Customer service

[dervish]

Is it a thing of the past??/ I'm tired of those pesky automaited menus and a robot that answers instead of a person.

[Edward]

OMG! Yeah, and I was watching Jepordy, and IBM has this supercomputer that can recognize the questions as they are spoken and pool from vast amounts of information to anser the questions. We are truly not from from an AI breakthrough in technology.

If a computer acts just like a human--is it alive? The world has had a century or so to become evolutionary atheists, so now the question is much harder to answer.

[Lily]

I don't think the new technology has improved the quality of life, at least not for the majority. Service is out-of-style. You seldom get a real person when you call a business these days, just a recorded voice that demands you select from the following 100 options! Just joking here, but heck it feels like it sometimes as you wait, and wait and wait....

Then when you finally do get through to someone with a pulse, don't be surprised when you find that they neither speak nor understand English well, so at that point you might as well just hang up. What's going on here? Where are all the qualified people these days? Store clerks no longer seem to have to know about the products they're selling either.

I just received some very bad advice from a "tech" at my ISP. I suspected it was incorrect. Yet lo and behold it was validated by another "tech" where I buy my computer supplies. OMG! It's just as well I had the foresight to check it out elsewhere. Be cautions out there, folks, it's a snake pit, and nobody seems to know what the heck they're doing any more. Of course, maybe they never did! ;D

[Richard]

When it was possible to skip the recorded part, and just press zero, it wasn't so bad. That is not as prevalent anymore. They have worked around that to force you to press something. I even just held on and pressed nothing one time and they just eventually hung up.

I'm not a technology advocate. It can be fun, and helpful, and certainly convenient, but life existed without it, and people actually knew how to talk with one another, not just text.

Probably just getting old.

[bubblegum91]

I happen to be a "check out chick." As the "new gen" I am not above using technology to make things simpler. And, yes, I text everyone! But that being said, I hate auto tellers/self serve check outs. Not only is my income threatened, but they're frustrating to use!
I might sound robotic during a 10 hour shift, and repeating myself does tend to make me go bonkers or crave a shot of vodka, but damn it's better to get money than not.

[greg]

No matter how hard they try a computer cannot take the place of good old fashioned person to person assistance.