Some thoughts on automated switchboards

If you pick up the phone and call many businesses these days you find yourself talking to a computerized system before a human being. Such is the modern world, but a few thoughts keep coming back to me.

All the modern inconveniences

I'd prefer to stick with the old "press # for ..." system unless your voice navigation lets me respond before the prompt is finished, is consistent in recognizing many people's speech patterns, and is flexible enough that I don't have to chose exactly the right key word for every branch of the tree. A few systems do this well, some do it tolerably, but a lot of them just aren't ready for prime time.

I wonder ...

A lot of these systems give you the "this call may be monitored" warning right up front, so it applies to your interactions with the computer. Does anyone ever listen to customer interactions with the computer? Do they hear when you're snarky, impatient or frustrated with the computer? Do they take any note of the sarcastic comments you make to people around you while you're on hold? To how much you hate the hold music they've chosen?

Correction

From a UI point of view a "We're sorry, but due to higher than anticipated call volume wait times may be longer than usual." type warning is a pretty good idea. But when you get it every time you call you know they are lying to you. They realy mean "due to anticipated call volume".¹

DAG nabit!

Most of these things seem to be organized as a tree, meaning there is only one set of choices that will get you to a particular leaf operation, but I feel that they could be more usefully be organized as a directed graph. Ideally acyclic because user would presumably be very annoyed to be carried around a cycle.

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¹ The reason is clear enough, unless they have a driving focus on customer experience they don't want to pay any call center people to sit around doing nothing, so they try to optimize their staffing so that the hold queue never never quite empties out. If their load consists of relatively few long call this means long waits for people calling in. They are optimizing for their interests at the cost of their customer, and how to make such call is a strategic choice for a business. But please don't lie to me: I notice and I care.