Calling customer service? Good luck speaking to a human.
Calling customer service? Good luck speaking to a human.
If you’ve been on the phone with customer service recently, there’s a good chance your first interaction was with a bot, or maybe automated voice, telling you to press some number to get to a menu to figure out what you’re calling about. Long gone are the days of being greeted by a human representative who might be able to better answer the issue that led you to call in the first place.
Emily Stewart, a senior correspondent at Business Insider, wrote about why fewer humans are manning customer service lines. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to discuss her piece. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: So why is it so hard to get a real life human being on the phone? And also, is that ever going to change?
Emily Stewart: I mean, I wish I had a better answer, or a happier answer to this question. I mean, the obvious answer is that it’s hard to speak to somebody because a company paying somebody to speak to you costs them money, and they would rather not spend that money. And so we’ve really seen over the past several years, the death of the customer service hotline. Companies have shut down their call centers. They don’t want to pay people. And so I think I’m not telling you anything new, but we’ve all kind of been stuck in a situation where you’re dealing with an army of bots and automated systems that seem designed to prevent you to ever speaking to a human.
Ryssdal: OK, so there, there is a generation or two in this country, and I will date myself a little bit and put myself in one of those two generations, which has an expectation to be able to talk to a person on the phone if I’ve got a customer service complaint. The kids, however, might not have that expectation, and are the companies banking on that?
Stewart: I mean, to some extent, a lot of millennials, and certainly Gen Z will say that they don’t want to talk to a person that they’re actually fine talking to a chat bot. They don’t want to speak to somebody. That being said, one thing that I was looking at recently was this research out of McKinsey. They found when it comes to premium services and products, Gen Z wants to speak to a person. Like, let’s say they have a fancy American Express card, right? And basically they’re calling it the same rates as baby boomers and more than millennials. And what McKinsey kind of thinks is going on there is that they see the ability to call someone as like a concierge-like service. They let some skip to the front of the line. So basically, for Gen Z, like the phone is fancy, it’s, you know, I’m paying $600 for this credit card, $700 for this credit card a year, I should be able to call somebody and they fix my problem for me.
Ryssdal: And do companies get that? I mean, are they, are they amenable to that?
Stewart: I think so. I mean, to some extent, you kind of see this in different parts of business and the economy. This is kind of an extreme example, but a lot of companies do charge people now for them to be able to speak to someone. A lot of cell phone companies, for example, like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile will charge you a $10 or $5 agent assistance fee if you want to pay your bill on the phone if you want to speak to a person. Now, what these companies say is, there are plenty of other ways to pay your bill, but if maybe you’re an older person you want to speak to somebody, right? Yahoo will charge you for phone support. I don’t know who’s calling Yahoo, but maybe someone is.
Ryssdal: Which is more a comment about Yahoo than anybody else. But anyway.
Stewart: Yeah, not to be mean to Yahoo, but even there are certain financial investment firms that will say, “OK, if you want access to a specialized phone advisor and you want to speak on the phone, you have to give us $50,000 to invest with us first.” And so this is a way that companies have kind of said, “OK, listen, if you insist on speaking on the phone, you have to kick in a little bit. And maybe we’ll say it’s a premium service.” And with airlines, we see this a lot, right? People with higher status, they used to be able to call a fancy number. Now they don’t even have the special number. The minute you pick up the phone, if you’re a customer with status, you get routed to better service.
Ryssdal: Yeah. So I might, you know, if I had a thorny issue, I might pay, like, five bucks maybe to talk to an actual person. What would you do?
Stewart: I mean, it depends … “How motivated am I?” I think is my question, right? If I’ve ordered, I don’t know, a rug, and I need to get through to FedEx or whoever I’ve ordered it for, and the rug is $500, I would probably kick in $10. But also, if it’s something where it’s like, you know, I just don’t care anymore, I’ll dispute this on my credit card bill or whatever. It’s a different story.
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