I coached my grandma to just repeat "I want to talk to a human operator, please" over and over until she got through. It worked about 70% of the time but some are nearly impenetrable.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Call Centers Replaced Many Doctors’ Receptionists. Now, AI Is Coming for Call Centers.
(kffhealthnews.org)
I called Comcast and it was horrible
human, operator, GET HUMAN, person, technician, for fucks sake! Bomb? Give me a fucking human!
Nope, nothin, mashing 0 on the keypad also did nothing.
I build call centers.
When we design the call flows, those are the first tings we disable. You can tell a company at least slightly cares about their customer base if they actually do allow you to escalate to a human without a ton of effort. Most don't, and want to shove "AI" in front of everything, so they can hire even less people in low-cost markets. Offshoring wasn't cheap enough for these ~~leeches~~ companies, now they want AI to replace those folks making starvation wages to get yelled at all day.
And sometimes, these solutions work well. Most of the time, they work just well enough to not have people quitting their service in frustration.
They literally tried this last time and called it "AI." They used Siri clones to replace receptionists but they sucked and that's why call centers became the norm.
Hmmm years back they were using mturk and underpaying for a bit.
But the ai is good for like 95% of questions people ask.
Buddy if you want to talk to an AI be my guest but don't act like 19/20 people find them useful as phone receptionists unless you are going to post a detailed study to that effect. 👍
If I'm going to have to talk to a computer just put it on a fucking website. There are 0 circumstances where I ever want to speak to a machine.
This won't go well.
Its either this or people in India. Once one company does it the price of that good falls and the CPI prints more money entrenching the shrinkflation.
I do call center work for a medical insurance company and some providers are already doing this. There is one that has a bot called EVA and she’s really pushy, doesn’t understand challenges or handle being told she’s wrong, she will ask several questions but let you only answer one before moving on rather than letting you answer her completely, she’s just a disaster. In some cases she will just hang up on you can call back and do it all again. I am absolutely certain she’s going to get that provider sued eventually.
Oh yeah the hanging up on you is really common. I would literally prefer a phone tree than having to talk to an AI because if what I wanted was something that would be simply explained to an AI, I would have done it myself on the website. The reason I'm calling is because I need someone with an actual brain, and in an understanding of the business, to use their brain to assist me with my somewhat complicated situation.
One time I got a credit card sent to my address that was for someone else. The letter was somehow addressed to me, but the credit card wasn't for me and I hadn't requested a credit card from this company. So I called the support line up and the stupid AI kept asking me for my customer ID. I told it I didn't have a customer ID because I wasn't a customer, and it said "thank you" and hung up on me. Fantastic.
In the end I had to call them out on Twitter in order to get in contact with a human.
Soon we will reach peak enshitification
I recently had a good experience with one of these where I was able to schedule an appointment for a contractor. They actually repeated my info back to me to make sure it was correct and I understood it.
So many times receptionists are either hard to understand or make a fuck up on some simple task.
In the food industry we switched from a dedicated employee on phones to call center with doordash if we agreed to also test Ai call takers too when they roll that out.
Honestly in some ways this is such a stupid solution to the problem.
When it comes to cost saving or on the other side of the coin efficiency. The most useful thing is to remove it not make it cheap.
We should be looking and giving people very good and easy alternatives elsewhere were they don't need call centres at all.
I called my doctors a million times to book an appointment and if I could have done it all online I would have. This is how many times I called:
Went to hospital and Dr told me book drs appointment.
-
called to book
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they call back asked futher questions
got one (got told to come back by doctor)
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can't book that doctor for the future call up first thing in the morning at our busiest and we can rush you in. (I then got a job so needed to book)
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we have no staff call back when we do (didnt say when)
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called. We have no appointments call be next week. "Can I book that Dr"? "I don't know. You'll have to call back Tuesday"
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I'll call back next tuesday.
This isn't fixed with an AI this is fixed by me being able to book an appointment online. If the Dr needs to give me a slip for one booking approval to not be abused so be it. Receptionist doesn't need to know my business so fuck them.
fuck yeah!