TipRing

I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).

A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as “channels”. A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).

This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.

1. Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:

2. Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it’s very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren’t you will not get good agents.

3. Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don’t blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.

4. The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume’s Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It’s a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there’s just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won’t even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.

5. AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.

   To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn’t have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition. The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn’t yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).

6. I don’t think this is intentional per se. Having been in numerous meetings with leadership about contact center issues, I can say that they are just as upset by poor customer service as you are. There is no top-down effort to make your life suck. But line must go up and contact centers are always cost centers which means companies hate them, they don’t view customer service as integral to making money despite understanding that angry customers will leave them so there is a constant budget short-fall. The issue isn’t someone at the top thinking “If we treat our customer poorly enough they will stop calling and we’ll save money!” It’s just standard corrosive capitalism creating perverse incentives that make everything worse. It’s a systemic problem.

Anyway, that’s my view for whatever it’s worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.

PEPFAR was targeted by Musk because he is a racist asshole who didn’t want money going to help black Africans.

No carrier has cell service at my house but maybe they will add a sat phone.

My ACL says my TV can’t talk to the internet.

Putin would be more than happy for the US to drop a nuke in Iran since it gives him free reign to use nuclear artillery in Ukraine.

What’s shitty is that this drug could damn near wipe out HIV if it were accessible to everyone who needed it.

But I guess we can’t have that.

He probably believes poppers are the real cause of AIDS since that was a conspiracy theory for awhile.

You can absolutely under the current law be tried by both the state and federal government for the same action if that action violates both state and federal law. See the 2019 case Gamble v. United States for the most recent ruling on it, but the idea is that the state and federal government are “separate sovereigns” and so it doesn’t violate the double jeopardy clause.

In practice doing so is unusual and DoJ guidelines discourage federal prosecutors from pursuing cases that are prosecuted by the states, but there is no law preventing them from doing so.

The state prisons of MN? They would be holding him and have no reason to release him on Trumps orders since they don’t work for him.

Best I can imagine is that the Feds charge him with murder, Trump pardons him for the federal charges, the state charges him with murder, then the SCOTUS rules that he can’t be charged due to double jeopardy.

Which is why vaccines production is paid for by the government and why the corruption of ACIP is so nightmarish. Without government funding, a lot of vaccine research, development and manufacturing will dry up. We are very, very screwed.

Modern vaccines are so astonishingly effective for their use-cases that they are the closest thing we have to magic. Smallpox is now eradicated (except for lab samples) and polio is no longer a threat in the US (for now) and these ignorant self-important grifting assholes are going to torpedo this miracle of science.

I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice this, all these atrocities are just so Bibi can stay in power and out of jail for corruption.

We should ask Bill Cassidy about this since his deciding confirmation vote was given after RFK Jr. assured him that the ACIP would not be touched. So Bill, how do you feel about your vote now?

The aid on the ship was symbolic. This was a protest action to call attention to Israel’s continued blockade of food and other aid into Gaza.

This disclosure was from last year and the exploit was patched before the researcher published the findings to the public.

So according to the Chief, their detective did not interview the surviving victim of the crime before talking to the press. Snappy police work there. “We’re not bigots who enabled this murder by ignoring the prior complaints of the victims, we’re just really stupid. Golly!”

I hope this drags on for months.

Because the kind ones take on the burdens of the world even if it breaks them, while the cruel and careless think only of their own gain and never suffer for the plight of others.

There is a lot of history of violence against LGBTQ people that the media and police swept under the rug. Most famously the arson of the Upstairs Lounge which killed 32 people, the media covered it until they found out it was a gay bar then buried the story. The arson was unsolved despite having evidence and witnesses placing Robert Dale Nunez at the scene screaming “burn” minutes before the blaze.

They are going to find out chromosomes are super complicated. There are XY AFAB cis women and we don’t actually know how common they are because we don’t test for it.