Press or Say "FUCK YOU!"
This morning I spent an hour and twenty minutes in various states of holding with Fed Ex tech support. Here is my assessment of the situation:
The Good: Remote Connect is best ever. They can get onto the machine, fix the problem, and let me watch. I am in favor of this.
The Bad: One of the issues I have with the Wii is that it replaces "Press A" with "Shake Piece of Plastic". The problem I have with the Fed Ex Tech Support voice recognition software is of the same nature.
90s Support Options:
Press 1 for sales.
Press 2 for support.
Press 3 to be fucked in the ass.
Present day Support Options:
Say "sales" to speak with sales.
Say "support" to speak with support.
Say "fuck me in the ass" to be fucked in the ass.
Pressing buttons is neither taxing, vexing, nor problematic. We don't need to replace button pressing technology while the underlying system remains the same. If the Tech Support Phone Tree still operates on the "Present a menu. Customer selects an option" formula we need not replace "press button" with "say option". There's no utility in this. It's not actual progress. It is a thin aesthetic veil over the exact same structure we've used before.
Now, if the system did not rely on menus but instead said, "You have reached Fed Ex Technical Support. How can I help you?" and I could reply, "My Fex Ex Ship Manager will not load and I need a technician to reinstall it." then this is progress. Navigating a tree by saying words to select menu options instead of pushing buttons to select menu options is not progress.
15 comments:
I agree.
On this I agree. I'm going to posit the argument that a game system is about a different experience than tech support, however
Honestly, you'd prefer to talk to a person than either press a button or speak key phrases.
Right.
And I'm not against speech recognition. But when they use that technology to do the same damn thing as pushing a button? Just let me push the damn button.
I heard that if you call Nintendo, you have to twist the reciever clockwise to talk to sales, thrust it forwards to talk to support, and drop it on the floor to stay on the line to talk to the next available associate.
To call Sony you have to use a proprietary Sony-made phone that is compliant with their exclusive call format.
To call Apple you first have to download and install iCall, which will convert numeric button presses on a touch tone phone into a format they can recognize. At then end of the call, you have to drag "current call" to the trash or else your phone will freeze.
And if you call from a non-Mac phone it fills your phone bill with ._ files which don't do anything but double the size of the bill printout.
That is true.
If you call Microsoft, they'll keep you on hold until they can upload a patch which will make it so you can talk to them, but all future calls made to older people will crash.
If you try to call Blizzard you get a message which informs you that they are not available yet. When they announce a date on which they will be available you will call to find that they pushed back the date of availability.
check out www.interactions.net
check out some of the demos :)
That was a shameless plug btw
Also rule of thumb, if you curse at the IVR, most often with the F-bomb, it will normally redirect you to a live agent.
That's pretty awesome. Also, I like how the movie playing on the plane is I, Robot.
I heard that if you run a joke into the ground long enough, Kyle will come by and redirect it towards his benefit.
Kyle is a level 99 redirector. If you call him he redirects your call before you've actually placed it.
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