Saturday, April 07, 2007

Automated Responses and Me

Help me figure something out, will you. Years ago, when I needed some help from a seller (corporate or governmental), I call them up and a PERSON answered. Now...I no longer get a person, but an electronic voice: a pleasant, sweet, caring--albeit--disembodied--vocal clone of a person. I follow the clone's directions. I press one button...and then I'm told invariably to press more buttons...and more buttons...and more buttons...until an hour later... Soon after I throw the phone across the room--after having screwed up for the seventeenth time the 'button menu' protocol/procedure and had to start all over again with a new call--I have a thought (and I think an enterprising graduate student might want to do a thesis on this): Has anyone ever measured the average amount of time (and brain power) it takes to complete the average the task 'menu' on one of these automated response gizmo's compared to the time it used to take to ask a real person a question? I have the hypothesis that could initiate the graduate student's data gathering toward a thesis: It takes more &%#@$#&% overall time to get a question answered today than it did pre-automated response!

I know the standard rejoinder (to my automation frustration): the new world of automated responses saves the corporations $$$ which they pass onto me in lower prices!!!...(minus, of course the extra taxes they might have to pay to fund unemployment payments and re-training classes for the hundreds of thousands of laid-off telephone operators).

Today I spent an hour talking on the phone to a manufacturer's clone. I got an answer (I think) to the question (I think) I remember asking (after an hour I can't be sure). Anyway, let's assume I an answer, and it was helpful; but...what I would like the graduate student to consider in their thesis is the overall economic impact of all this (to me, of course).

When I teach, I charge about a hundred dollars an hour for a private lesson. So when I spent an hour on the phone today with the corporate clone, it costs me $100--which, when added to the $29 cost of the purchased article (a teapot that used to cost $79...pre-automated response--to the consumer) the cost of my new teapot is $129.

The corporation is NOT saving me money?!!! The teapot only cost $79 before automation!!!! Digital progress has cost me $50!!

Wait,you say (accusingly, to me). Let's be fair; you needed corporate help in the old ($79 teapot) days. You would have had time to spend on the phone then, right?

I agree...but, in the old days, with a real human being on the other end of the corporation phone line, without menu after menu after menu of press button anxiety and mistakes and re-dials, the Help!!-call would only have taken me (and the real corporate person) ten minutes to consummate!! Twelve at the most!!!

Twelve minutes of my time (ONE-FIFTH of $100) equals a Help! cost of $20 in the old telephone days. So the teapot then--with full (help!!) questions answered--would have cost me $79 plus $20 phone time, or $99!!! NOT $129. So...by now dealing in this age of automated responses, I lose $30. Time still equals money...mine...lost: $30 per teapot.

My thesis: The corporations are making (my) money. They can downsize (fire) telephone staff, savings huge amounts of salaries, health insurance, pension plans, etc. True, there is the cost of the corporations installing automated equipment...but that is a one time charge to be amortized over many, many teapots. A socialist would say corporations are stealing time and money from the consumer (me): $30 per teapot!!! However, I'm a capitalist; so I would prefer to say (I want to hypothesize): increasing corporate profits and executive salaries are growing at the expense of individual personal income. The corporations are making the inordinate bulk of the money/profit from automated response technology. (A 'greed' warning to corporations: if they don't watch out, if they keep ripping off $30 per consumer teapot, there are not going to be enough American consumers to buy teapots at $79 or even $20. And the Chinese already have teapots.)

Anyway, that's my hypothesis. Please...some economics graduate student, before you go to work for some large corporation and demand feel you deserve that executive salary and pre-dated stock options, gather some data on the above (time lost/time saved...and for whom) and write a paper, will you?

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