RAGE. There is no other word to describe dealing with phone systems where you have to speak and some damn computer doesn’t understand a word you say. I recently called our health insurance company (which is a whole different rant for another day) and had to “talk” to an automated operator.

Things that infuriated me during this call:

  1. Computer woman asked me to say my member ID, but then said to not include the first three letters. WTF? If they knew enough to program computer woman to tell you not to include the first three letters, couldn’t they program the response handler to ignore them?!?
  2. While I was trying to slowly speak my member ID, computer woman interrupted and gave me a brief lecture about how to say the ID… which seemed to mirror exactly what I was doing before she interrupted me.
  3. She then asked me to say my birthday. My birthday? I said “twelve twenty six seventy five”. She said “I’m sorry, I did not understand that, try again, what is your birthday?” My ID number was just a sequence of numbers and I got a lecture on how to read that, yet my birthday, which could be said in a bazillion different ways gets no format. I tried again “December twenty six nineteen seventy five” and again, she couldn’t understand.

I eventually just started screaming “HELP” until she said “I don’t understand that, please hold for the next available agent”. What happened then was infuriating enough that I won’t even bother here, it’s a post for another time.

If I had a point with this rant, it’s that computerized conversations are not ready for prime-time and customer service really should not be the place for it. The problems, as I see it are:

  1. Real people are all a little bit different when it comes to cognition. Conveying what you need from people requires slightly different instructions for each person (or type of person). If the computerized voice can’t adapt (and the one I just yelled at certainly couldn’t), then it seems a lot of people will end up in a frustrating “I didn’t understand your input” loop.I’m pretty tech savvy and I get what they are trying to do, so I try things to make it work better (speaking slowly, formatting properly, etc), only to get frustrated and start screaming (because we all know that being loud helps. sigh). If you want true comedy, watch my Grandma try to deal with one of these systems.
  2. We spend time getting to the point where we understand what the computer wants, and then it doesn’t understand what we gave it!! Not because of a formatting problem, just because voice recognition sucks. RAGE. This must stop. Seriously, if it has a “95% success rate”, that’s 1 in 20 words missed. If each person is speaking an alphanumeric value 12 characters long, that’s a TON of mistakes. “Not ready for prime-time” doesn’t even begin to address the situation.

One last note, this reminded me of something Thomas told me the last time he called me. I picked up the phone and he was laughing, saying “Voice recognition sucks”. The situation he had just gone through was this…

Thomas to phone: “Call Eric Muntz”
Phone to Thomas: “Did you say ‘Call Supercuts’?”
Thomas to phone: “NO”
Phone to Thomas: “Ok, calling Supercuts…”

If the voice recognition fails on “no”, me thinks it should not have been released to the public. I can’t even think of a similar analogy, maybe a car not understanding it’s gas pedal? Sigh.