My take is that Borderlands 1 was boring, Borderlands 2 had decent game play but was held up by excellent writing and characterization and every Borderlands game since has been trying to recapture the magic of the second game but just feels hollow. They aren’t terrible, but they aren’t amazing either.
I design contact centers for a living. I have done so for almost a quarter century now, until very recently I only had worked for Fortune 200 companies (moved to the public sector which is a nice change of pace).
A quick bit of jargon definition: We refer to various means of communication as “channels”. A contact center is multi-channel if you can reach it by more than one channel (i.e. phone, SMS, chat, email, etc.). It is considered omni-channel if you can switch between these channels (supposedly seamlessly, but see below).
This article gets several points dead on and misses several more. Here is my professional take, make of it what you will.
Call centers are expensive. Licensing and software costs are very high. There are few vendors who offer scalable omni-channel offerings and the licensing costs end up being exorbitant. And you need omni-channel contact centers because:
Phones are the least efficient way to service customers. An agent can only be on the phone with a single customer at a time, but they can staff around 6 chat or email sessions simultaneously. For a customer, this devoted attention is a boon, but for a company it’s very costly because Agents, even poorly paid ones, are the most expensive part of your contact center if you are paying benefits, and if you aren’t you will not get good agents.
Agent turnover is very high. Agents are poorly paid and their job sucks. They are driven by metrics that are poorly thought out, intended to drive efficiency but ultimately create poor behavior; the article gets this very correct. A lot of poor service you get is caused by agents trying to hit impossible metrics. Don’t blame the agent, the managers are the problem here.
The technology has gotten better - and worse. VOIP infrastructure radically reshaped contact center design and the migration to CCaaS reshaped it again, with some good sides and a lot of bad sides. Telephone technology is an aging tech with a substantial demographic issue. I am consistently the youngest member of my teams and I have been doing this for almost 25 years. Expertise is aging out of the field and taking a lot of knowledge with them. Further, the number of disciplines you need for expertise has dramatically increased. It is no longer enough to just know CCNA-level networking, wiring, PSTN tech, linux and windows servers administration, codecs, basic related legal knowledge (wiretapping laws, Ray Baume’s Act, TEHO laws in India, etc.), design and infrastructure theory (like Poisson distribution), but now you also need to know Kubernetes, docker, ESXi (or equivalent), AWS, Azure, etc. It’s a lot and nobody can know it all, the complexity of modern design and no education program to get there means there’s just a lack of comprehensive understanding of the technology at a pretty fundamental level for most people trying to design and maintain this stuff. The result? A system designed around 99.999% uptime is now failing to meet that SLA, hell some vendors won’t even promise it anymore but most will just lie and claim that they do. So there are reliability issues.
AI. This one hits pretty closet to home for me because of a personal experience so a quick anecdote: at one job, I had a spirited discussion with the head of our IVR technology group over how effective AI would be at reducing call volume into the center. He initially had great success, reducing call volume by ~30% in the 6 months. He received accolades and commendations, a big bonus, he was riding high and honestly he deserved to be. The problem, and what prompted my attempt to intervene, was his promise to continue that trend, predicting that his AI tech could reduce human-required calls by 60% within the next 2 years.
To me, this was madness. His initial success was because he moved the payment system into the IVR instead of having agents do it. This is a no-brainer. Computers are quite capable of taking payments or listing basic account information, but more complex tasks involve a much greater up-front cost in technology development and we didn’t have that budget, it was a massive over promise and I told everyone who I could to not take his estimation seriously. Unfortunately, he had a PhD and I am a college dropout, so they listened to him and cut 50% of their agent count via attrition.
The results were predictably disastrous and the company hasn’t yet been able to fix it years later (thankfully, I left that place).
Anyway, that’s my view for whatever it’s worth. I am glad to be in the public sector now, which has its own issues, but at least everyone is focused on actually providing service because the service is the value.
Golly, I can’t understand why younger generations aren’t having more kids.
You may be confusing democratic socialism and social democracy. They are similar in their short-term goals, but democratic socialist have fundamental economic reform as their long-term goal, while social democrats just want to curtail the social problems of capitalism.
We need like a hundred more Mamdanis and AOCs.
This is why 62% of Democrats say they need new leaders. The neoliberals (and their billionaire backers) are afraid of losing power while the ground-level party is already shifting. I’m not convinced that splitting off the progressives will be productive in our current electoral system. By the time the Democrats die off the fascists will have abolished elections. Instead I envision an outcome similar to the political realignment the GOP just finished, where a growing progressive caucus gains enough traction in primaries to force concessions from the party leadership until the neoliberals are all but pushed out entirely.
Yep, he is a Democratic Socialist which is actual socialism, unlike Social Democrats who are still capitalists.
So we revealed the limits of our precision strike capabilities to our adversaries all over the world and didn’t even achieve our mission objective? Nice move, Trump. Maybe you could reveal more of our sub locations while you’re at it.
Hopefully this heralds the realignment of the Democrats back towards a pro-worker party. Neoliberalism has failed this country for 35 years.
Quomo is a comically bad candidate and Mamdani is a very good one so I don’t think we can expect results like this in every primary. If progressives can keep finding highly qualified people I think we have a chance.
PEPFAR was targeted by Musk because he is a racist asshole who didn’t want money going to help black Africans.
No carrier has cell service at my house but maybe they will add a sat phone.
My ACL says my TV can’t talk to the internet.
Putin would be more than happy for the US to drop a nuke in Iran since it gives him free reign to use nuclear artillery in Ukraine.
This already sort of happened in Texas where the state claimed that cities like Houston had “failed school systems” then appointed right wing toadies to run the district. In several schools they eliminated libraries, replacing them with Discipline Centers. They also make life hell for teachers or just fire them outright and replace them with unqualified ideologues.
The Republicans will definitely use that same process to deprive state and local governments of their autonomy.
Alt National Park Service is not credible, they are basically a left-targeting qanon. The organizers of the protest say they had 5 million people in attendance.
It was a hilarious piece pointing out the right problem (aging out of touch and feckless leadership not representing the people) while claiming that progressives are the real enemy they need to be standing against. Just peak NYT op-ed material. So we can see what the billionaires are worried about.
What’s shitty is that this drug could damn near wipe out HIV if it were accessible to everyone who needed it.
But I guess we can’t have that.
He probably believes poppers are the real cause of AIDS since that was a conspiracy theory for awhile.
It was the first protest I’ve ever attended.
It won’t be the last.
Well knot that shocked.