July 27, 2005
“Got a problem?... Tell it to my bot!”
United recently advertised $599 R-T flights from New York (among other cities) to Hong Kong (over a specified two month period). I found this out from the Travelzoo Top 20 special travel deal list, whose link to the offer I clicked on to reach the United site’s flight scheduler, which referenced $299 one-way, at least. One way or two, specific time or flexible, I was only able to find much more expensive flights on the United site (from $1500 to several thousand)! Screw this, I said as I grabbed the phone to dial United to complain about this BS and demand the special fare. Nope, it was me who was to be screwed. There was no escape from robot operators even on the phone, and the only thing the damned robots were willing to do was take me through exactly the same choices as on the website, with exactly the same results.
Among the new things I have noticed on this return to America is that we’ve passed some sort of threshold of allowing our businesses to fob off a dystopian robot hell as “customer service”. We want to scream about our problem, but instead we have to listen to recorded lists of guesses of what our problem might be, or other irrelevant options like promotions. Our anger boils as we wade through various lists skirting the edge of any error (ours or the bot’s) that will send us back to the beginning. Time?... the bot’s got all the time in the world! We scream at the bot, and it gives some blow off message before hanging up on us. We hit zero hoping to escape the inhumanity, and it sometimes works! Sometimes we finally zero in on our problem, or even get to a human. Other times the bot just extorts time, frustration, even money, from us.
Surely THIS is what the terrorists are so upset about!
Posted by Matt at 02:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)
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