Book excerpt Hajo Schumacher: “No network! Money, time, mood, love – how we recapture our real life. “
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Hajo Schumacher (Photo: PR)
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Plug out, plug in
Just a few clicks, in three simple steps, immediately – one of the biggest digital frauds is the promise of an easier life.
It was in the middle of the first wave of corona quarantine when my favorite broadcaster RBB decided not to record our talk “The Observer” in the studio, but to switch on the conversation partners from home. With digital transmission technology and programs like Skype or Zoom that shouldn’t be a problem, you could read that everywhere. For a good hour I tried to get a stable line together with the unit manager and two technicians. Sometimes the picture was okay, then the sound. But never both. “Security” muttered the unit manager. The technology makes no difference between hackers and long-term, innocent freelancers. Everyone is suspicious.
The transmitter sent me an adapter by taxi so that another microphone could be plugged into my computer. Vain. A specialist internet technician let me load an app onto my smartphone that had to be fed with very long passwords. Vain. Finally, another smartphone was sent home to me in a taxi. At the same time, the station’s chief technology officer appeared to monitor the live broadcast. I finally had the picture of my colleagues on my computer, I got the sound via my private smartphone, and the sender’s device finally sent my picture. The technical director had dozed off after a 14-hour workday. When he said goodbye, he said that after six months of tinkering, he had finally managed to direct the WLAN to all corners of his private house.
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my digital life, but: I remember countless hours that I spent upside down under our office cupboard, where the cables to the router come together. Anyone who has ever tried to merge several music libraries into one, who has wanted to migrate purchased e-books or update the router, knows what it is like to spend a weekend between cables and under cupboards and watch YouTube tutorials while the router is running .
In my memory, I hang out for hours on chilled hotlines, in specialty stores buying adapters, cursing in front of address books that have entered every name four times, desperate in front of clouds that save some images over and over and others don’t even save, helpless on vacation, in the fight against mobile phone providers who want to roam with all their tricks.
Anyone who has ever switched from iOS to Android or back knows that the great freedom and simplicity only apply to those who are chained to an operating system for life. And if God wants to punish, he lets him look for the cheapest price for a hotel online. Professional tip: call directly and reserve.
There is a system in chaos. Corporations want revenue through confusion. I shouldn’t equip the old but fully functional smartphone with the freshest operating system, but buy a new one. I am not supposed to speak to the hotline because the staff is too expensive. I’m supposed to get along with the instruction manual, which has been translated automatically into twenty languages. The old trick of riveting household appliances instead of screwing them to prevent repairs is being used again and again on innumerable levels in the digital world.
The logic of digitization does not want to offer the best possible customer service, but calculates coldly how little effort, personnel and thus costs a company can get by. Artificial intelligence knows how long you can torture customers. Spoiler: crazy long.
Let’s take a question about the allegedly cheap family mobile phone tariff that could not be clarified in the FAQ, via YouTube, or via help forums. So the service hotline, a term that already bears two lies: Because neither “service” nor “hotline” can be spoken of.
In the first three minutes there is unbridled joy at having got through at all and now being able to wait in a queue, the length of which is unfortunately unknown. The other day my favorite company, a telecommunications company, warned that it could take forty-five minutes to get connected to a professional. Bad trick, I thought, they want to get rid of me, that’ll be faster. After forty minutes I wasn’t so sure anymore.
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Hajo Schumacher: “No network! Money, time, mood, love – how we recapture our real life. ”- 271 pages 20 euros, Eichborn Verlag
https://www.luebbe.de/eichborn/buecher/digitale-welt/kein-netz/id_7769028
Holding loop is like a heavyweight boxing match over twelve rounds. A quarter of an hour ago it was said: “Only three customers left”. My will is to be broken. Annoying music grills the brain. The repeated reference to the website with the answered questions from other customers wears down perseverance. The goal is not to help me, but to finish me off.
But not with me. When I turn the phone up, I can do my housework on the side: clearing the dishwasher, hanging up laundry, sorting tax documents. We have wanted to renovate the kitchen for a long time, the walls of which are greasy due to the lack of an extractor hood. Maybe I should put all the pending hotline calls and the renovation in one day. Mask off the first queue, delete the second, and clean up the third. Then the day is over. The kitchen is ready. And only two customers left before me. Professional tip: keep the phone connected to the power. Nothing is more terrible than getting hold of it when the battery runs out. And: breathe. Let emotions go. Like clouds. Everything will be fine.
It’s a game of patience. Do I hold out? Or does it come, this moment when I end the connection with a bestial curse and, in the eyes of all my relatives, utter a grim oath that this company, this network provider, this pay-TV giant or this financial institution never, never, never, but never to give a cent again? Three days later I do it again.
The data know about my range of patience as well as my willingness to forgive. Artificial intelligence helps. From the countless calls to hotlines, from angry e-mails and actually canceled cancellations, corporations can precisely calculate how much trouble customers are going to face. Data is not used to make our lives easier, but, on the contrary, to find out which customer personality puts up with which tricks and unreasonable demands. Digitization therefore ensures that customer services are constantly deteriorating.
The cheapest thing for companies is when as few people as possible who are looking for help hold out until a personal conversation with a consultant. These skilled workers are expensive, firstly they have to carefully bring angry contemporaries back onto the carpet with psychological sensitivity and secondly they have to solve a tricky technical problem. Every person who is pushed out of the queue means lower costs for the call center.
The software now refines the art of systematic annoyance right up to the “breakpoint”, the point where the customer cancels the contract. Smart algorithms, that’s how it reports Wall Street Journal, find the red lines down to the second: How much waiting time, what music beat, which announcements ensure that customers switch to an automated answer program, torment their way through endless question and answer lists or seek first aid on YouTube. Modern software can already tell from the voice of a caller whether his anger is still simmering in the light or dark red area. In the US, customers were surveyed in 2019 about who has the lousiest phone service. Result: Ironically, those who earn the best, especially Facebook.
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