IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

208 Chapter 9
Zeroing Out
When an IVR/speech system does not meet a customer’s expectations, the
customer becomes frustrated and hang ups or ‘‘zeroes out’’ to a live agent.
According to the Forrester research cited previously, customer satisfaction
levels with IVR systems fall in the 10 percent range, compared with a satisfaction
rate of approximately 80 percent for face-to-face interactions. This
confronts service providers with a financial dilemma. Tal Cohen, a datamodeling
expert, asks service providers to consider this recognizable scenario.
Suppose a company receives fifty thousand customer calls each day,
and its automated system is not meeting their needs. The result is that
20 percent of these callers ‘‘zero out’’ to live agents who cost the company
ten dollars per call handled. The service-providing company spends one
hundred thousand dollars each day to have live agents complete customer
transactions. Companies such as NS International look at those
numbers and think, ‘‘get rid of the human agents.’’ But automated systems
cannot—and never will—take their place. 68
The transition to a light and sustainable economy means moving from
an economy of transactions—selling and buying things—to an economy
in which the quality of services, not the acquisition of goods, becomes our
measure of well-being. In previous chapters, we saw examples of what it
means in practice to take one aspect of daily life and make it better using
information technology as one of the tools. The problem with NS International,
and a thousand near-blind companies like it, is that they believe
their own propaganda about the capacity of technology to do things for us
as well as people can.
Even the most tireless boosters of technology have become aware that
describing a wish, attached to a memorable name, as something that already
exists can rebound against them. Ambient intelligence is a bewitching
vision of the future—but it may be further away than we think. James
Woudhuysen, a former manager of long-term market research for Philips,
thinks many of the more fanciful scenarios described in industry forecasts
are suspect: ‘‘The consumer of digital media (and appliances) meets ‘convergence’
only in the same way that, in a blizzard, the snow seems to ‘converge’
upon you. We all may hope that everything will one day be
controlled by a single, submissive black box below the stairs—but in new
technology, systems are more prone to being incompatible than to match-