daydreamer's footnotes

Nowadays, it is very hard to get quality customer service with real qualify human at any physical location. It is even harder to get to talk to a qualify human when trying to get service on the phone.

Everywhere I tried to get information, it always says, “check it out online.”
Well, I am only calling the customer service hotline exactly because I couldn’t locate the answer to my specific question online. Then I am given many options on the phone to choose from and none of those options seem right.
Okay, off to visit the physical location. Surely at the bureau they will have people that can answer my specific question, right?
Nope! I braved the extreme cold weather to get to the bureau. Asked the representative on site the question I needed to ask, but immediately hit a stone wall. The nice lady who serviced me didn’t have the answer, and she can only direct me back to the number I previously called trying to get the answer to resolve the question to my problem.

I called again, now I was finally able to talk to an agent only to get transfer twice to different agents, the last transfer got me to an automatic message that said they are too busy, and the called disconnected … without even giving the option to wait in line or leave a message to call back. Just a seemingly rude and abruptly hang up.

Surely customer services a decade ago was not so difficult, right? Normally you wouldn’t be hitting so many walls trying to resolve an outstanding issue with the respected organization. 10 years ago, it may be slow and have to wait a few hours at time in order to get to the service, but at least you were able to get to a knowledgeable person to help you with your problem. Nowadays, physical location at the bureau has no knowledgeable person on location, and calling the hotline can take you days before you get to talk to a qualifying person to actually help you resolve a problem.

I feel this experience is a prime example how automation and AI generated customer services failed miserably in the society. People paying the taxes and not getting the services they need efficiently. The government invest your tax money on such automations instead of hiring real people, only to fail the citizens even more. Everywhere with automation in their customer services, services are getting worse by the day as if physical, real verbal human interactions no longer matter anymore. Yes, the technologies are there to help moving the world forward. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t know how to implement the technology correctly to calibrate their services to the human needs: a non-human-centric design of the automation service technology.

What a depressing world we are heading toward! We are pretty much doomed if those organizations don’t hurry up and revamp their automation system to a more human-centric design rather than solely relying the technology driving the service.