The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Customer Service: The Hunt for a Human



December 30, 2004

Customer Service: The Hunt for a Human

By KATIE HAFNER

RY to reach customer service at Amazon.com to fix a problem with an order and you will encounter one of the most prominent and frustrating aspects of the Internet era: a world devoid of humans. Not only is there no telephone number on Amazon's Web site, but the company makes a point of not including one. Instead, customers are asked to fill out an online form and wait for a response.

'It's incredibly annoying,' said Ellen Hobbs of Austin, Tex., whose frustration has led her to publish Amazon.com's customer support number at her own Web site (clicheideas.com/amazon.htm). 'They haven't invested the kind of money in helping you solve problems as they have in selling you things.' In December alone, some 1,100 people visited Ms. Hobbs's site.

Indeed, in the pursuit of customer service, the Sisyphean challenge of making contact with a human defines the automated age, and can sometimes feel like a full-time job.

'It's almost as if we're dealing with this ghostly machine,' said Lauren Weinstein, a telecommunications consultant in Los Angeles who has made an avocation of studying customer service. 'You assume there are people back there somewhere, but it's as if the whole purpose of these systems isn't to provide customer service but to keep the customer at arm's length.'

Now, by punching or typing in a sequence of numbers, or by speaking to a machine that has been programmed to understand human speech, you can have access to information previously impossible to obtain without a human - the whereabouts of a package, for instance, or the balance of a of a bank account.

What is increasingly difficult to obtain, though, is the actual human. "Unless you want to call a neighbor," said Dorothy Meyer of Escondido, Calif. "You get them right away." Then she thought better of it. "But then, you don't. You get their answering machine."

Many consumers have developed any number of tricks for reaching a sentient being. Mr. Weinstein and others have discovered a number of techniques for outwitting the automation to reach a human, especially when confronted with the labyrinthine menus that accompany most phone-based systems.

Most people, for instance, know to punch zero even when the option isn't offered. And many a frustrated consumer has learned to pretend to be one of the few remaining telephone customers . . . .

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