Yeah, I'm back to talking about voice recognition phone menu systems. Specifically, the ones that don't even give you the option of hitting a key to make selections: "Say 'Scooter my daisyheads', or press 1." I hate these systems. They rarely if ever work right. They can't possibly be doing anything to improve customer satisfaction because they're such a frustration for the poor customer. And I find it hard to believe they're cheaper ... surely that voice recognition hardware's got to cost more.
I can only come up with one explanation. It's the "Oooooh, SHINY!" factor. Idiots Marketing and customer relations managers get a brochure for the latest, most advanced voice-recognition menu system pushed across their desk, and their eyes light up, and they say "Hey! This'll show how up-to-date we are!" and buy the damn system without once conducting an actual usability test. In the event they DO ask for a usability demonstration from the vendor, and the system hiccups, the salesman will no doubt have some glib explanation ready about how a few errors may occur early on, but the system will self-train within a few weeks .....
Why do we so often believe that "shiny" means "better"? Newer does not necessarily mean better, and old does not mean bad -- any more than old is automatically good, or than it's automatically the right way to do it because that's how it's always been done. Except in marketing, where black can be white, up can be down, and intrinsically nonsensical concepts like "200% satisfaction" are bandied back and forth without so much as a blink or a raised eyebrow.
When will customer relations people catch on that it's not how shiny and modern your menu system is, it's whether it meets the needs of its users, and those users are your customers? When will they figure out that it doesn't maye your customer relations staff's jobs any easier to do if the customers, even those who started out calm, have already been pre-stressed and pre-aggravated before ever reaching a human being?
I'm not holding my breath.
Of course, in the case of the Verizon DSL tech support call that spurred these ruminations, after our DSL abruptly stopped routing packets areound 1730E today, my mood was not improved by the usual experience of the tier 1 support tech clearly following a script of instructions that the tech didn't actually understand enough about to know which steps could be skipped as irrelevant to the problem, nor by the fact that as usual the script included hard-resetting the DSL modem, which invariably creates more additional problems than it solved. (To give her due credit, this tech did eventually acknowledge that I knew what I was doing and that there were several things we could skip because I'd already covered them.) Once again, during the course of troubleshooting the problem, Verizon blew away our account password, forcing a reset. Once again, there was nothing wrong on our end and it was a Verizon problem. Once again, Tier 1 support didn't know about the problem, and Verizon finally fixed it about two hours after I got off the phone, then after it became possible to get PPP authentication again I had to figure out again which of the bridging settings on the Westell I had to change from the firmware defaults, because it won't actually work in bridge mode with the default settings.
I wish we could get Speakeasy service again, where I could call up the NOC and say "Hey, did you know you just lost a router serving Sunnyvale?", and they'd not only assume I knew what I was talking about and pay attention, but thank me for calling up to advise them of the problem.
