Agreed. My only real complaint with this article is it frames needing to argue with a machine as though this is a new, freshly annoying thing. I already do this constantly.

Every time I call the Costco pharmacy, I just hit 0 immediately because: Phone. Trees. Suck. They have always sucked, it's just an awful, grindingly slow way to accomplish ANYTHING, and it's so, so much easier to, when I need help, get a person on the line who can figure out what's gone wrong and sort it.

The only people benefiting from cutting that down are the scum class (combo of shareholders and executives) and who's shocked, really. Everything is being ruined nearly at all times to benefit the scum class.

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gdulli 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At least phone trees are deterministic and there's still (usually) an option to get to a person for matters that aren't covered by the multiple choice options. Talking to AI is a much worse experience and the hope of the industry is that there won't need to be a human as a fallback anymore because (they believe) the AI is intelligent enough to handle anything.

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SpicyLemonZest 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm surprised to find so many people who consider human-based customer support a good experience. I wasted an hour on the phone last month with a series of polite support agents who I'm sure were wonderful people in their personal lives. They kept saying they'd like to try one more thing, making me wait 5 minutes (just short enough that I can't get anything done in the interim!), and then asking for one more pointless permutation of the workflow that did not work because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there. Talking to an LLM would have let me realize a lot faster that we weren't getting anywhere.

	▲	wincy 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This happened to me when I tried to buy Oakley’s, it was because I’d changed my router to an ad blocking DNS which made their support session lookups fail, so they couldn’t help me. Transactions failing, all because of their site being too tightly integrated into tracking and ad platforms. I ended up going with Zenni and got similar glasses for 1/5 the price.
	▲	fyredge an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there. At that point, it's effectively a phone tree executed by a human. Colloquially, human-based support means getting a hold of someone who knows how to solve problems, and worst case, knowing who to contact to solve the problem. That means employees who know their worth which unfortunately, businesses do not want to pay.
	▲	JohnMakin 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		there are many human customer support systems where the goal is to frustrate you into saying something to make them hang up, or make you give up. good, human customer service is a big margin my current company eats our competitors alive on

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rtgfhyuj 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

you're part of the scum class btw (we all hold shares)