People rag on Comcast? Because it's a terrible company? But for most people, Comcast is the worst company they know. They're unaware of the abysmal nature of Cox, or Time Warner, or Ziply, or Frontier.

Comcast is, in my opinion, doing this the right way - the 80% of calls that go into basic troubleshooting categories are shunted off onto a text robot. They know you're going to get less mad at an SMS because expressing rage through emoji is infantilizing and they declare their robotic nature front and center so carefully wording your outrage just takes time (cools you down) and increases the likelihood that the robot will misunderstand you.

Where they go wrong is in protecting the fuck out of the phone tree such that if I have an actual problem caused by actual Comcast, I have to battle robots for ten minutes before I can get a human to roll a truck. Worse, my entire interaction with the robot is washed away and I get to start over with the human.

I can see AI improving the shit out of this. Give the AI the chat, let it wrap up when it fails, send a summary to the human, and then butt the fuck out.

I can absolutely pull up a panel that says "waiting calls" "serviced calls" "abandoned calls" "longest waiting" "average waiting" and "average talking." It's one button on my app. I've never given a shit because I know that all my receptionist's calls are complicated AF. And I think that's my basic beef more than anything - when you have a "phone pool"-type employment class, the technology makes you look for ways to punish the humans that aren't molding to the tech. The proper way to do it is to utilize the humans' expertise to the fullest.

And if you have created a worker class that does not require expertise but still requires them to interact with technology that drives them like plow horses? You should be ashamed of yourself.