Here’s one for Brendan Carr, soon to be in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (nytimes)… a regulation that requires call centers to have caller ID so that they don’t hassle Americans with “What is your phone number?” questions. As far as I can tell, customer “service” call centers are the only users of the American telephone system that don’t have caller ID, thus leading to the annoying phenomenon of having to provide one’s phone number, the agent having to type it in, etc.
The worst offender in this regard seems to be General Electric. They have an automated system that has called me about 10 times regarding our fancy Monogram gas range. One of the things that we like about it is that LED rings behind each burner control knob light up to show that a burner is on. Or at least they did until the entire system failed. GE sent out a tech who, predictably, decided that parts were required. GE then began shipping out parts in dribs and drabs. After each shipment, the company’s automated system would tell me to schedule a return visit. Then I would press some buttons to talk to a human who would, after asking for my phone number (keep in mind that GE had actually placed the call and, apparently, no longer had the phone number that it had used) say, “We can’t schedule service until the parts are delivered“.
(I did ask “Why is your system programmed to make calls when a part is shipped and ask me to schedule with a live agent if you can’t schedule anything until after a part is delivered?” and, of course, the agents didn’t agree with me that there was anything suboptimal about GE’s system.)
I recognize that this would seem to be at odds with my general support for smaller government, but telecom is already heavily regulated, purportedly for our benefit.
Separately, I would love to know how roughly a dozen parts are required to fix what, in my humble engineer’s brain, must be attributable to the failure of a single component (none of the six burner controls has a working backlight and I think we have a full set of parts for each of the burner knobs, but I have to believe that the root cause is upstream from the knobs).
Buy a Miele or Bosch unit and stop wasting your time on the phone and scheduling repairs. Far superior design, engineering and reliability all around.
I have tried asking the reps, “why are you asking my phone number when it is obviously on your screen already?”
Sometimes he would say that he is required to ask for it anyway.
I could only figure out these possible explanations.
– Sometimes caller id is unreliable.
– Sometimes the outgoing caller id is not the best callback number.
– Companies find that if they seem to know the customer phone number, then he might be rattled by a possible privacy violation.
My guess is that all the call centers have had caller id for 25 years, and your proposed rule will not do anything.
I think quite a few call centers lack this information because they do sometimes make transcription errors. Also, some call centers say “Is the phone that you’re calling from a good callback number?”
CallerID is easily forged, at least until SHAKEN/STIR gets greater adoption, which will take a while because the makers of landline phone switching gear like Nortel or Lucent went out of business over 20 years ago and it’s impossible to get new software features.
I had a Korean colleague who’d note how backwards the US is: you lose phone signal in an elevator, and all sorts of customer-service or administrative formalities require using the phone rather than the web.