I used LucyPhone back in the day and it was great, but sadly it looks like it's no longer around, would love to have something like this as well. FastCustomer still exists but hasn't been updated in over 5 years...
With hands-free phones I never felt like I was wasting my time on hold. However, this might save my sanity by not making me listen to the awful music over and over.
Probably more than half the companies I've been on hold with interrupt their hold music with periodic recorded voice announcements (e.g. music music "Try our new flavor of Ovaltine!" music music). Event with a hands-free phone, this is probably the worst possible hold experience.
I recall an even more evil example (I forget the company) where they'd interrupt the music, have this sound effect that sounded like someone was picking up a phone or breathing into it, and then instead of a human it was one of those "Did you know, you can upgrade your service to the MoarPlan today!" irritants. The effect gave your brain just enough hope to yank your attention from whatever useful thing you were trying to do while on hold.
And "your call may be recorded for training and quality purposes" and "your call is important to us". The former is s legal requirement but I really wonder why they often include the latter. I'd my call is that important, just answer me instead of telling me so!!!
> "your call may be recorded for training and quality purposes"
I reply "Thank you" when it says this. I mean, it's permission right? Saves me remembering to ask the person who picks up if it's OK for me to record our conversation.
The ones I hate are the ones that ask "have you tried doing it online?" to get you out of the queue. I wouldn't be calling you if you allowed me to do what I'm trying to do online.
The problem is that unfortunately there are a lot of monkeys out there that actually do call for things that can be done online, either because of laziness or incompetence such as not being able to manage passwords to login online (I used to work in a customer-facing role selling phones and the amount of idiots buying high-end smartphones while not even being able to login to their email was mind-blowing - I did more password resets for Hotmail/Gmail/Apple than my main duty which was to deal with carrier- and network-related issues).
Of course the real solution is to make phone support paid (with a refund if the problem ends up being the company's fault or something that can't be done self-service) as to discourage this behavior.
I wonder if this service can handle these messages. I have had holds where an automated voice would tell me the estimated wait time every few minutes. Can google's system differentiate between a customer service rep and a series of unique procedurally generated messages?
> * Every business’s hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes onto the call. Hold for Me is powered by Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes hold music but also understands the difference between a recorded message (like “Hello, thank you for waiting”) and a representative on the line.
My favorite was the DMV every 2-3 minutes making a call transfer sound with some ringing to get your hopes way up. Then after 5-6 loops of this hanging up on you with “we do not have any agents available.”
My hypothesis is that the horrendous music is on purpose, as a way to get you to hang up and stop bothering them. Sure, the 2-hour wait times could just be because they're too cheap to hire enough staff but what reason could there be to make the music so bad?
The article says "To determine when a representative is on the line, audio is processed entirely on your device and does not require a Wi-Fi or data connection". So presumably it uses no move minutes/data than would be used by waiting on hold for real.
In the new world, signing up for anything is instantaneous, but opting out takes hours of hold music. It's easy: if it costs you money, it's quick and easy. If it costs the company money, it will be like pulling teeth.
Incorrect health insurance bill? Waste a few hours of your time and we'll fix it! Want to disconnect your $10/mo subscription? Talk to you tomorrow, so long as you don't hang up!
Want to add a premium TV channel or upgrade your internet to a faster speed? Just click a button on their web site. Want to downgrade it back to like it was before? You can't do it through the web site. You must call and listen go to a sales pitch before they'll make the change.
I take a Ronin approach in these matters and never walk into a place I don't know how to walk out of. If there are any horror stories from would be leavers to be found online, it's an absolute deal breaker, no matter how attractive the proposition is otherwise.
That seems like an unusually small amount of times for 10 years. I could understand in a year but 10 is - wow - you must've gone out of your way to avoid being on hold.
I've been on hold a lot more often than a handful in the last decade and I don't make many phone calls. IRS, companies that messed up an order, cancelling services, government agencies, various small businesses that I call locally, and so much more that I am sure I am forgetting. Sometimes it's only 30 seconds of being on hold. Sometimes it's literally hours and - sadly - the connection gets cut off and I lose my place in line and I wasted a bunch of time having to listen to that noise in the background and unable to do much of anything else because of it.
The worst offenders are those that crank the music volume so high that it clips practically all the time - but then there are long times of silence or low audio - and then the music comes back clipping again... AND then when you finally connect, the person is so quiet that you can't hear them at all and they say, "hello? hello? bye" and they hang up.
I hope Apple gets this feature soon as I've been dying for this when I have to call some of those pesky places!
you must've gone out of your way to avoid being on hold.
I'm not OP but buddy you have no IDEA the depths I will go through to avoid having to pick up the phone and call "support" and deal with their endless IVRs or horribly implemented voice response systems or the endless transfers or the constant re-entry of my "customer verification info" because the last segment of the call didn't relay it to the next segment, or "yes I restarted my modem before I even called you look is there someone else I can talk to perhaps anyone in cargo shorts with a penguin poster in their zoom background? Does the word 'shibboleet' get me anywhere?"
Calling support and actually enduring the experience these days feels like it should be its own Olympic sport.
(However I absolutely love USAA's support system. Start on the app, if the app's "AI" attendant can't help you, a button comes up, press it, it immediately calls support and the person who answer already knows why you're calling based on your interaction with the app. MORE OF THIS PLEASE)
I'm there with you - just saying that even with all the avoidance... you can't really avoid it unless you give someone else the task or have some special resources at your disposal to get direct lines to people.
That's impressive. Nothing bugs me more than having to punch in my account number (or play the voice recognition game) and then have to go through it all again with the agent.
I'm not 100% sure if it was intentional, but there was a span of time when AT&T's customer service queue (for land lines) behaved like this. You'd call in, your call would be placed on hold (with their terrible hold music), then if you hung up it would call you back when an agent answered your call. I only discovered this behaviour because one day I was fed up with waiting, hung up the phone, and then an hour or so later got the call back. Repeated this a couple times after that call and it worked the same way. I have no idea if that ever worked for their cellular accounts, or if it was peculiar to their land lines.
It is a somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks, though I hadn't heard of one that did it automatically without your consent. The feature costs the company using it money, since they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.
Surely the incoming rates on a toll free number are higher than the outgoing rates for a regular call. I wish the call costs were large enough to move the needle - eg encourage the company to hire one or two more reps, which would drastically reduce the queue. Alas.
Besides the obvious business incentives (eg Comcast wants to make their phone experience as bad as possible), I'd guess the main obstacle holding this feature back is the specific PBX system a business is running on.
> they have to place a second outgoing call which may have different charge rates than the incoming call did.
It's probably a wash: their outgoing call to you costs as much or less per minute than their toll-free incoming lines. At least in North America where Calling-Party-Pays isn't really a thing.
In cellular plans that don't include long distance calling, it could cost you more to receive a call when you're out of your home area, while the same toll-free call is (usually) never long distance.
> somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks
Maybe on the sales side, but on the service side, many vendors (particularly b2c) prefer that you give up entirely and never call them ever again.
To give an example of the cost,
Plivo[0]:
Make call: $0.0065/min
Recieve call: $0.0025/min
Twilio[1]
Make call: $0.0045/min
Recieve call: $0.0020/min
Flworoute[2]
Make call: $0.00833/min
Recieve call: $0.0050/min
So double to triple the cost from some providers for just this feature sounds very expensive. But perhaps with large commercial pricing this difference shrinks.
Yep. Surely the phone system costs for AT&T calling their own customers is so close to zero as to not matter even at telco scale, compared to the minimum wage they're paying the people on their end of the call.
(Also, isn't there some weird thing in the US where cell phone users get charged for _inbound_ calls? They might even make money on these...)
You missed the rates for receiving toll free calls, which are generally higher than both incoming and outgoing regular calls. For example, Flowroute is $0.00975/min.
I expect that the hourly rate for the CSR dwarfs the cost of the telecommunications, and efficiently allocating resources and being more convenient for the customer vastly outweigh a few fractions of a cent per minute cost.
A cellular company faces disconnects more often than others, and can plausibly attest that customers prefer to be called back when disconnected, since the company is the provider for disconnect support — when other companies might not be able to without permission.
It helps that they can link your caller ID conclusively to your account since it’s their own systems.
Working for a .edu in the UK, we do/have done this during Clearing[0], which is where prospective students who didn't quite make the cut can apply to empty spaces on the course(s) of their choosing. The user dials up our number, is placed into a queue and is told that they can hang up. They're still in the queue, and we'll dial them back when they reach the front. In our case it's profitable because we _want_ to talk to people on the phone, whereas sales departments might not want to talk to people who want to cancel their contract.
I might buy a pixel 5 just for this feature...I waited 30 min on the line for just to make a doctor appointment recently. Wait time are fucking absurd for some of these services since Covid, especially with banks and medical offices.
Alternate history fiction idea: Telegraphy was expanded to allow individuals to make asynchronous communications without an intermediary. Replacing telephones, for the most part, are machines like an ASR-33 teletype with a receiver for voice calls, on which people can do things like instantly place orders or book travel -- in a pre-WWII setting.
Tell that to my plumber. The plumbers with nice automated systems still use people to pressure you. And you're paying for those systems and people in your bill. One of them quoted me $2500 for 2 faucets. The local dude did it next day for $350. Those ads at football games and fancy systems and trucks don't provide revenue or better service. So I'll deal with the crazy dude who's likely cutting a wall or soldering something talking to me on bluetooth.
Also with a lot of these people, they can't really schedule, stuff is just a queue. This dude is definitely a queue.
I remember asking one of the $350-type contractors if they've heard of the Travelling Salesman Problem... it seemed like they could use the knowledge. Dunno if my explanation changed anything, but its their mileage not mine (except indirectly it is). Le sigh.
Or you can service a small region and spend little time driving. That's what this guy does. Stays in a 10 mile radius. His phone is constantly blowing up.
As soon as you want a special order, phone for food is the quickest way to order. In some of my local resturants I skip the service fee the website adds, too, that way.
The problem is that there has to be a better alternative, and it has to be better for the businesses implementing it, and the switching cost must be low.
Why? Making a phone call removes middlemen from the process.
When I order food over the phone, the only people who need to take a cut of the transaction are the restaurant and maybe the credit card company if I don't pay cash. I can also be confident that my tips are going to the person whose hand I place them in.
When I order online, there are umpteen different companies taking my data and the restaurant's money, and they often obscure where fees and tips go. To me, it seems absurd to involve so many parties in such a simple transaction.
The experience is also usually fungible. Talking to someone doesn't take longer or introduce more error in my experience, so I usually prefer it because there are less externalities and fewer complexities.
For booking complex, non-fungible services (like Doctor's appointments, plumbers, etc) phones are great for high-bandwidth communication for follow-up questions, triage, etc. Phones also allow a certain element of salesmanship which doesn't come through on a form, which a big reason why service providers like them.
I’m waiting for the day my doctor’s office puts a calendar link on their website and lets you directly request an appointment. So far they bought one of those EMRs with a website that allows you to send a “secure message.”
They should get on Zocdoc (shameless plug - I work there). Not having to wait on hold with a doctor's office is one of our main selling points for patients.
... and hello to forgetting why you were on the phone in the first place.
User calls financial institution, user is put on hold, user invokes "goodbye to hold music" feature, user goes on with their life and regains time, user forgets they are on hold and goes to the bathroom... you can see where this is going.
This isn’t a new problem. Before every phone had a speakerphone option, it was easy to put down the handset of your landline phone while waiting on hold and just check in every once in awhile. Same is true of online chat-based support.
Also you could build a feature next which asks you why you’re calling and maybe tells the agent why you’re calling before transferring/connecting you...
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
So you can go use the bathroom while you wait (if you're quick about it, or you're willing to risk the representative hanging up on you).
I was on the fence for the pre-order. This did it. Pre-ordered.
But right after I ordered, I'm now struck with wondering if the Fi version I ordered is the same as the one from the Play Store. I hope it's International. That's why I use Fi.
For the Pixel 5, I believe I read that the hardware is the same everywhere (although verizon and some other carriers may have the phone carrier-locked, at least temporarily).
The 4a 5G does have a different version for Verizon.
Disclaimer: I work for google, but have no direct knowledge of these sorts of hardware details. This is based purely on what I read in the press.
How well will this cope with everyone's favorite idiotic invention, the hold feature that interrupts the hold music with a brief silence followed by a pre-recorded human voice saying "DID YOU KNOW THAT BASIC FEATURES ARE AVAILABLE ON OUR WEBSITE" every minute, making you think that maybe you've finally reached an agent, but haven't?
Some support manager discovered that adding those damn interstitials led to a massive reduction in human interactions (and thus cost) from a boomer population wishing to handle all account management tasks by phone conversation with a person, but at least had some percentage who could be convinced to use a website for routine tasks. We've been living with the fallout ever since.
This was exactly my thought. Did I completely miss an entire Google product cycle for some sort of poorly supported spotify competitor? Surprisingly, no!
Even though this is not related, you may have missed Google Play Music which was Googles Spotify competitor. It's getting axed in favour of YouTube Music.
It's such a common inside joke that people even make variant jokes in reference to it, like maybe: "Subject: An update on evmar / Body: No, I'm not quitting, I just got a new puppy!"
HN title is improperly capitalized - the actual title of the blog post is "Say goodbye to hold music" - so I thought it's a Google product called "Hold Music" that's getting axed.
It took me 3 reads to dismiss the idea this was about Google Music (which is getting the axe anyway :(. Somebody should get fired over failing to build an audience for this great service)
I never had good experiences with callbacks. Sometimes they never call back, and I end up calling again days later and talking to a human, or sometimes I get random callbacks where no one is on the other end of the line.
Customer support does not rank high in some companies and industries and they understaff their support call centers. Staying on hold for a long time serves them as a filter to narrow down the 'really severe problems'.
More often than not, when someone takes you off from hold they expect an answer right away, and will hang up on you if there's no response. I've had this happen in cases where I put myself on mute and couldn't hit the un-mute button fast enough.
So I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. At minimum, I would be anxious the whole time I was waiting, ready to hit the return to call button at a moment's notice...
Call centers are going to have to become more accommodating about this. If they make customers wait for hours but can't wait seconds for someone to get on the line, they should be considered effectively unreachable by phone.
>If they make customers wait for hours but can't wait seconds for someone to get on the line, they should be considered effectively unreachable by phone.
I think thats part of the playbook for most support call centers.
Australia's Centrelink, the unemployment/student payment government body, is notorious for doing this. They have physical centres which usually tell you to call the hotline.
In 2015, the hotline got the busy signal for 29 million callers (Australia has 25 million inhabitants). 7 million were hung up during the wait time. I myself have been in their queue for hours at a time.
There are zero legal ramifications for this behaviour.
Considering how little they already care about their customers, I find it extraordinarily unlikely they are going to suddenly become more accommodating for some random Google project.
For the company that's operating the call center, that's a feature rather than a bug. Anything they can do to just make you go away, including making you wait for two hours in the first place, saves the company money.
That doesn't make sense though, right? Barring regulatory reasons that force companies to have call centers, if the company wanted to provide customer support then they would want to be able to fix customer problems, right? And I've heard call center employees are paid based on minutes on the line so why wouldn't they want to wait a bit longer to solve someone's problem.
The company wants problems to go away. Fixing them or making it so people don't bother the company about it are both ways to accomplish that goal. And as long as the lack of support doesn't impact sales, it doesn't hurt the company and saves them money in not having to pay for more/better call center staff.
Also in more benevolent companies, providing support over the phone is the most expensive way to provide support. So as much of that that can be shifted to automated systems, better products, etc the better because it avoids the high cost of a call center.
While a call center employee may be paid by minutes on the line (though I think that is rare), they would be penalized for taking too long on a single call or helping too few customers. There's little incentive to spend time on longer more difficult calls when you could just focus your effort on solving many of the simple calls instead.
> if the company wanted to provide customer support then they would want to be able to fix customer problems
You've clearly never had to deal with a company in a monopolized industry like telecommunications. The call center needs to be there on paper, otherwise it will give people the option to cancel their contracts or even initiate lawsuits because something doesn't work and the company is unreachable.
The call center doesn't need to provide quality support however; as long as it is there on paper it is all that matters. In reality the call center is costing the company money and they'd rather not have you on the phone as long as you keep paying your bill (and most people will keep paying even if they receive subpar or lack of service because of the lack of consumer protection laws in the US, forced arbitration, the fear of a hit on their credit report or the lack of competition).
I'm fully aware of that reason which is why I mentioned "barring regulatory reasons"
The people in this thread are acting like call centers are all bad when the real problem is the monopolized industry and not the customer service agent.
In the vast majority of consumer-facing sectors, non-captive markets only exist in the pages of introductory economics textbooks.
Even in B2B, most commercial transactions are with an oligopoly, or monopsony, as one party to the transaction. Competition-driven customer service doesn't exist here. For instance, not even enterprise-level customers can get meaningful customer service out of the likes of Google.
Or it will make the wait even longer, since the queue time is going to increase if a large amount of people use this feature and take 15-30 seconds to answer their phone when a representative is available, instead of being able to answer immediately.
Maybe the feature should switch the phone to loudspeaker mode when the call is answered, so you'd immediately hear them speak and could also immediately reply before picking the phone up.
Call centers that give a shit about customer service usually have the option to just leave your number and they call you back. Call centers that don't want/ need to be accommodating will just hang up.
I thought the exact same thing as well, I assume that the program will annunciate a message when it detects someone on hold, like to does with their Screen Call feature (which I love)
I hope this google assistant will start talking to them while it waits for you to notice the notification, essentially putting them on hold until you answer.
Didn't look into it so no idea how it behaves, but sounds like a realistic solution to this problem and would have very interesting consequences!
The most likely interesting consequence will be companies burying a line in the ToS saying they can deny you service if you use a tool to reduce your opportunity costs of sitting in a hold queue.
The purpose of a hold queue is to reduce the number of customer service calls a company has to field. They will not take lightly to any service which defeats this.
Alternatively, they'll hire staff to answer the phone, say a few words to break out of Google's hold music detection algorithm, then put you back on hold, this time with ads instead of music. Repeat every few minutes to make sure you're still stuck on the line.
There's no limits to what's possible when you realize the purpose of anti-customer service is to harm customers rather than help them.
They could, but google could pretend to be you and answer basic questions until you pick up. Or just pretend to be your secretary. We're at a point where it becomes impossible to tell if you are talking to a human or not, at least for the first 10-20 seconds. I don't think those companies/call centers can win here, they will have to adjust sooner or later.
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call. We gathered feedback from a number of companies, including Dell and United, as well as from studies with customer support representatives, to help us design these interactions and make the feature as helpful as possible to the people on both sides of the call.
The lack of such a feature is not a technical problem; it's misaligned incentives. The company does not want you on the phone; the annoyance of being on hold is a feature for them and not a problem that should be fixed.
In a healthy market this behavior would cause the company to lose marketshare to a competitor offering better support, which is why the only companies still using call centers as their primary (and often only contact) are those in monopolized industries like telecommunications. Every other industry has moved on to better solutions (async email, chat, etc) because consumers demanded them.
The real problem here is monopolies and misplaced regulation (harmful regulation that prevents competition combined with the lack of regulation that would force the incumbent to actually provide good service).
Exactly. In fact some callcenter systems have a feature called something like 'expectation management'. It can make you wait even if there are people available, just so you don't get used to the quick response and be less happy at busier times. Or to dissuade people from calling for minor issues I guess. It's often used on cheaper support tiers also to make paid support more interesting.
I'm not joking, this is an actual feature. I used to build callcenters and it surprised me when I saw it in the documentation. None of our customers ever implemented this but I can imagine some would otherwise it wouldn't have been in there.
That sounds quite customer hostile. To play devil’s advocate I’ve heard of two examples supporting that logic. Web browsers that wait for most resources before painting are perceived as faster than those that load in piecemeal. An airport got complaints about having to wait for luggage. In the next renovation they moved the baggage pickup farther away so by the time you walked over there your luggage was almost ready. Perception is reality.
I suspect for a huge number of call centres, "the customer" is the bank/telco/insurance company that's outsourced to them, and the key metrics and incentives of their relationship with that customer _totally_ make "expectation management" make sense. The call centre company has no incentive to make life better for account holder or phone users or people who's house just burnt down - beyond extrememly narrow interpretations of the responsibilities in the contract they have with their customer - which is presumably as poorly written and as easy to game as any software project requirements doc you get from those kinds of clients...
Exactly.. Outsourcing tends to bring out the worst incentives in companies. Especially because the lowest bidder wins the contract, which means the one that cuts the most corners.
In the company I work for now, they tried outsourcing but moved all their support back in house because they are a market leader so keeping customers is more important to them than gaining new ones. Hence more focus on good support than agressive sales. It makes a world of difference.
Roughly speaking in terms of (inbound) callcenters there's 2 kinds of attitudes.
- There's the callcenter type that actually cares about their customers and strives for the best metrics possible in terms of satisfaction (usually measured by after-call survey) and the shortest waiting time. This type of callcenter is often overstaffed to make sure they can handle peak times without pressure on the staff (which will reduce customer satisfaction because the staff will be stressed and the customers wait longer). In these callcenters it is common to see staff sitting 'idle' during which time they are supposed to do some elearning or support emails, or even kick back and relax. The metrics they care about will be customer sat ratings and waiting time (as in lower is better)
- There's also the kind of callcenter that is all about productivity. These are typically outsourced and get paid per call. They tend to have the minimum staffing so they reduce staff idle time: Hours not on call are 'lost' hours to them. Staff will be managed more on calls per day/hour and handling time per call (lower is better). Less time will be available for training (if any). These are the kinds of callcenters that want features like I mentioned. For one because it dissuades customers to call for minor issues and use email support instead, which is a lot cheaper to provide per customer interaction. And also to keep distance between the 'regular' and 'premium' support tiers, to make the premium waiting times shorter. This kind of callcenter will usually want to tweak the system to generate the best statistics for the customer that outsourced to them.
Obviously the first type of callcenter is much much better. Both for the customer and the employees. But the second type is very common too, especially for things that are commodity (as in easy to provide, not much knowledge needed), like number information services.
The only thing worse than the second type is the outbound sales-driven callcenter which are real sweat shops. Luckily the company I worked for didn't really deal with outbound.
Presumably, your phone would say something like. "The person calling you is using a google service to listen to hold music for them... they should be with you momentarily."
I’ve had Brands interactions on Twitter where they ask me to go into private, then ask for my phone number, call me and send me directly to a holding queue, i guess it would fair to respond in kind.
I used to work helpdesk at an ISP, and we played the local classic rock station as our hold music. One of my best shifts was when a customer I put on hold asked to be put back on hold because they were really enjoying the songs they were playing. Done!
The best 'hold music' I've experienced is from a small aircraft manufacturer; they play recordings from the tower at Oshkosh during Airventure, so much fun!
Unfortunately if you’re Dell and you try to do this you actually have to pay for every song they play. But first you have to know what song they are playing.
The obnoxious part is where companies like Apple who actually choose and license nice music play it in such a way it sounds absolutely horrible on the phone. What a waste!
It's a challenge to make music sound nice on the phone. From Apple, I'd expect they'd try to get their hold music setup for 'HD Voice' which would help, but just stuffing it into POTS is going to be pretty icky.
Surely if Apple though it was worthwhile, it'd be pretty simple for them to remotely fire up iTunes and play your iTunes Favourites playlist at full iTunes streaming quality through the phone app while on-hold with them. (And for the lulz, make it play every song you've ever skipped when you're on hold with Google. Which'd be one of those wait-10-years-before-anyone-finds-it type of easter eggs, 'cause that's approximately the time between real people finding an actual working support number for Google... ;-) )
The frequency passband on old-school analogue POTS isn't wide enough to play music with acceptable fidelity. The upper frequency limit for POTS services is 3.4KHz, which is far below the ~15Khz needed for half-passable music fidelity.
Modern digital is worse because it combines the frequency passband of analogue with combinations of codecs and bit rates that can't support the audio complexity of music.
Nobody can hear the hold music any more because the vocoders are voodoo and the mobile networks drop 99% of the packets. Only people on landlines and VoIP have any idea what your hold music even is. On mobile it's just undifferentiated screeching.
> On mobile it's just undifferentiated screeching.
Maybe the caller was a Norwegian death metal fan? ;-)
"What's that awesome track you were just playing? I tried Shazaming it, but it just came back with Beyonce. I can't find a death metal band covering any of her songs?"
The worst hold music I've heard was an advertising jingle for the company I was calling. Listening to that over and over will drive you insane and make you hate the company for putting you through it.
Huh? Google already controls the entirety of the Phone app — if you're convinced they want to eavesdrop on your calls, they certainly don't need you to enable this feature to do so.
The privacy concerns of Google doing nefarious things with tinny renditions of elevator music?
And it's an optional feature that you explicitly have to activate each time to boot.
This misses the point entirely. The problem is that we’re put through IVR (1) and put on hold (2) because:
1. The call recipient doesn’t know why we’re calling
2. There’s not enough agents to deal with particular issues.
Deploying AI in the face of these problems is ridiculous, we just introduce more reasons for error.
We face these problems because telephone numbers only connect us to call centre boxes which rely on touch tones to navigate a system - it’s from the 50s.
A better solution is to interrogate a phone number for information before a call is made - this could be IVR menu options so we can navigate the call centre before we make the call; or add ourselves to a call back queue through online resources rather than through an antiquated telephone system.
A small team and I are working on a way to store and retrieve machine readable data for domain names - https://www.num.uk
We want to do the same for telephone numbers by issuing the holder of telephone numbers with domains like 441234567890.num.net where they can store structured data.
I'm a proponent of always plugging but how are you solving the issue of putting the burden to migrate on yourself as opposed to requiring changes from the customers or the call centers?
We can pre-populate the DNS of 441234567890.num.net with useful info until the rightful owner claims it. Which as I see it, is better than what we’ve got now - which is that phone numbers are not resolvable on the internet except through closed APIs and even then in limited examples.
The long term plan is to use a TLD for this eg .telephone (or whatever) but the bigger picture is that if you own a phone number that’s a unique identifier - it needs to be represented on the internet so we can interrogate it and then find WhatsApp / Skype / Zoom alternatives.
It was doomed because it was delegated to each country and there was registries and registrars appointed in each country and almost all failed to get the point across.
I think ENUM had huge potential but the execution was horrible. It was also victim to proprietary system trend - Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp audio
What we’re proposing (which is public in DNS) doesn’t replace ENUM - we still need a way to covert phone numbers into SIP to connect VOIP calls using an open standard.
What we’re proposing helps connect the proprietary systems to those phone numbers. As well as caller ID and other really useful stuff - like alternative ways to connect on social media etc.
I wonder how it works with the automated hold off-ramp that tell you 'We are now connecting you to a representative...' but then essentially puts you back on short hold until they pick up.
This is AWESOME and I can't wait for Apple to hopefully build their own version as well.
But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if representatives will actually stay on the line to wait for you.
If you're accidentally on mute or they don't hear you, sometimes they'll hang up very quickly, within just a few seconds. (Not always though.)
I hope that because it'll play a message for them instructing them to wait for you, they'll wait... but I also assume they'll set an internal policy on how long they're allowed to. Will it be 30 seconds? 15 seconds? 60 seconds?
Maybe Google could record your real voice saying "uhhh can you hear me? hold on how about now? yes i can hear you"
or some random garbage filler words like that, and play that to the customer service rep while the phone gets your attention to get back to the phone. Hopefully you'll be back just in time before your pre-recorded fluff finishes playing.
Phone tree systems are such a jumbled mess of garbage, that I wouldn't doubt the agent wouldn't know whether the please wait message came from their own system of from the customer's side.
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
Not anymore apparently! Trump just calls up directly whoever he feels like venting to. Woodward mentioned once Trump randomly called his house phone while he was working on the lawn or something and his wife had to go get him while the president waited on the line.
Yes, that's what I said, if you "read further down" in my comment (see the word "because"). My concern is whether the representative will actually hold.
That's what I was thinking; here all these services let you wait for 20-40minutes and then they hang up if you don't IMMEDIATELY answer when they say; 'hello sir???????'.
I guesss we'll see if that message works or not... I guess it'll take a lot of tweaking per country and even regions of the country. Where I live they typically don't wait even if you don't speak the accent; they act like they cannot hear you and hang up.
Over the last year or two the Phone app team has been knocking it out of the park. My other favorite feature is automatic screening of calls and declining of robocalls: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, although on a totally unrelated team.)
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadI reply "Thank you" when it says this. I mean, it's permission right? Saves me remembering to ask the person who picks up if it's OK for me to record our conversation.
Generally most companies I know have an opt-out option in the IVR now (IVR = voice menu). Or opt-in in the countries where that is required.
Of course the real solution is to make phone support paid (with a refund if the problem ends up being the company's fault or something that can't be done self-service) as to discourage this behavior.
> * Every business’s hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes onto the call. Hold for Me is powered by Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes hold music but also understands the difference between a recorded message (like “Hello, thank you for waiting”) and a representative on the line.
And yet they also want you to believe "Your call is very important to us!"
Incorrect health insurance bill? Waste a few hours of your time and we'll fix it! Want to disconnect your $10/mo subscription? Talk to you tomorrow, so long as you don't hang up!
It applies to Google as well: human customer service costs Google money, so good luck getting anything fixed that their algorithms can't deal with.
Want to add a premium TV channel or upgrade your internet to a faster speed? Just click a button on their web site. Want to downgrade it back to like it was before? You can't do it through the web site. You must call and listen go to a sales pitch before they'll make the change.
I've been on hold a lot more often than a handful in the last decade and I don't make many phone calls. IRS, companies that messed up an order, cancelling services, government agencies, various small businesses that I call locally, and so much more that I am sure I am forgetting. Sometimes it's only 30 seconds of being on hold. Sometimes it's literally hours and - sadly - the connection gets cut off and I lose my place in line and I wasted a bunch of time having to listen to that noise in the background and unable to do much of anything else because of it.
The worst offenders are those that crank the music volume so high that it clips practically all the time - but then there are long times of silence or low audio - and then the music comes back clipping again... AND then when you finally connect, the person is so quiet that you can't hear them at all and they say, "hello? hello? bye" and they hang up.
I hope Apple gets this feature soon as I've been dying for this when I have to call some of those pesky places!
I'm not OP but buddy you have no IDEA the depths I will go through to avoid having to pick up the phone and call "support" and deal with their endless IVRs or horribly implemented voice response systems or the endless transfers or the constant re-entry of my "customer verification info" because the last segment of the call didn't relay it to the next segment, or "yes I restarted my modem before I even called you look is there someone else I can talk to perhaps anyone in cargo shorts with a penguin poster in their zoom background? Does the word 'shibboleet' get me anywhere?"
Calling support and actually enduring the experience these days feels like it should be its own Olympic sport.
(However I absolutely love USAA's support system. Start on the app, if the app's "AI" attendant can't help you, a button comes up, press it, it immediately calls support and the person who answer already knows why you're calling based on your interaction with the app. MORE OF THIS PLEASE)
Besides the obvious business incentives (eg Comcast wants to make their phone experience as bad as possible), I'd guess the main obstacle holding this feature back is the specific PBX system a business is running on.
It's probably a wash: their outgoing call to you costs as much or less per minute than their toll-free incoming lines. At least in North America where Calling-Party-Pays isn't really a thing.
In cellular plans that don't include long distance calling, it could cost you more to receive a call when you're out of your home area, while the same toll-free call is (usually) never long distance.
> somewhat common feature of customer service phone systems to have a way to do callbacks
Maybe on the sales side, but on the service side, many vendors (particularly b2c) prefer that you give up entirely and never call them ever again.
So double to triple the cost from some providers for just this feature sounds very expensive. But perhaps with large commercial pricing this difference shrinks.
[0] https://www.plivo.com/sip-trunking/pricing/us/ [1] https://www.twilio.com/sip-trunking/pricing [2] https://www.flowroute.com/pricing-details/
That being said, are we not talking about AT-and-freaking-T? :) Surely they'll've been able to work things out. I think, anyway.
(Also, isn't there some weird thing in the US where cell phone users get charged for _inbound_ calls? They might even make money on these...)
I often wait 2-3 hours for a 5-10 minutes call.
It helps that they can link your caller ID conclusively to your account since it’s their own systems.
[0]: https://www.reading.ac.uk/clearing-explained.aspx
Also with a lot of these people, they can't really schedule, stuff is just a queue. This dude is definitely a queue.
Doing FIFO may be “fair”, but resulted in more time spent travelling rather than responding to calls.
When I order food over the phone, the only people who need to take a cut of the transaction are the restaurant and maybe the credit card company if I don't pay cash. I can also be confident that my tips are going to the person whose hand I place them in.
When I order online, there are umpteen different companies taking my data and the restaurant's money, and they often obscure where fees and tips go. To me, it seems absurd to involve so many parties in such a simple transaction.
The experience is also usually fungible. Talking to someone doesn't take longer or introduce more error in my experience, so I usually prefer it because there are less externalities and fewer complexities.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Using computer agents avoids the middleman.
If the restaurant runs a website, there's no "umpteen different companies taking my data".
And then you have restaurants own websites which if they exist, are super clunky and require typing payment details rather than paying on pickup.
HIPAA fines are fearsome. Medical IT is heavily weighted towards creating parallel systems that don't touch the rest of the world.
User calls financial institution, user is put on hold, user invokes "goodbye to hold music" feature, user goes on with their life and regains time, user forgets they are on hold and goes to the bathroom... you can see where this is going.
Also you could build a feature next which asks you why you’re calling and maybe tells the agent why you’re calling before transferring/connecting you...
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
So you can go use the bathroom while you wait (if you're quick about it, or you're willing to risk the representative hanging up on you).
But right after I ordered, I'm now struck with wondering if the Fi version I ordered is the same as the one from the Play Store. I hope it's International. That's why I use Fi.
The 4a 5G does have a different version for Verizon.
Disclaimer: I work for google, but have no direct knowledge of these sorts of hardware details. This is based purely on what I read in the press.
Some support manager discovered that adding those damn interstitials led to a massive reduction in human interactions (and thus cost) from a boomer population wishing to handle all account management tasks by phone conversation with a person, but at least had some percentage who could be convinced to use a website for routine tasks. We've been living with the fallout ever since.
Domain: blog.google
I just assumed this was another Google product getting the axe.
Maybe the goal wasn’t to play ads, but to remove obstacles that prevent the users from playing ads.
A nonzero percentage of users will spend their reclaimed time watching youtube. This is often equivalent to watching ads.
Like, “Update on Google Wave” from 2010: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wav...
HN title is improperly capitalized - the actual title of the blog post is "Say goodbye to hold music" - so I thought it's a Google product called "Hold Music" that's getting axed.
Couldn't we solve it with a form on the website + callback?
So I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. At minimum, I would be anxious the whole time I was waiting, ready to hit the return to call button at a moment's notice...
I think thats part of the playbook for most support call centers.
If I were writing an utopia, class action lawsuits would rain like fire and brimstone.
In 2015, the hotline got the busy signal for 29 million callers (Australia has 25 million inhabitants). 7 million were hung up during the wait time. I myself have been in their queue for hours at a time.
There are zero legal ramifications for this behaviour.
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/public-service/centrelink-hangs-up-on...
Also in more benevolent companies, providing support over the phone is the most expensive way to provide support. So as much of that that can be shifted to automated systems, better products, etc the better because it avoids the high cost of a call center.
While a call center employee may be paid by minutes on the line (though I think that is rare), they would be penalized for taking too long on a single call or helping too few customers. There's little incentive to spend time on longer more difficult calls when you could just focus your effort on solving many of the simple calls instead.
You've clearly never had to deal with a company in a monopolized industry like telecommunications. The call center needs to be there on paper, otherwise it will give people the option to cancel their contracts or even initiate lawsuits because something doesn't work and the company is unreachable.
The call center doesn't need to provide quality support however; as long as it is there on paper it is all that matters. In reality the call center is costing the company money and they'd rather not have you on the phone as long as you keep paying your bill (and most people will keep paying even if they receive subpar or lack of service because of the lack of consumer protection laws in the US, forced arbitration, the fear of a hit on their credit report or the lack of competition).
The people in this thread are acting like call centers are all bad when the real problem is the monopolized industry and not the customer service agent.
It's not just in monopolised industries, but the entire process has been labelled "low skill work" and left to fester.
Even in B2B, most commercial transactions are with an oligopoly, or monopsony, as one party to the transaction. Competition-driven customer service doesn't exist here. For instance, not even enterprise-level customers can get meaningful customer service out of the likes of Google.
Didn't look into it so no idea how it behaves, but sounds like a realistic solution to this problem and would have very interesting consequences!
The purpose of a hold queue is to reduce the number of customer service calls a company has to field. They will not take lightly to any service which defeats this.
Alternatively, they'll hire staff to answer the phone, say a few words to break out of Google's hold music detection algorithm, then put you back on hold, this time with ads instead of music. Repeat every few minutes to make sure you're still stuck on the line.
There's no limits to what's possible when you realize the purpose of anti-customer service is to harm customers rather than help them.
In a healthy market this behavior would cause the company to lose marketshare to a competitor offering better support, which is why the only companies still using call centers as their primary (and often only contact) are those in monopolized industries like telecommunications. Every other industry has moved on to better solutions (async email, chat, etc) because consumers demanded them.
The real problem here is monopolies and misplaced regulation (harmful regulation that prevents competition combined with the lack of regulation that would force the incumbent to actually provide good service).
I'm not joking, this is an actual feature. I used to build callcenters and it surprised me when I saw it in the documentation. None of our customers ever implemented this but I can imagine some would otherwise it wouldn't have been in there.
Depends who you consider to be "the customer".
I suspect for a huge number of call centres, "the customer" is the bank/telco/insurance company that's outsourced to them, and the key metrics and incentives of their relationship with that customer _totally_ make "expectation management" make sense. The call centre company has no incentive to make life better for account holder or phone users or people who's house just burnt down - beyond extrememly narrow interpretations of the responsibilities in the contract they have with their customer - which is presumably as poorly written and as easy to game as any software project requirements doc you get from those kinds of clients...
In the company I work for now, they tried outsourcing but moved all their support back in house because they are a market leader so keeping customers is more important to them than gaining new ones. Hence more focus on good support than agressive sales. It makes a world of difference.
Roughly speaking in terms of (inbound) callcenters there's 2 kinds of attitudes.
- There's the callcenter type that actually cares about their customers and strives for the best metrics possible in terms of satisfaction (usually measured by after-call survey) and the shortest waiting time. This type of callcenter is often overstaffed to make sure they can handle peak times without pressure on the staff (which will reduce customer satisfaction because the staff will be stressed and the customers wait longer). In these callcenters it is common to see staff sitting 'idle' during which time they are supposed to do some elearning or support emails, or even kick back and relax. The metrics they care about will be customer sat ratings and waiting time (as in lower is better)
- There's also the kind of callcenter that is all about productivity. These are typically outsourced and get paid per call. They tend to have the minimum staffing so they reduce staff idle time: Hours not on call are 'lost' hours to them. Staff will be managed more on calls per day/hour and handling time per call (lower is better). Less time will be available for training (if any). These are the kinds of callcenters that want features like I mentioned. For one because it dissuades customers to call for minor issues and use email support instead, which is a lot cheaper to provide per customer interaction. And also to keep distance between the 'regular' and 'premium' support tiers, to make the premium waiting times shorter. This kind of callcenter will usually want to tweak the system to generate the best statistics for the customer that outsourced to them.
Obviously the first type of callcenter is much much better. Both for the customer and the employees. But the second type is very common too, especially for things that are commodity (as in easy to provide, not much knowledge needed), like number information services.
The only thing worse than the second type is the outbound sales-driven callcenter which are real sweat shops. Luckily the company I worked for didn't really deal with outbound.
I’ve had Brands interactions on Twitter where they ask me to go into private, then ask for my phone number, call me and send me directly to a holding queue, i guess it would fair to respond in kind.
Exactly the sort of behaviour I'd expect from a company that considers "brand interactions" to be a thing.
The obnoxious part is where companies like Apple who actually choose and license nice music play it in such a way it sounds absolutely horrible on the phone. What a waste!
Modern digital is worse because it combines the frequency passband of analogue with combinations of codecs and bit rates that can't support the audio complexity of music.
In the age of Compact Disc, people are spoiled for audio quality ;)
Maybe the caller was a Norwegian death metal fan? ;-)
"What's that awesome track you were just playing? I tried Shazaming it, but it just came back with Beyonce. I can't find a death metal band covering any of her songs?"
Also, the post states this is done completely on-device and links to a page with significant details on this: https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/10104618
1. The call recipient doesn’t know why we’re calling
2. There’s not enough agents to deal with particular issues.
Deploying AI in the face of these problems is ridiculous, we just introduce more reasons for error.
We face these problems because telephone numbers only connect us to call centre boxes which rely on touch tones to navigate a system - it’s from the 50s.
A better solution is to interrogate a phone number for information before a call is made - this could be IVR menu options so we can navigate the call centre before we make the call; or add ourselves to a call back queue through online resources rather than through an antiquated telephone system.
A small team and I are working on a way to store and retrieve machine readable data for domain names - https://www.num.uk
We want to do the same for telephone numbers by issuing the holder of telephone numbers with domains like 441234567890.num.net where they can store structured data.
We can pre-populate the DNS of 441234567890.num.net with useful info until the rightful owner claims it. Which as I see it, is better than what we’ve got now - which is that phone numbers are not resolvable on the internet except through closed APIs and even then in limited examples.
The long term plan is to use a TLD for this eg .telephone (or whatever) but the bigger picture is that if you own a phone number that’s a unique identifier - it needs to be represented on the internet so we can interrogate it and then find WhatsApp / Skype / Zoom alternatives.
I think ENUM had huge potential but the execution was horrible. It was also victim to proprietary system trend - Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp audio
What we’re proposing (which is public in DNS) doesn’t replace ENUM - we still need a way to covert phone numbers into SIP to connect VOIP calls using an open standard.
What we’re proposing helps connect the proprietary systems to those phone numbers. As well as caller ID and other really useful stuff - like alternative ways to connect on social media etc.
But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if representatives will actually stay on the line to wait for you.
If you're accidentally on mute or they don't hear you, sometimes they'll hang up very quickly, within just a few seconds. (Not always though.)
I hope that because it'll play a message for them instructing them to wait for you, they'll wait... but I also assume they'll set an internal policy on how long they're allowed to. Will it be 30 seconds? 15 seconds? 60 seconds?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM&ab_channel=Toao....
> Once a representative is identified, Google Assistant will notify you that someone’s ready to talk and ask the representative to hold for a moment while you return to the call.
Wouldn't be out of character a bit.
That's what I was thinking; here all these services let you wait for 20-40minutes and then they hang up if you don't IMMEDIATELY answer when they say; 'hello sir???????'.
I guesss we'll see if that message works or not... I guess it'll take a lot of tweaking per country and even regions of the country. Where I live they typically don't wait even if you don't speak the accent; they act like they cannot hear you and hang up.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, although on a totally unrelated team.)