RE: Saturday Musings: I Suck at Customer Service!
I don’t wish that industry on anyone. It’s a soul sucking industry and people take far too much advance of people just trying do their job. If only companies focus more on making there employees happy; instead of, waste hundreds of hours a week on analyzing, and annoying customers in trying to determine “how to make the customer more happy. I got a simple solution. Stop making employees so miserable with your 1001 metrics that they all need have perfect scores in. Customers will always complain if they dint feel they were “treated how they wanted to be.” No need to punish a hard working employee who fulfilled their job only because someone felt “entitled” to the world being served on a silver platter to them with no reproductions of their bad behaviors.
Whoa @enjar... and YEAH!
Call me cynical but some of this strikes me as the last gasp of an entire industry at the very edge of being about to enter obsolescence... that is, we're moving slowly towards becoming a "post consumer" society.
For example, I sell on eBay for part of my living. 15 years ago it was a pretty fun and free marketplace where buyers and sellers connected and terms were agreed to. Now it's an endless pit of rules, all of which favor buyers, at the expense of sellers. It feels as if they have run out of ways to actually increase sales organically so instead they bank on making the terms of purchase more and more liberal for buyers... to the point that the buyer has ZERO risk and ZERO commitment... if the freakin' wind changes direction six months from now, the buyer can return the goods in now USED condition for a FULL refund PLUS shipping... all expense now borne by the seller.
Reading between the lines, this suggests that the "consumption train" that drives the world is running out of steam. We can no longer sell on "equitable terms," so we have to sell on UNequitable terms to keep the train running. Well... maybe the stupid train should just be allowed to CRASH so we can build a better model...
Always seem like we have these mega companies that are just too big to fail, and too big to adapt to anything meaningful. With how easy it is for someone to make a site to handle similar transactions you see a lot of these little things pop up all over that focus on trading goods local. I’m sure if companies like ebay had their way they just buy up these companies and kill them to keep business as it always is. They corner the market, and can’t grow anymore so they focus on other things to profit from. When they can’t profit from something they try and reduce the liabilities. In the end they are just killing themselves off. If no sellers want to sell anymore out of fear of being scammed; then it does not matter how safe of a market place you make for the buyers they no longer have anything to buy.
It’s scary how many jobs are on the brink of being replaced by automations. I know a lot of call centers already have the AI sitting in the back ground “learning” but are able to take over at a single keystroke. No amount of automation will save these companies when the common person no longer has a job, and can’t even afford food. You just can’t eat an iphone for nutrition no matter how much they want you to think you can!
Eventually, the things we today call "jobs" will no longer exist... within 20? 50? years most of them will have been replaced by automation. What "work" will look like at that point is hard to say...
As early as 10 years unless they come up with a way to tax automation into giving us humans a fighting chance. I hate having use taxes in such a way but greed is winning out on both sides. One side where works think they should be paid $15 for there inability to get an order right and construct the meal in the correct way. The other side under valuing "human capital" and working it to death in very stressful and ridicules standers because they have another option --automation.
food industry and retail are going get hit very hard and already are. So many people are employed in these jobs. I cant go out to eat without them already wanting me to use automations to pay for me my meal, and trying tell me I should get use to ordering from it soon as well. Even sadder when these people are already having to accept work that was never meant to support a family in the first place.
Outside of increasing government assistance I just cant see it ending well for these people. I fear with increased government assistance so will be increased regulations and testing to maintain such assistance. Then when large portions are being held up by government assistance that is funded from tax on automation they will start to increase the requirements to receive help. I could see it going into: required therapy, mediations, drug testing, removal of weapons. After that they just have to add in 20-30$ tolls on the roads so everyone is just staying home. Scary thoughts pop into my head when thinking about these kind of things.