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No human should work in a call center
Having worked in a call center (doing survey research) during college, there are a lot of people employed by such places who really wouldn’t have many employment options anywhere else.
I remember saying, while there, that the entire industry would be replaced by AI in 10-15 years. They all scoffed, saying they had ways to get people to answer surveys that an AI wouldn’t be able to do. I told them they were being naive.
Here we are.
That said, I do worry about some of those people. Just because they were borderline unemployable doesn’t mean they were worthless.
There was a lot of talk about that when the call centers were sprouting up: generally poor jobs, minimum wage, and liable to be outsourced or ai’d. They were generally put places where there were no real options so those towns are going to suffer when it all goes away
doesn’t mean they were worthless
Not what I said, on the contrary.
It’s a horrible mindnumbing job and anyone deserves better.
The avg of employment is 6 months.
Some don’t make their targets and get fired, most find a less shitty job.Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t accusing you of saying they were worthless. I was just voicing my own concern for some of my former coworkers.
OK
I worked in one. It was just a job and not that bad.
Could be but it depends, inbound helpdesk is not the same as outbound selling stuff with targets to be made and clients to convince.
Every interaction costs them money, right?
Sounds like we need to put all the AI call centers on a conference call with each other.
“Hello-o, this is Lenny.”
You mean… like this ? https://youtu.be/t-7mQhSZRgM
“This call may be used for quality assurance and training purposes.”
Enshittificatin intensifies
The movie Outsourced (2006) didn’t foretell AI, but it did a pretty good job foretelling how the offshoring trend was going to unfold.
Going to add that to my watch list.
Dang! You meet my approval as a movie buff. That wasn’t a widely available film.
I liked the first half of the film, but it abruptly turns into a different movie. The second half isn’t bad, but it’s not what I wanted and it’s not what was advertised in the trailers and marketing.
VCs ruin everything they touch.
The hardest thing to believe is that call centers still had humans somewhere to call/answer calls
Several companies still have a call center. You might get a robot at the start, but that’s usually to send you to the right specialist.
If you thought your service was bad now, it’s gonna get worse.
Isn’t that what we call “Innovation” in our capitalist society?
You build a thing. Pour your blood sweat and tears into it. Some VC goon buys it during a downturn. They fire most of the staff. Strip the copper out of the walls. Make the service shittier and shittier until all that is left is its faltering brand recognition then sell it all for a bundle to the very next sucker they can?
Innovation is enshittification these days. It used to be invention, where entirely new products and materials came about. Then there was innovation, incremental improvement coupled with price hikes. Now “innovation” seems strictly rearranging deck chairs with worse service, and reducing employee count for increased profits.
In the 90s it was “selling it for parts” where the market value of the whole company was lower than the component parts, so buy it on the open market for a bargain, then slice and dice and profit.
These days, they’re squeezing the lemons for all they can get.
The “corporate raider” existed before that, infamously thanks to people like Frank Lorenzo dismantling Eastern Airlines in the ‘80s or Icahn to TWA. The late ‘70s and early ‘80s were rife with corporate raiders.
Necessity is the mother of invention and capitalism is its drunk abusive stepfather
I’ve never seen anything good come from companies with the words “equity” or “capital” in their names.
Shareholder value? Capital gains? Golden parachute? These are all great things if you belong to the owner class.
Wait until AI reduces it to just owners.
Could the Big Four be in danger?
They have been for awhile. Early adopter communities like the fediverse used to argue about the good and harm done by the big four.
For about the last five years, I haven’t heard an early adopter defend the big four.
I saw/heard the same things around, for example, SEARS, back when it was week known that SEARS was too big and successful to fail.
Wait, it’s all scams?!
Seems like they may be hurting themselves in the long run, I hope it fails miserably
They don’t care about the long run.
Yep, just gut one business after another for the quarterly returns. Same logic as the thieves stripping copper from street lights, just at a bigger scale
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Sure. But in the meantime, calls will get worse.
Just tried call a appliance service fucking told me that customer service was now all AI no human. I fucking hung up.
No no. Don’t just hang up. Tell us who it was so we can ALL avoid buying their products.
Sears appliance repair.
…that only raises MORE questions!!! Where the hell did you even FIND a Sears in 2025??? I thought they went out of business around the same time Toys R Us did. Like, 10 years ago.
Me too, but I called for appliance repair anc it redirected me to the local Sears repair. https://www.searshomeservices.com/repair/refrigerator-repair-service
True innovation in the area of making existence even more miserable, as if using phones for support wasn’t bad enough on its own already.
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People with money will always find a way to run away from consequences.
Odds are there will be no other options left for us and we’ll have to use them whether we like it or not.
call centers got worse after outsourcing them overseas and we still have them.
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uh, you completely missed the point. the point is we could very well be stuck with this shit because it’ll save businesses money. they don’t care if it’s worse.
Ohh no. Please don’t destroy call centers. What will we do without them. Ohh the humanity.
I had an issue with some equipment from ATT, it took about 6 different try’s before I finally found a human capable enough to help resolve my issue, which involved replacing the equipment.
This future sounds so much worse to fix a complicated issue.
They’re not going away, they’re just going to be more persistent with their cold calling, and more infuriating with their call answering.
Good luck calling your bank, social security, healthcare, DMV, IRS, etc with the obscure problems we all have, if they’re a poorly trained chatbot
Good luck calling them already. A lot of services make it flat out impossible to talk to a human.
I am so glad I got out of IT before AI hit. I don’t know how I would have handled customer calls asking why our chat is telling them their shit works when it doesn’t or to cover their computer in cooking oils or whatever.
And only after they banged their head against the AI for two hours and are already pissed will they reach someone. No thanks.
Thank god I can troubleshoot on my own.
When VC and PE call a company or industry “mature” it means they don’t see increasing revenue, only something to be sucked dry and sold for parts. To them, consistent revenue is worthless, it must be skyrocketing or nothing. If you want to see this in action right now, look what Broadcom is doing to VMWare. They also saw VMWare as a “mature company”.
Fuck Broadcom. We’re still dealing with that bullshit, as there aren’t a lot of viable alternatives at the enterprise scale.
Broadcom management deserve gulag
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