A surprising human connection

What just happened with a customer service agent for a large Internet provider stirred me in a positive way. Maybe you can take a little hope from this as I have.

My Internet company is a big one and pretty much universally loathed. The reason I use them is that they have an actual monopoly in the rural state where I live. There are no competitors to choose from. I am not naming the company out of concern for the good employee I chatted with.

My problem was that the company believes I have an outstanding balance when I do not. This happened because the company kept open my old, prior account at a prior physical address, and continued to bill me on that account. I did not realize they had not transferred that to my new account at the home I now live in. The result is that I’ve been paying my bill monthly to a defunct account, and the company thinks I have not been paying my bill at all. My goal is to have those payments to the old account credited to my current account.

As you can see, this is not something that an AI system, or a limited chat menu tree, can help with. But as always, this company works deliberately to stop you from being able to speak to a human. The online chat bot is frankly aggressive—it pointblank refuses to connect you to a human no matter how you respond. It forces you to step through choices that don’t fit your situation. As a customer, you’re afraid to do it, because making the “wrong” choice often results in the chat bot hanging up on you and making you start the process all over again.

I don’t mind telling you that in the privacy of my home, I actually yell out loud. It’s intensely frustrating; the company is actively hostile to helping you.

But this post is about something positive, so enough complaining.

I managed to get a live person on the chat (I explicitly asked him to confirm he was human, not AI, and he did. But yeah, I know AIs lie, too). “D” was very polite and helpful. I explained the situation to him, and he understood the problem and understood why I needed a human to make actual judgments.

When he apologized for the delay, I replied that it was fine, I was just so pleased to be speaking to a human, and that I appreciated his help. I said the AI system was frustrating but talking to a person who could help was a pleasure.

D surprised me by saying that the “AI system was really frustating to lots of people” and he found it frustrating, too. He then said that a number of his peers had lost their jobs in call centers and customer service positions because of AI and it was really taking a toll on a lot of people.

I commiserated and told him I’d lost my job as a news writer and editor to AI. D then said he too had lost his writing work as a sports writer and reporter. We sympathized with each other in a friendly way and wished each other luck.

This unscripted, honest, and friendly human connection was unexpected. Call center employees are locked into scripted conversations in a way that they never were when I was younger. You feel for them, because you know there’s a real person there who wants to be able to talk to you like a human, but she’s made to mouth this unctuous and dishonest corporate script larded with insincere buttering up.

You don’t expect a person working in such a role to dare to go off script, especially in a way that sympathizes with a customer against the company’s practices. I hope D doesn’t suffer any consequences from that, and I hope he finds more writing work.

A frustrating task-it took an hour to sort out the billing problem-unexpectedly became a bright spot in my day because of simple, honest human connection.