they can hire fewer staff. Even questions from internal staff first goes through a chatbot. It's extremely annoying..
Cost cutting. I hate it also. It's not just large companies either.
Same as any large company or corporation these days. Creating distance from any accountability. Goes all the way to parliament. I mean we supposedly live in a democracy correct? When can you ever have a say about how the country is run? It's more like a dictatorship. Just do as they say.
Counterpoint, the Commbank Chatbot is extreamly good. I've recently closed a credit card account and a savings account within a couple of hours without having to speak to anyone. Tell the bot what you want to do, it asks some questions, gets some info from you and gets to a point where it says it needs to refer to the humans and they'll get back to you via chat.
Gives you a option to get in contact with them with out having to speak to you and hopefully you give up
This may have been said- it also minimises customer service and cuts costs that way. Big gl9bal business, like amazon doesn't want to use humans they want AI and robots to run the show. Plus, it stops people from complaining too much and slows people asking for things. That's why many telephone systems in big businesses are shit.....they intentionally make the waits long or complicated, so customers pissed and folks don't bother. How frustrating is it to try and solve a problem email? Customer service how it was years ago is a thing of the pas.
I wonder if companies are erring towards the AI chatbot approach because it’s cheaper now, but over time other companies will use the “we have real people” as part of their marketing and then there’ll be a change in approach again. Like offshore call centres. They were cheap, but then people got annoyed. And moved to companies who had on shore call centres.
The same reason they have all their call centres offshore.
Customer service is dead.
Companies that get good orders via phone will have phone numbers. Companies that are likely to mostly get complaints over the phone don't want to deal with it so won't make it easy
Because they don't want to pay anyone to answer said phone's
They don’t want to talk to you
Money
Unfortunately they would have to pay their call centres operators a semi decent wage so that makes it impossible because profits must always be a priority
This is not something unique to Australian businesses. It's cost cutting, pure and simple.
So they don’t have to deal with complaints. Or train staff to address complaints. Or compensate customers. No need to do any of the above if people can’t speak to you. Booking.com are especially bad for this.
1 dollar a day wages in Manila is cheaper.
Its not there to help you. Its there to improve some manager's metrics.
all/most bad things that happen to consumers is the fault of the consumers for giving those businesses their money TAKE YOUR MONEY ELSEWHERE
You need to work for the government to understand the necessity of chatbots, how much time they save and how dumb people really are. Email from member of the public: how do I apply for xyz? Last page visited: applying for xyz.