As technology marches on, one of the casualties seems to be personal service, with tonnes of companies doing away with a real life person, and putting what I call a ‘cyber greeter’ on the phone.
Vodafone has Lara, a cyber greeter who asks you questions and depending on your answers, eventually puts you through to where you want to go. But there are problems with this, both from a personal and technology point of view. For a start, there is the impersonal nature of it all. They are saying to me “while we want your money and custom, we can’t be bothered investing in a real, live person to meet your needs.” Second, from a technology stand point, in my experience, there are problems with the voice recognition technology not recognising what I am saying. This, in the past, has led to me getting through to the next stage after two or three attempts – and when there are a few stages, it can be very frustrating.. This would be solved if a real person was answering your call in the first place. That aside, I have found a way to cheat and beat the system so you can get through to a real person a lot quicker. Make up gobbledegook! All you do is spout nonsense into the phone, and you will get “I’m sorry, I could not understand your answer, please try again” a couple of times, before the voice then defaults to “I’ll just put you through to someone who can help you out” mode. Maybe it’s not a perfect way to circumnavigate the system, but it beats wasting time trying to explain to inanimate object where you want to go.