Being the luddite I am, I hated it.

We were using Zendesk before and it was fine. Before the company really started growing and it was just me and a couple of other guys managing all the tickets, we had a pretty good, albeit informal system for managing tickets. It was messy and lacked cohesion; we all had our own barometers for what counted as a pending vs open ticket, but once you learned everyone's peculiarities, it ran fine.

Then we started growing, throwing in another layer of management, meaning a new director and a name change for our department. Don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy, but the new director was obsessed with ensuring we had a strong ticket routing system that was entirely unified. I get it. From an outsider looking in, our existing "system" was unideal, but it worked.

He revamped our Zendesk to now have all these automated routing features; calls also now created a corresponding ticket so there was a searchable record and summary of what was done. The routing features didn't really apply to me, as I was the only one active for the night shift, but nevertheless it got in my way. New conversations would get assigned to me with a little notification that I always managed to miss. Then I'd be waiting on the Unassigned tickets page watching for something new to come in the queue as the student was waiting for my response, as I sat none the wiser. Eventually they disabled the phone-generated tickets because they filled the ticket queue with junk calls or students looking for another department. The "optimization" really only served to slow us down. I found my ways around it. Marking myself as "busy" kept the tickets flowing into the unassigned queue, preserving my workflow.

Then the switch to Kustomer happened.

The first week of rolling it out was one of my worst weeks at work. I was simultaneously fighting with the new system and trying to get through the mountain of tickets that was piling up. Most things were 1-to-1 with Zendesk; you snooze a ticket instead of marking it as pending, a ticket is "resolved" instead of "solved"; those were easy to understand. What threw me for a loop was the asinine UX. Visually, it's prettier than Zendesk and has an actually functional dark mode. However, EVERYTHING is hidden in a submenu or tooltip, instead of displaying all the customer information in a column on the side of the chat like Zendesk. You have to hover over their name for the tooltip of their email to appear, and you better not take too long to move your mouse, because the tooltip will automatically close if you're slower than Usain Bolt. This sounds like a nitpick, but when you're constantly copying and pasting emails, which is 90% of my job, that little bit of friction is a real delay. Not to mention, I only found it by accident, so for the first few days I had to open the customer info submenu. My pace and rhythm were all thrown off, things that should take 5 minutes took 15 because the other 10 were spent fighting with our new system. More were coming in than I was able to complete and by the time they arrived in my inbox, the student had already left. Instead of forwarding new chats that had just come in, it was sending me thermostat requests from 9:00 in the morning.

Not to mention the problem of calls was back! Again, every phone call we received came up as yet another ticket clogging the arteries. I found a fun bug where I couldn't hear what the person on the other end was saying, but it showed up fine in the call recording. In addition, half the time I wasn't even aware we were getting a call because the ringer that plays is so quiet and the only visual indicator is a tiny pair of buttons that appear in the bottom right of the page. I was able to convince the director to only have it create a ticket if they left a voicemail, but even today I missed a couple calls even when I was staring at the screen.

That first week was awful.

By Wednesday of the following week, we had all gotten a bit more accustomed to the new system and we had burned through the rest of the pile. Now, I was able to play around a bit more with it, without feeling the need to rush. Kustomer is pumped full of slop. For every action, there is an AI integration, automated summary, or sentiment analysis. Most of it is useless. Its hallucinations in the hand-off summaries require you to read through the chat history anyway.

I noticed it had a pair of buttons in the chat box: "Fix Spelling" and "Expand Text". Fix Spelling is self-explanatory, but I was curious about the other option. I had a hunch it would flesh out a message, but wanted to see how it worked. So I typed my usual response, then pressed the button. After a few seconds of waiting, I was greeted with a wall of text, mostly containing filler. It was riddled with "I understand you are having a problem with XYZ", "I understand how frustrating that can be", and "If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! I'm here to help". At first I rolled my eyes, but I continued to test it out, to give it a fair shake. The more I used it the more I came to like it. Instead of spending a minute typing out a curated message, I could type "I ordered your replacement and sent a return label" and it would fill in all the rest.

This honestly has been a bit of a game changer in terms of my irritability levels. Nothing drives me up the wall more than pretending to be nice to an asshole. Now, I type the bare minimum to keep the AI from hallucinating, let it fill in the pleasantries, proofread to make sure it hasn't repeated itself (it insists on needing to remind them we're here to help in every message), and press send.

The niceties have always been a bit of a pain point for me. In the past, I've gotten a couple emails from my boss saying that the CEO was reviewing recent tickets and he didn't like how I handled something, not on technical merit, but because I didn't bend over backward to blow smoke up the student's ass for being so smart to reach out to us. I just tell them what they need to do to get their tech working and tell them to have a great rest of their day.

It's made me reflect on how much of communication today is made up of "expanded" text. Every job listing I read contains a short novel about how each company is a family trying to build a better world. Every studio movie is long and drawn out, pumped full of lines to say exactly what the character is feeling at all times. Every email could have been handled in 2 sentences, but is padded out to 2 paragraphs. And it's always that sickening overly-enthusiastic faux-friendliness that makes you feel like you're trying to be sold something.

There's a reason why AI psychosis is a problem. The trainers of these bots make sure every question you ask is answered with points about how novel, insightful, or brilliant you are. It's so people feel good while using them.

I wonder how much of our culture has been shaped by marketing teams and sentiment analysis. These tools existed before AI was big, and now it's pervasive. If they found that beating people over the head with niceties resulted in a 10% higher satisfaction rating, and made it company policy, how long did it take to seep into the vernacular, and how long does it take to spread? Will we have to pad every conversation with reaffirmations that the other person is doing a good job?

Probably not.

I know I'm not the only one who is irritated by this sort of thing. In fact, a number of students have thanked me for just being direct and getting their problems solved efficiently. After dealing with the other departments and their "enthusiastic" messages, I understand why.