Ask HN: If I enter account or order in a phone tree, why am I asked again?

It’s called CTI in industry — computer telephony integration. Normally well run firms will have CTI setup properly to transfer IVR data to an agent.

Sometimes however agents are trained to distrust this information as there are ways to spoof or attack the system. One easy way is to call a victim and pretend to be the company, then “3 way” them in with the IVR of the real company, have them verify, then disconnect them and take over, ask to transfer to an agent and you have full access to do whatever you want to their account (if the agent doesn’t re-verify). For this reason, 99% of the time financial institutions already have CTI data but will always do re-verification.

Working in the industry, lots of companies rely on outsourced work through Business Process Outsourcers. Basically you are calling Target or another company and in their internal system probably run by Avaya or Cisco on ancient hardware and only can process limited inputs like DTMF/Touch and a tree format. When you transfer to a person, that agent works in a different region/office/company and on a different system. Since they transfer through a phone number, no data passes so they have no idea who you are and chances are have a different system that sees a limited set of information to handle your call.

Telephony is a cost center for most companies and the work to build clean experiences for callers is not a priority so a lot of companies have these broken systems and spending money maintenance to keep them running instead of understanding how a proper experience for someone helps their business and brand.

The phone tree needs your information to route your call properly, the service rep needs your information to service you. Conveying the information to the service rep is harder than routing your call, so it's not always done.

After experiencing this myself in numerous different contexts I just figured it was essentially a time sponge step - it feels like you're making progress through the system, but in actual fact it's just to make waiting in the queue seem less time consuming.

"Here's some pointless busywork, ooh look you've moved up in the queue 3 places since we asked you for your order / account / ticket / reservation number.

Collecting info early serves several functions: - confirming you are a real user - routing / escalating you appropriately - weeding out unmotivated calls - generating analytics about inbound in volume - (potentially) improving your handle time

As you can see, the frost four bullets have value even if the fifth one is ignored, so "vestigial" identification steps have a reason to persist even if they don't follow you. Add in a couple of reasons that the info might not get passed:

- fear of fraud - constantly shifting tech platforms - org boundaries, like using an outsourced call center at certain times of day

And there are a lot of ways you can end up with repeat asks.

Bonus: the same reasons this info doesn't get passed makes it harder to track the negative impact to it not getting passed along, so it is hard to prioritize a fix.

Probably for the same reason that upon hearing “your call is important to us” you instantly know that the call center is understaffed, the company has no interest in talking to you, you’ll be hearing that elevator music for quite a while longer, and call centers are a cost center.

While technically possible, it would cost slightly more money to actually make it happen and so it isn’t done.

Or maybe it used to work that way 20 years ago when the flow was designed and ever since it’s been changed over and over no one actually bothered to look into it: the requirements was just “make it ask the same things as it always did” without wondering “why”.

It could be that they are using and older setup that doesn't support this, but more likely they just didn't set it up or have an integration issue between their IVR system and their CRM they chose not to pursue.

It's been 10+ years now since I used to work building these systems myself but even back then this was possible. In this day and age I agree, while it might be fine for the customer support rep to verify the data passed through the IVR, they really should get it. There is no excuse not to.

It's the same at the doctor's or dentist's. Every time I got they hand me a paper form and ask me to fill it out even though they already have my info. They could just ask "has anything changed" but nope. They could also do it all online before I get there but nope. If they're required to file they could print out the info and just ask me to verify then sign it but nope.

As for the phone tree, FAAMG is no better

For HN readers outside of the US,"Target" is the name of a store in the US. Took me a minute.

On one system I saw, it is shown to the service rep but it's required to ask again to confirm. Other larger system only route you to proper service rep which would probably be on the other side of the planet and using a different system to service your support call.

I asked a friend who manages a call center now and has managed call centers for years, previously at a big US bank.

He said that sometimes they have multiple systems or outsourced call centers that don't integrate, and since the inconvenience falls on the customer no one at the bank considers fixing it a priority.

He then mentioned that customer service operators frequently get people on the line who don't have their account number or whatever they need ready, so having the phone tree collect that (even if it's just an input that gets ignored) heads off the operators wasting time on the call while the customer digs around for their account number or receipt number or whatever it is they need.

Having worked at a company that had an outsourced call center myself I know people often call the wrong company (calling their bank about their credit report, calling a store about insufficient balance on their credit card). And I know that even asking customers to enter their ZIP code or phone prefix (to route the call to a regional center) will flummox a significant number of callers. Because call center operators generally work with quotas and maximum time per call monitored, reducing the time the operators spend waiting for grandma to find her account number becomes an important goal, even at the expense of irritating some customers.

As a counter-example: DHL is the only company I've called that does forward information to humans.

I used to work at a call center, most of the time the phone tree doesn't carry the info over to the call or there may be a piece of info missing that could count your call as authenticated so the rep has to ask.

There was even times where I had the previous customers account still open and the new call came in, the IVR would not populate the system with the IVR data.

Most automated systems are used to answer easy and commonly asked questions or offer some simple self-help.

Probably because each level of support is using an outdated isolated system, that have minimum interoperability beyond call routing.

The most likely reason has been replied to multiple times, that the phone system doesn't pass it.

But another reason is this is a failsafe to ensure the right order number was entered, as with a phone system there are very few means of authentication before that point.

It’s an anti-fraud maze of sort - @patio11 calls it anti-fraud loops [0]

[0] - https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

It feels like an unnecessary gate left in place, in the hopes that some callers won’t get through, this reducing total call volume to the humans.

More likely, it’s just not worth it to implement the interface between the systems.

Straight-up incompetence on the part of the systems integrator or designer. I'm so tired of this shit, especially when entry of an account number is essentially a REQUIREMENT to even get into the system.

I briefly did customer support like this, the bigcorps have various call centers many of which are other companies outsourcing it (I was and am in the US although obviously offshore exists too). I don't think there is a technical limitation, it is just a decision both companies make on the cost/benefit of having to come up with some protocol and integrate/require that with every 3rd party call center.

There were Tier 1's people talk to, no idea where they are and I was WFH taking escalations and asking same questions again.

"Please say your order number."

"SIX THREE FOUR NINE"

"Did you say "SIX brick barn fine", say yes or no"

"NO"

"Thank you ... please wait while we look up your account"

Just like building a good UX for a website takes skill, so does building a good UX for a call center. I’ve only developed contact flows with newer cloud based call center solutions. But I’ve integrated them with Salesforce so by the time you talk to a human, they can already see all of the relevant information and it automatically pulls up related data.

The larger the company, the more bureaucratic it is, and also the more siloed individual divisions are.