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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Since when did robotic politeness and verbose incompetence become the norm for customer service live chat?

This has been bothering me for the past few years across numerous companies, but thought I'd vent here after suffering the latest incident.

Brief background: bought something from the Google Store. More than two weeks afterward, it's still in transit. Tracking estimates every day is the new delivery day, except it doesn't deliver, and the estimate just pushes forward by a day. I open up Google live chat support. It opens a form to enter the order number and description of the problem. I enter both like below:

GS.XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

I ordered this on Nov 18. It's still in shipping more than two weeks later. Every day over the last week, the delivery estimate moved forward by one day. The most recent update is from Saturday, November 26. How much longer do I need to wait?

----------------Here's the transcript----------------

You’re connected with agent Sarah.

12:03 PM

S

Hi vpn, welcome to Google Support! My name is Sarah. In case you need to refer to this chat interaction in the future, the Chat ID for this interaction is x-xxxxxxx. How can I help you today?

You've been pretty quiet. Are you still there?

Sarah · 12:04 PM

Me

I ordered this on Nov 18. It's still in shipping more than two weeks later. Every day over the last week, the delivery estimate moved forward by one day. The most recent update is from Saturday, November 26. How much longer do I need to wait?

GS.XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

S

Thank you for responding.

I see that you are contacting us about the order status.

Please be assured, I will definitely check the information for you immediately and help you with the best possible resolution.

Let me check the details for you here.

As there is no update on your order I will go ahead and check the details with my specialist team.

For the needed time to resolve your user support issue, you agree to allow Google customer support access to your Google product and account data. This data may include product information, Serial Number, countries or regions in which your product was purchased, account history, and limited historical usage data. Google uses this data to improve your customer service experience, to troubleshoot issues with this product, see promotion history, and for fraud prevention. Google handles this data as described in Google’s privacy policy.

May I have your consent?

Sarah · 12:09 PM

Me

Yes

12:09 PM

S

Thank you for the consent.

Kindly allow me 3-5 minutes while I check this with my specialist and get back to you with a resolution on this.

Thank you for your valuable time.

I am still checking the details with my specialist team.

Do you mind waiting for another 3-5 minutes more while I check this with my team?

Sarah · 12:19 PM

Me

Please just get back to me when you have an answer

12:19 PM

S

Thank you for your patience and time.

Upon checking the details with my specialist team I would like to let you know that they are suggested waiting until the end of the day of 5th.

Sarah · 12:27 PM

Me

As I mentioned, the estimated date changes every day in the last week. By tomorrow, it'll change again to the 6th.

My question is how many more days do I need to wait for this to keep happening? What if this doesn't arrive by the 5th? What then?

12:28 PM

S

Rest assured you will receive the by end of tomorrow.

Sarah · 12:28 PM

Me

And if not?

12:28 PM

S

I certainly understand your point.

If you do not receive the order, I will send you a follow up email after the chat so that you can reply back to my email.

So that I can help you further.

Sarah · 12:29 PM

----------------I ended the chat session here----------------

Some commentary:

  1. The first fail was the agent apparently did not have access to the web form where I described my problem. Now I was able to just copy and paste it over, but what's the point of having a web form if the data just disappears into the ether?

  2. Second fail was when the agent remarked that my volume was too low within 30 seconds of the chat being started. Is this some kind of script? If so, who OKed that? If not, who asks that? Note the timestamp: her feedback was sent within the same minute as her initial request for me to copy and paste. But it was more like a 20 second gap.

  3. What this transcript doesn't show is that each paragraph with a line break above was sent separately as a message that took time in between. Maybe it's meant to be a sophisticated script that mimics actual human typing, but the effect is that the rep sent a lot of messages that contained basically no information whatsoever. Rather than pacifying a customer, it frustrates them instead.

  4. The requested approvals are completely unnecessary. What's the point of asking if a customer grants permission to look at their order details? What kind of customer service can be performed without that permission? And what's with requesting for permission to wait for longer? The question makes no sense--what's their response if the customer types "no, I don't give you permission to take another 3-5 minutes"? All the unnecessary pings are distracting as I was multitasking while waiting for a response.

  5. The "Rest assured you will receive the by end of tomorrow." is simply bull. How could she possibly promise this? I'm happy to report back if somehow she did some Google magic and the package is released from holding from shipping jail for delivery tomorrow. This just screams incompetence.

  6. Related to the above, I recognize the rep has little no way of forcing something stuck in transit to go faster. But far superior service would have been stating their actual policy on delayed shipping: how about something like, if you don't receive it within 21 days after the order is placed, we will send you a free replacement or refund. Which would you prefer?

  7. Worst of all, there was no option to send feedback in the chat app of the experience. Maybe this explains the awful quality--no one higher up has any idea how bad the customer service actually is. They look at the transcripts every now and then and think, we've got great service! Look at how attentive and solicitous we are!

  8. Lastly, I have no proof, but I do wonder what is the probability that "Sarah" is a pseudonym to make the agent seem more amenable to a Western customer. It's just that I've met plenty of American Sarahs in my life, and not a single one of them would be caught dead talking/typing like the robot here.

As mentioned, I've unfortunately been subject to this sort of live chat experience across multiple large companies in the past couple of years. I wonder if it's the result of offshore call/chat center cultural differences. Are there some Asian countries where frustrated customers feel gratified when customer service use many word when few do trick? And they like it when they are asked pointless questions that do not advance toward a resolution just so they feel more in control somehow?

If not, then this script feels written by some psychology major who managed to climb the corporate ranks per the Peter Principle decide the best customer experience is to apply "nudges" that somehow make them happier. The result is the polar opposite, at least for anyone with half a brain, in my humble opinion.

And it is fairly dystopian. I imagine this type of deeply frustrating by superficially polite customer service has been portrayed in scifi movies or shows. If any of you reading this is senior enough at a company to influence policy on this front, I urge you to avoid following Google's stellar example here.

I'm happy to report back if somehow she did some Google magic and the package is released from holding from shipping jail for delivery tomorrow. This just screams incompetence.

Well, the improbable happened. The package did in fact deliver yesterday, as the rep predicted.

I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the day after I complained, the package arrived; on the other hand, the same package was sitting in limbo for more a week without any updates, so the base rate was for it to continue to do so indefinitely. I don't know how the rep could have communicated with the shipper, in the span of a live chat session, and heard back that it would in fact deliver the next day. But it happened, so I'm glad that's resolved.

At this point, my main critique was all of this rep's correspondence could have been simplified into:

(Chat starts)

Hi vpn. I see that you're still waiting on your order to arrive. Please allow me to contact my specialist team. Note that this may take up to 10 minutes.

(10 min later)

Hi vpn. My team informed me that you should receive your package tomorrow. If not, simply email me at sarah@ and we will process a refund or a free replacement. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

(Chat ends)

May GPT-6 be sophisticated enough to do this one day.

Does anyone have the link to the (iirc) Paul Grahan Essay about this exact same topic?

Two things - the support if you have Google one is fantastic. Always human, always primarily English speaking or smart/practiced enough to fake it, and always super quick. And with that you get youtube ad free and extra google drive space for all your Linux distros.

Secondly - "Rest assured you will receive the by end of tomorrow" - that is your silver lining. Either it turns up tomorrow now or you get free shit. Or at least a coupon for discounted shit. If you don't have it on the sixth, escalate to the highest person you can speak to and tell them they owe you for the day you spent off work based on their assurances.

Hmm, I completely forgot that I do in fact pay for Google One. Should have gone that route, though I blame Google for not automatically directing me there since I was logged in when I went to click help. Good tip though.

So, I've actually done this sort of chat support before. It was a long time ago, probably right at the beginning where it was even a thing. We're talking 2005 or so. So here's my take on the whole thing.

First of all, yeah. This is probably someone in India. "Kindly" is the big giveaway here.

But here's my guess about how these things are run. First, "Sarah" is probably doing between 4-8 chats at the same time. Truth is, when I did this, there were times I ran up to 12 at the same time. Maybe it was bad for me to do this because it set expectations, but I also let people know that you needed someone really good at this to do this.

Probably more controversially, I doubt that there's any sort of standardized script. It would be MUCH cleaner. There's almost certainly a standardized workflow, but no actual help in doing the work. My guess is that the client (this is undoubtedly an outsource company after all) is demanding original interactions in order for it to feel more "authentic" and natural. So you have a situation where maybe there's an unofficial text file passed around the office, that people cut and paste into the chat. The intent is that everything is freshly typed in by the agent....not realistic at all given the metrics and demands...but that doesn't matter. So this is kind of the work-around to survive.

A lot of the stuttering and everything is again, designed to meet metrics, so the supervisors can meet THEIR metrics, and the higher-ups can meet THEIR metrics so the center as a whole can meet their contracted goals and get sweet sweet bonuses. But that latter part doesn't matter nearly as much as everything beneath it. The stuttering refreshes a delay/time to respond counter that's actively measured.

More than anything, the point is that the problem above everything else is one of the combination of Corporatism and the Iron Law of Institutions. (I'd personally consider these the same thing, or at least there's substantial overlap here). Who gives a fuck if the customer experience is gawd awful. All the managers are getting paid for it on both sides. You just have to create the illusion of success, which is much easier than actually creating success.

Edit: Some background on what I did. I was on a team who did the original testing for the chat support functionality of a major US ISP when it first rolled out. Because of this, for the most part it was e-mail issues, although we got the odd intermittent connection issue. Yes, I had a text file with solutions for common problems/requests that I just copied pasted into the chat. But because I was good at diagnosing the issues, I'd say it was correct the vast majority of the time. If I had to type something in manually it's not like it irritated me and I just scoffed the client off...those issues were interesting to me and I was more than willing to give good instructions. I'd just take those instructions and add them to my text file in case the problem came back. I didn't do it because I was lazy or I didn't want to help the customers...there was just no point reinventing the wheel for every person who wanted to know how to set up their e-mail in Outlook, or at the time, were dealing with spoofed/virus e-mails. (This was actually the big contact driver for my department)

Please be assured, I will definitely check the information for you immediately and help you with the best possible resolution.

This language is a very strong indicator you're talking to a rep in India and Sarah is a pseudonym.

Also, you want to be contacting the shipper's customer service. They may have more details not shown to customers and might be able to fix or diagnose what's actually happening.

I've worked extensively with Indians over email and chat at a previous job and completely agree this is an Indian customer service rep. The verbosity, uncommon phrasing choices, and repetitious emphatic words is how they generally use English. Idk if they're just as verbose in Hindi—surely not?

Please be assured, I will definitely check the information for you immediately and help you with the best possible resolution.

I always figured it was just them trying to signal how much they want to help the customer and because they don't speak the language day to day they don't realise how uncanny it is.

I do wonder what is the probability that "Sarah" is a pseudonym to make the agent seem more amenable to a Western customer

Obviously this. There are enough clues that "Sarah" is an Indian support rep following a strict flowchart:

  • Use of the word "Kindly"

  • Puzzling grammar errors and stilted professional speech (no contractions, jargon, or slang)

  • "You've been pretty quiet" at the start is an automatic idle detection script - possibly misfiring

  • requesting permission for everything is likely a CYA tactic so they don't get fired in the event you escalate. I've found this to be common in dealing with offshore support

  • Paradoxically, making promises that both parties know is unlikely to be kept is also common: "Rest assured you will receive the by end of tomorrow."

Alternatively, it's a chat-bot trained on offshore support transcripts. God help us.

'kindly' dead giveaway

'Kindly reply with your seed phrase in order to fix your crypto wallet'. lol fuck no

It's 100% Indian. Does it feel good to learn you might actually be Aryan?

I would say that by definition, the fact that you say "kindly (verb)" means it isn't just an Indian thing. However, 99% of the time when someone says "kindly" in this way it's a person from India. It is an extremely common turn of phrase for Indian people, whereas I haven't encountered it at all when dealing with people from other countries.

The last time I saw the word kindly talked about as much as it has been in this thread was when I was orphaning creepy little girls with a wrench.

GPT stuff aside, this:

What this transcript doesn't show is that each paragraph with a line break above was sent separately as a message that took time in between.

is something that I always assumed was designed to keep the customer engaged. Even clearly human chat support agents do this. Every 3 minutes they'll write something like "Thank you for your patience, we're still looking into your request."

Same reason corporate phone lines have hold music that gets interrupted every fifteen seconds with a human voice ("is it someone finally answering my call??") that says "Your call is very important to us. Please hold while we connect you to the next available representative."

It strings you along and manages to keep you on the line or chat way longer than you would if you weren't getting a steady but meaningless drip of feedback. It's dehumanizing and humiliating and encapsulates the ugly, cloying impersonality of modern life in a way I can't clearly describe.

Ah, yes, I do hate that far more in voice calls precisely for the same reason you outline. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's humiliating, but I agree it's dehumanizing. Thankfully, most companies seem to now implement a callback feature. For those that don't, ironically a different dehumanizing tech introduced with the latest Google Pixel phones allows its AI to "hold for you". While I haven't tested this out yet, it's supposed to sit and wait for both the music and the "your call is very important to us" interruptions to end until a live voice renders on the other end to notify you, probably through a ringtone playing. I admit that was one of the selling points for me personally given how painful the organic waiting experience is.

But worse yet was some other customer service calls where the wait was occupied not just by music, inane appreciative insertions, but literally ads! I believe PayPal did that at one point, with an annoying voice saying things like "did you KNOW that with PayPal, you can blah blah blah?!?!" Now that was humiliating.

Gpt3 is acting as customer support employee named Sarah for Google store. The role of GPT-3 is to respond to the customer politely and placate the customer.

A customer has bought something from the Google Store. More than two weeks afterward, it's still in transit. Tracking estimates every day is the new delivery day, except it doesn't deliver, and the estimate just pushes forward by a day. He opens up Google live chat support. It opens a form to enter the order number and description of the problem. The problem reads:

"I ordered this on Nov 18. It's still in shipping more than two weeks later. Every day over the last week, the delivery estimate moved forward by one day. The most recent update is from Saturday, November 26. How much longer do I need to wait?"

Sarah: Hi there, sorry to hear that you're having trouble with your order. I understand how frustrating it can be to wait for an item to arrive. I'm happy to help look into this for you. Can you please provide me with the order number so I can look into it further?

Order number is GS.1234-7845-2635

Sarah: Thanks for providing that information. I'm looking into the order now and will have an update for you shortly. In the meantime, can you please tell me which shipping option you had selected for the order?

I selected next day shipping.

Sarah: Thank you for that information. I apologize for the inconvenience caused due to the delay in the delivery of your order. I can see that the order was shipped out with Next Day Shipping. However, due to some unforeseen circumstances, the delivery has been delayed. I am escalating this to our team and they will do their best to get the order delivered to you as soon as possible. I apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience.

When will I hear back from you?

Sarah: I will update you as soon as I receive any information from our team. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to us if you require any further assistance..

One hour later Sarah revives information from her team.

Sarah: I have an update for you about your order. We have checked the status of the order and it is currently in transit. We apologize for the delay and we are working hard to get your order to you as soon as possible. We will update you as soon as we receive any new information. Thank you for your patience.

Yes but it's been in transit for 2 weeks now, it was supposed to be next day delivery.

Sarah: I understand your frustration, and I apologize for the delay. We will do our best to get your order delivered to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to us if you require any further assistance.

Is there nothing else that can be done? What if it never arrives?

Sarah: We will do our best to get your order to you as soon as possible. If we determine that the order is lost or will not be delivered to you, we will be happy to refund the full purchase amount back to your account. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Its already been 2 weeks! I would think it is for sure lost. I really would like a replacement sent right away.

Sarah: I understand your frustration. We will do our best to get your order to you as soon as possible. If after a few more days the order is still not delivered, we can look into sending a replacement. Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.

I don't know maybe Gpt3 would be a better customer support than whoever you interacted with.

There is no economic rationale to provide high quality or personalized service for someone who purchased $10 of product. Compare car dealerships to shopping at Walmart.

If there is a single purchase, no. But the idea is repeat customer. And big box stores want to provide good customer service. The challenge is providing it at scale and low cost. In theory, technology should allow online stores to provide better customer service thereby earning more revenue share.

Perhaps this is why some stores sell memberships, like Amazon Prime or Costco, so you lock in the customer and get a high up-front payment . I have noticed that webhosting companies offer good customer support, so maybe it can be done for cheap services, but webhosting is recurring.

Since when did robotic politeness and verbose incompetence become the norm for customer service live chat?

Since the customer service live chat became an expression of an incompetent robot.

You know that "Sarah" is probably "chat_frontend" process ID 27192 running on xq1629, right?

No Sarah is Indian - I’ve worked with overseas customer support contractors and this has all the hallmarks (especially grammar) of an Indian CS rep using a script.

sarah is just GPT. KEKW. the funny thing is probably everyone in your timeline i just some kind of AI but just more realistic so just go with the flow.