Tech underlines the value of local service

It is often said that “What goes around comes around.” We hear that phrase uttered regarding fads and fashion, but a changing technological landscape can occasionally drive the repetition of more practical matters–sometimes in unexpected ways.

Recently, I’ve found myself being pulled back in the direction of local, personalized customer service. I have spent most of the last two decades conducting as many transactions online as possible. Whether banking, brokerage, or paying for utilities, online transactions require no travel time and, most importantly, are not constrained by office hours,

Routine transactions like checking utility statements or funds transfers are now efficiently executed as long as they are routine and straightforward. However, dealing with unusual online circumstances has slowly become a nightmare.

When I began this journey at the end of the last century, every online service provider had an email address to which questions regarding circumstances not addressed by software could be directed. It didn’t take long for hackers to develop bots that would capture those addresses, do obnoxious things with them, and make them unusable. Those addresses were quickly replaced by form fields that allowed questions to be asked within the service software, but now even those are disappearing.

FAQs and chatbots have replaced those form fields, which are well-suited for helping with site navigation but little else. Often, no electronic contact is available, and too frequently, the answer to every question becomes, “Call us.”

I dislike telephone conversations with customer service departments for several reasons: First, the caller is often routed through precisely the same information and services that are available online. It’s an internet service for people who don’t use the internet, which is an excellent option for many people, but I have already tried that route, and it didn’t answer my question.

When a human comes online, often after a considerable wait, the business holds a profoundly unfair advantage. Those disclaimers that conversations may be recorded for training purposes obscure the fact that businesses with elaborate phone systems systematically record, transcribe, and index conversations by date, time, and topic. They also record the information screens the customer service agent pulls up while fielding questions and other pertinent documents.

In the age of artificial intelligence, those capabilities go substantially further. Voice recognition software can confirm our identities, which is a reasonable safety precaution, but AI-enabled call centers now evaluate and note our moods. My mood isn't always good when I get that far into the process.

That’s all just a bit too Orwellian for me. They already have my date of birth and social security number. Now they have my voice print and my emotional state? In what ways will their predictive technologies impact my life? What happens when those systems are hacked?

As a consumer, I don’t have those capabilities. Yes, I can make a crude recording if I put my mind to it, but it’s not something I wish to do, and I certainly wouldn’t have their storage, indexing systems, or sophisticated analytics.

There are also the complexities of dealing with the humans on the other end of the line. It’s here that I want to be very careful. I once had an employee who loudly complained that she couldn’t understand the heavily accented agents taking the service call. While I will admit that my ability to interpret foreign accents has been diminished by nearly thirty years of life in the mostly-caucasian midwest, her comments appeared to be driven by xenophobia, if not racism. That is not my concern here, and I have no desire to hop on board with that line of thought.

My concern with online service personnel is that they are often sad, underpaid individuals constrained by scripted responses. Like automated systems, they usually present little more than the information found online. What’s more frustrating is that because they are limited to pre-written, block-diagrammed responses, it gives the impression that they haven’t listened to the question.

As a longtime promoter of shopping locally for retail goods, I am now turning the corner toward shopping locally for other services (brokerage, insurance, etc.) where I can speak with not just a living, breathing human but someone who can give a thoughtful answer. I still don’t care for the hours, but in combination with an automated system, it’s good to know that I can send an email to a familiar face. If I can do that in the middle of the night on a weekend, I’m more than happy to wait until Monday for a reply.