I was in the middle of one of those customer service “chats” yesterday when I violated one of my deeply held personal rules. I am moving to a new place, and I had a very simple question: Does my current internet service provider offer the same product at my new address? What I imagined, in what I now realize was a haze of foolish optimism, was a one-minute exchange in which I tell the person on the other end of the chat (or, I guess, in the age of AI, “person” on the other end of the chat) my new address, and then that person or “person” checks it against a master list and comes back with an answer.
Because — and here’s where my delusional mind took over — it seemed to me that it’s a pretty open-and-shut question. You either do or do not offer internet service at a given address. There really isn’t an opportunity for nuance.
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“I’d be happy to open a ticket for that,” was the nonresponse by the possibly nonperson I was chatting with. Not “Yes, of course!” Or “No, sorry.” Just some meaningless customer service rep jargon.
Well, not entirely meaningless. And here is when I violated my personal code of conduct. Years ago, I vowed to myself never to pretend not to understand something I understood. Nothing irritates me more than people who play dumb — by pretending not to hear something they heard perfectly well, by acting as if they don’t understand a word or a meaning that they completely understand, or by creating the impression that they’re confused or at a loss just to make the other person do more work.
“What does ‘open a ticket’ mean?” I tapped out on my phone.
Of course, I know exactly what it means. The specific slang terms of the customer service department (or, I guess, customer “service” department) are well known to all of us. We know that the “ticket” is a message the chatbot sends to the department involved, labeled with a blizzard of letters and numerals that appear on the top of the email we get a few moments later, and a promise, later broken, to respond “within 48 hours.” The ticket is passed back and forth until either the customer or the company gives up and lets the issue die. Then it is called a “closed ticket.”
But I didn’t want to give my customer service representative the easy way out. I insisted that he (or she, or bot) explain exactly what the drawn-out and overcomplicated next steps were going to be. My hope was that by forcing an explanation about what, exactly, a “ticket” is, and why it was necessary to open one to answer what we both knew was a very simple, black-and-white question, I might inspire some deep self-reflection on the part of my customer service representative. My questions may lead that person, or “person,” to a better understanding of why it seems that every customer on the other end of the chat is so easily enraged.
It doesn’t matter, as we all know, whether the opposite number on the customer service chat is a person or a bot, because these companies train the dwindling number of their embodied employees to think and act like bots anyway. You get the same stilted and half-human language from man or machine. But in this case, I can report a small victory.
Midway through the tortured definition of a ticket — “A ticket is a documented customer service record that allows us to be transparent and responsive to our valued customer’s concerns and to share with company stakeholders…” — I interrupted in all-caps: “You don’t have service in my new neighborhood but you’ve been told to open a ticket because if there are enough tickets asking about the location maybe you will offer internet service??? Yes???”
The chat went silent. Then, suddenly, in italics: Agent is typing…. And then nothing. And then the italics again. And then nothing again.
“It’s okay,” I typed in the interval. “I get it. But tell me the truth. Right now at this moment you do not provide internet service at my new address. Is that correct?”
Agent is typing…
And then: “That is correct.”
At this point, I was pretty sure I was dealing with a bot. A human would have typed something like “System down, please try later.” When it comes to acting like a bot, nothing beats a human.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.