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I recently had a HORRIBLE expereince with Avis, the car rental company. I rented a car and when I got my receipt it was listed as 'no bill' so I called and was told there was no bill. I then got another reciept with a different value on the bill. I called back and was told it was a no bill. Then my credit card was charged a month later. So I called and said WTH, I was told twice this was a no-bill. They said there was no record of my calling. I told them to annotate that I called this time and asked to speak to a manager. I was told no... So I hung up and called back. I asked if there was an annotation and they said no, this looked like the first time I called. I asked to speak to a manager.... they hung up.

Long story short... I never spoke to a manager and they never annotated that I called 9 times and I had ZERO recourse. Their customer service is getting really sneaky.

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The only recourse in situations like this is to do some serious public shaming and never using them again.

This is shameful behaviour.

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It's sad that it comes to this. I do try to be nice to the call centers. I feel like, since 2020, the customer service died as everything went to e-mails and chat bots.

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This feels so familiar 😅

There are already implementations of bots out there that are able to detect the "tone" of the interaction ("What the f- is this s-? Nothing works, you c-") and redirect the call to a human.

In this sense, will we live in a future where regular communication is handled by machines and difficult communication is passed to humans?

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I think that is very likely outcomes in the short to medium term. Now this means the work of call center staff will get harder. But it might also get better paid. You move from being a call center grunt to an "Emotion Management Expert". You could even get diplomas in it.

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