Why don’t companies let you talk to an actual human anymore?

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production.

Jordan Heath Rawlings In today’s always on connected everywhere world, it has never been easier to get ahold of anyone at any time by any method…unless you are a customer with a problem and you would like to speak to a human being on the phone. If you have ever had an issue with your account, you’re definitely aware that big tech platforms like Facebook and Instagram and many more don’t have phone numbers for you to call. They have forms to fill out and emails to send and requests to make, and maybe if you’re lucky, an actual person reads about your issue and fixes it. But maybe not…when you service billions of people in dozens of languages…maybe that’s understandable. Maybe. But that approach has trickled down to smaller and smaller companies, any kind of company appliance vendors, music services, magazines, and in some cases, airlines,

CLIP Frontier Airlines has completely gotten rid of its telephone customer service line. The budget carrier says it’s transitioned to only online, mobile, and text support.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Why is this happening? Is it just about the money? What does a company save when it cuts this kind of service, and how much does it cost them with its customers? Facebook, not having a number to call might be a nuisance, but imagine you’re stranded in a foreign country and not able to speak to anyone from the airline you need to get home. What happens then?

I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Emily Stewart covers business and economics for Vox. Hello Emily.

Emily Stewart Hi.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When’s the last time you tried to reach a customer service representative by the phone?

Emily Stewart Oh, man. Probably I think last week, honestly, and I was very lucky. I did need to speak with a real person and it took me a second, but I got through.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Did you have to like finagle your way through various help menus and such?

Emily Stewart I had to be like, no, no, I really think I need to talk to a real person. And you know, then it’s like, no, no, you don’t. You say, yes, I do. But I really just had to, I got like something from the bank that I was like, I don’t think I need to do anything with this, but I have to find out.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Right.

Emily Stewart And, the robot didn’t know, but the person on the end of the other end of the line, they knew and they were like, no, we can put it away. And it was very easy. Well, easy enough.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Easy enough, and that’s why we’re having this conversation because that is a rarer experience every day. Why don’t you start by telling us the story that you start your peace with and just tell us about the Johnny Boston situation. It’s a great example of what we’re talking about here. So what happened?

Emily Stewart So Johnny Boston’s is a restaurant in New Hampshire, and basically what happened is the owner of the restaurant, at some point was no longer able to access his personal Facebook account. That meant that he couldn’t access his businesses Facebook account. So he would use that account to kind of keep customers updated about specials and deals, couldn’t get back in. And this is a, I think like a pretty common experience. A lot of people have been locked out of other Facebook or Instagram accounts. Turns out he was really not able to get back in. He would go through this, you know, the Facebook system to send pictures of his driver’s license to prove that he was himself. But every time he’d get to the last step he would get tripped up because the person who had hacked his personal Facebook account had had changed the account’s phone number. So it was something where it must have been sending a link or, or a code to a phone number that was no longer his. His problem was not just that phone number, but also Facebook’s, or rather Facebook’s, lack thereof. There was no customer service line to help him get back in. So he spent months and months not being able to use his business’ Facebook account.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Okay. Facebook is a huge company, and to your point in the Johnny Boston situation, there’s a lot of money at stake for businesses that use this platform and they can’t talk to a human being at all?

Emily Stewart No, he could not talk to a human being at all. I mean, the, the punchline of this story is that I was able to get him back into his account because I reached out to Facebook’s PR team after going back and forth with them over email, not over the phone for a couple of weeks that we got, we got Johnny Boston back in.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Has Facebook ever had a customer service line? Like did they start with one and phase it out, or have they just always been computer only?

Emily Stewart I mean, at the very least, they haven’t had one in recent years. You know, I don’t know, like back in 2004, 2005, maybe there was some sort of line for someone to call.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That was probably just Zuckerberg’s cell phone, right?

Emily Stewart Like who knows what that was. But in recent years, you know, this is a pretty common phenomenon. I still, to this day, I get emails from people asking me to get them back into their Facebook accounts after publishing this story a few months ago.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How common is it for a company of Facebook’s size and reputation to not have one? Like what kind of company are they keeping here in the industry? How often do companies like this have a real customer service line?

Emily Stewart I think you’d be a little bit surprised how common this is. Frontier Airlines, the budget airline made some headlines last year when they announced they were getting rid of their customer service line. Reporting for this story, I found someone who could not get in touch with Uber, and when I asked Uber what she should have done, they kind of said she should use our app. There was no phone number for her to call. You know, Amazon will call you back. But it’s difficult to call them. Tidal, the music streaming service was a company that I dealt with for this, but it really is companies that really run the gamut. You know, I talked to somebody for this story who couldn’t cancel a magazine subscription and couldn’t find a phone number. I found someone who, had bought a wine fridge and it had broken and could not get through to this company. So it, it really is, is more common than I think sometimes you’d think.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Do we know when this phenomenon kind of started happening? I know you can’t pinpoint it to a date or anything, but you know, when not having an actual phone number with the human on the other end started to become at least an option for these companies as opposed to, you know, I think of maybe 20 years ago that would’ve seemed nuts.

Emily Stewart Yeah, I mean, it does feel like the internet has made this a lot more possible for companies than it was. I mean, it’s also important to remember like at some point years and years and decades ago, customer service is only face to face. Right? You couldn’t call at all. But over the years, this is, has happened for a multitude of reasons. You know, companies now have the internet. You know, call centers are expensive. Looking forward, you have to wonder how much AI is going to make this even more possible. But, you know, companies have plenty of other ways that people can reach out now that are a lot cheaper. They would say more efficient. A lot of consumers who have dealt with this would say it’s not exactly.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Right. And is that the root of all this, when you talk to, you know, business experts about infrastructure and that kind of stuff, is it just, is it cost cutting?

Emily Stewart Most of it really is money. You know, one person I talked to said, listen, like the cost of talking to a person face-to-face, it’s always gonna be more expensive than talking to a live person on the phone. That’s more expensive than talking to somebody on chat. Then you get into automated solutions, then you get into emails. So yes, companies have figured out this is a way to cut costs. And you know, even for companies that do have a phone number do have call centers. I think a lot of people have had the experience of, of winding up having a call center, you know, calling a company and getting someone who’s not in the United States who maybe English is not great. So you’re having a harder time understanding. And that’s a cost cutting measure as well, right? Like ultimately companies wanna make money. They think this is a way to do it.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Do we know how customers feel about this in general and what it does to their relationship with the company?

Emily Stewart I mean, to a certain extent, sure. Sometimes you don’t really wanna have to call somebody, like, right, if I’m going on vacation, I need to call my bank and tell them that, you know, whatever, go on vacation, don’t cancel my credit card. That’s kind of nice to be able to do over the internet. You know, on the other hand, there are moments that it can be, you know, quite upsetting to people. One researcher I talked to told me that having another person on the phone kind of makes consumers feel more confident about their decision making, and she said that even the option to have a person to call makes consumers feel more at ease. You know, all of these hoops that we’ve had to jump through over the years has also kind of trained consumers to behave a little bit badly. None of us are our best selves when we are on the customer service phone line, but because we’re used to having to jump through so many hoops, because we’ve had so many negative experiences, a lot of consumers escalate very quickly because sometimes we’ve been taught to believe that the way to get what we want is to immediately say, I’m super upset. Give me your manager. I wanna talk to the manager. And it makes us behave a little bit poorly. And some of that’s, that’s obviously on us, but some of it’s also that companies have made us this.

Jordan Heath Rawlings We are gonna talk about what this does to the companies themselves, but first I do find it kind of funny that we get really frustrated when we can’t get a human on the line to help solve our problems. But at the same time, there are all these memes about, you know, don’t call me, just text me. Like, oh, I don’t wanna pick up the phone. Oh gosh. Like there’s a big push towards non phone interactions, at least among people who are under 40 or whatever. And at the same time, then we’re like, how dare you cut my customer service line?

Emily Stewart Right, and like I said before, I think sometimes we just want the option, like there are, I’m happy to press a couple of buttons. I’m happy to talk to the chat bot sometimes, but at some point you really do get to the point where it’s like, I just need to talk to somebody. And you kind of got at this earlier, this is also an age question. Like, so if you’re under 40, under 50, maybe you’re a little bit more internet savvy, but for older people, the idea of getting on the internet to do some of this stuff is just not realistic or possible. You know, they really do want and need to talk to somebody else. So not everybody has internet access. Not everybody has a smartphone that they’re really great at, you know, at dealing with chats and stuff. So you want that option. I think most people would say, even if that’s not my first choice, it is a choice I would like to have on the table.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Right. And if you put yourself in the business’s shoes, you know, you do a cost benefits analysis and you realize that you can save a lot of money and the cons might be, I guess, what, for them, aggravated customers? Surely there’s reputational costs for, you know, not being able to, to get a person on the line to solve somebody’s problem. Like that doesn’t give your business the best look.

Emily Stewart Right. I mean, I’m sure some of it is really, a lot of it is reputational, right? Like, ugh, I had a terrible experience with this company. I never wanna use them again. at the same time, if you’re Facebook, I don’t know how worried you are about that. Like at the end of the day, you have tons and tons of users. People hate you for a multitude of reasons, whatever. You know, some people I talk to experts in this area said, that one thing cus companies kind of sometimes might miss out on is learning about their products and services. You know, if you’re talking to your customers and have people on the line with them, you might start to notice that a lot of people are having the same problem. They’re having the same complaints about whatever your product or service is, and that is an opportunity to fix that problem. And then maybe you’ll have fewer complaints going forward and that actually winds up saving you money down the line.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And presumably you’re also missing a chance to upsell, these consumers on, on your other goods and services.

Emily Stewart Right. I mean, I think it just, it makes people feel good to be able to talk to somebody and feel like, you know, we do wanna feel like we have a personal relationship with companies, which is you know, it’s own separate issue, but we do wanna feel like there’s somebody there and like the company cares. And, and maybe it is an opportunity to say, Hey, you have A, do you want B? And maybe somebody will say yes.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Yeah. So what happened when you reached out to these companies? You mentioned you were able to get Johnny Boston’s its Facebook account back. What about in other cases when you reached out to ask them, why, why can’t this customer talk to someone?

Emily Stewart I mean, really what was so funny about this was, you know, being a reporter, dealing with like a comms team, it, the relationship is different a lot of the companies that I’ve reached out to basically were like, who’s the customer? We can probably fix it. And like, offered to fix these people’s problems…

Jordan Heath Rawlings Which is what they wanted to a person that would do it

Emily Stewart Right. So I was able to like most, for most of the people I dealt with, they’d kind of abandoned the issue long ago. But it was funny to say like, oh, actually this in-person interaction, even if it is over email or whatever it is, or getting the college person on the phone is kind of fixing like we’re doing. We’re fixing the thing in the way that we know that we probably could fix the thing.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Were they aware at all of the irony of that?

Emily Stewart I don’t know. I wondered that. I really did. I just, because after the first one I thought, okay, that’s weird. And by the third or fourth I thought you guys shouldn’t be doing this. Like, just ignore me. But okay.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Did any of them comment on the overall strategy and why they’d done it though, as opposed to just fixing the problem?

Emily Stewart I mean, I think if you’re Facebook here, like what you say is we have tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of customers. We have, you know, users. It would be wild for us to open up a customer service line and just impossible to scale. Which I guess like to a certain extent maybe, I don’t know. But at the same time, like I said before, I get emails pretty regularly from people specifically about Facebook who are locked out of their accounts. It seems like a problem that you have to be able to fix. Somehow, right? I mean, the same thing with Uber. You know, we talked to a woman who wasn’t able to update her phone number and she’d moved from one country to another, and Uber was kind of like, well, she can use the app. And it’s like, okay, but she’s tried to see the app, so now what happens? Like, I understand you guys have a lot of people, but what is, like, what’s the solution for her? And I think sometimes companies, you know, they, yes, it is, it is difficult to run a big call centre or whatever, get, you know, hire customer service people even to be on a chat. But you have to wonder like if this is a trade off that we, we all really wanna make.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What about some of the smaller companies? What did you mention? Like a wine fridge and stuff like that. Like those folks don’t seem like the sort of business that would have, you know, massive scale problems with having a few people answering phones.

Emily Stewart Yeah, with that one, I really never quite got it. I think I went back and forth with their who someone on their other email. I mean, it became very clear I think in that back and forth that this company maybe was not based in the US and that was part of the issue. Some of it’s also, we often don’t know you know, in the age of the internet, we have no idea what companies we are dealing with. In a lot of cases, there are tons of businesses out there, small businesses that may be based here or there that you know, may or may not have, you know, the best customer service or the best products. And so I think that was a case where just, you know, they were never gonna answer the phone and they never wanted to.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Fair enough. I guess, it’s their business. But just to play devil’s advocate here for a second, on behalf of the businesses, Couldn’t this all…I feel like that meme, like, couldn’t this meeting just be an email. But couldn’t, couldn’t all these problems be taken care of by, you know, a really responsive, email customer service department? Like is it really a person and a voice on the phone that we can yell at? Or is it just like bad customer service that could be better?

Emily Stewart I mean, I think there are certain things that could be emails. Like I did speak to one person for this story. I don’t think she wound up in this story who’d worked in a customer service role, and she was saying, you know, we could do so much more via email and people could explain their problems to me. Like in her specific case, that was maybe true, but at the same time, like. I don’t know, my flight’s delayed. Do I wanna spend three hours in the airport emailing with American Airlines or whatever, while I get this figured out? Like you do kind of want that instantaneous ability to communicate and email just doesn’t, I don’t think in some cases it just doesn’t do that. And we do wanna talk to people sometimes.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, the airline one is a good one because when I was reading your piece, that was the one that caught me, right? Because there are, there are timelines involved. They’re often quick. People are often far away from home. Some of them are stranded. Like I can understand, a big tech company that deals with millions and billions of customers and predominantly just deals in information and bits and bites. But like when you have people you’re trying to get someplace, it does seem like quite a huge step to not talk to them.

Emily Stewart I mean, I wonder with Frontier, you know, obviously they’re a budget airline. Their whole promise is we’re gonna keep prices as low as possible. That means you’re gonna accept some conditions that you may not love. And I do wonder how many people have have accepted those conditions and then, you know, push comes to shove and it’s summer travel and you cannot call Frontier. You might regret that a little bit. At the same time, you know, you have social media and we see people all the time going to Twitter to say blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you sometimes do get somebody in the Twitter, you know, DMs or whatever. Who is gonna solve your problem? But again, this kind of makes us worse. People like it would, like, nobody wants to be the person tweeting from the airplane at Frontier or Delta or whatever, that they’re mad. And everybody knows that their trip is a disaster.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So what happens next in this space? Is this all a moot point? Because it’s all gonna be handled by AI, within a matter of months anyway. This is seeming like where it’s trending, right.

Emily Stewart I mean, that is I think a good and big question. You, you are seeing some reports of call centres going fully AI. you’re also seeing reports of some call centers using AI to help train their workers, which I think is kind of interesting. You know, if you have if like it’s not a bad idea if you are a customer service representative, and let’s say you’re on the chat instead of on the phone and people are asking you the same thing every five minutes, like it’s not a bad thing to be able to just send them the canned response. Or if you’re a newer worker and you don’t know the canned response, you don’t know the right answer, like the AI might be helpful to you. Like, is AI gonna be answering every phone call in America in the next six months? Like, I don’t know, I’ve given up on like trying to predict what AI will or will not do.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And given up on trying to reach companies by phone.

Emily Stewart Yeah, I mean really a friend of mine got lost out of his Instagram a couple of weeks ago and he is also a reporter. He was able to get back in because of being a reporter cause he got a real person.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And people say journalism is dying. Still fulfills an important role in society.

Emily Stewart Yep. Getting us back into our Facebook account.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Emily, thank you so much for this. It was a delight.

Emily Stewart Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That was Emily Stewart at Vox and that was The Big Story. For more, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca and of course we love to hear from listeners. I wanna respond to one email that we got, because this is something I think about a lot. This is a listener named Brandon, and he writes:

I like your podcast, and I like you.

Thanks Brandon.

But a week ago, you made me want to throw my phone across the room because I like you, I’m taking the time to tell you why. About a week ago you were devoting yet another podcast to the who knew what, when, and should, could they have said something earlier, nonsense related to Chinese spying and you said, will there be a public inquiry? It’s the question every Canadian wants answered.

Brandon says: I don’t want it answered. I want our so-called leaders expending half the energy they do on pseudo non scandals on what really matters. If you asked anyone what their top issues of concern are, I imagine the list would look something like this. The cost of food, the cost of housing, the sad state of healthcare, climate change, children’s mental health, and somewhere way down at the bottom might be what our elected officials are spending most of their time on.

I will leave it there, but I will let all of you know this is something we think about a lot. The question is often, do we wanna make people take their medicine or do we want to talk about what we know they want to hear about? It is a tough decision. I would dispute personally the idea that this is a pseudo non scandal. It involves election interference from a foreign government, which is listen a pretty big deal, even if it doesn’t impact your pocketbook on a day-to-day basis. But this is something that we love hearing from listeners about because first of all, we always want to know what the most important issues in this country are to you. And second, because without this kind of feedback, we’re not as good at making these kind of decisions. We are going to cover the Chinese interference scandal as it goes on. I hope we get a public inquiry because there’s also a bigger issue here that we return to time and again of a lack of transparency in our government, and that should matter to all Canadians, no matter which party you support. So I want to thank Brandon for writing in, and I want to encourage everybody listening this far at the end of the podcast. You are probably the top 10% of listeners who actually listen to me babble at the end. So you guys are the ones we really want to hear from. And if you usually listen this far, you know how to do it, but here it is anyway. You can always find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. You can always write to us via email. The address is hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, and you can always call us and just talk into the phone. That number is (416)-935-5935. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.