The Expert Podcast

So the tight labor market is showing up in more ways than one. It's not always just lack of availability of merchandise or even higher prices. Where it also shows up is in customer service. Here's an article in the Wall Street Journal about how a lot of companies are going to robots or voice bots or chat bots, automation to handle incoming inquiries. So what's your solution if you're a consumer? How do you get around this? How do you actually get valid information and direct contact from a company?

Well, you're going to find that this type of maybe passing the buck is not just in the private sector. This article talks about restaurants, the pizza places having voice bots take orders over the phone. You may find chat bots on websites that talk to you using AI — it's not an actual person typing the messages. It may also show up in just lack of any direct contact at all. Maybe you're contacting a government agency like the Department of Motor Vehicles or some permitting office and you just can't get through on the phone.

Sometimes you can get through, but the person you talk to is not really knowledgeable, just a low-level clerk or receptionist or administrator who is just there to basically field phone calls. And if you're an existing customer, maybe they can pass you along to your agent or your rep, but for new customers, they're basically sending you to the website or maybe sending you an email. If you're a consumer and have some inquiry about a professional type service or product, you may find it's difficult to get good answers.

Now, of course you can access YouTube like this video and do your own research and due diligence. You may be able to go to websites and find the information. But sometimes people in their mind think, I just want to talk to somebody. I want to talk to somebody one-on-one. The problem is companies now have to allocate the resources of their employees to something that has a rate of return. If you have all your employees just on the phone giving out information to customers, nobody's going to be available to actually provide a product or service to paying customers.

It's just the nature of the beast. It's the nature of the marketplace now. That's going to impact you as a prospective customer or maybe even somebody that just wants information. In the old days, you could call up and companies had excess staff that could talk to you and give you free advice and answer questions and you could talk to a qualified person in that company, right? And you might expect that that should be the case. If you have a question, company has customer service, you want to be able to just talk to somebody one-on-one, undivided attention, have them give you straight answers without having to jump through hoops.

Nowadays, you either get a chat bot, a voice bot, you talk to a low-level receptionist. Maybe you do talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about, but they're a salesperson, right? They're just trying to sell you on something with a sales pitch, and that's not unbiased information.

So because of this, there's a lot of business enterprises popping up that offer consultation for a fee. There's companies like JustAnswer you see on the screen, TelAdvice, there's telemedicine websites, there is BetterHelp which does therapy online. A lot of companies now, especially in the digital age where you can talk one-on-one by video, you don't have to go to a place, are using that technology to offer access to certified, credentialed, experienced, legitimate experts for a fee.

Now, as a consumer, you might say, look, I don't want to pay just to talk to somebody. And that I would agree. You shouldn't have to pay. But in this day and age, with the limitations of staff and not enough professional experts to go around, the people that are in a company that are there need to work on files for paying customers. Somebody orders a product or service, you want to make sure that you have somebody that can work on that file for your customer.

So it puts the company in a bad spot. Either you take your qualified staff and have them answer all the incoming calls and give out information and have nobody left over or not enough left over to work on cases or files or orders for your customers, or you just shut down the phone, shut down live contact and have everybody work on paying customer-only orders. Or maybe you hire salespeople whose only real purpose on the phone calls is to try to get you to buy something, not give you information — to try to get you to buy something.

Put you as a consumer in a bad spot. You now have some options. You have to pay for them, but you can decide: is it better to pay a small amount or not, or do your own research? That's the good thing about the internet age and the YouTube age. Almost everything you'd ever want to find out is on YouTube, right? You can learn how to build a house on YouTube. You can learn how to program a computer on YouTube. Anything you'll need to know is on YouTube.

However, you have to take the initiative to find it and search through and navigate and almost do forensics on all the information. It's an overwhelming amount of information. It's like a needle in a haystack. So if you don't mind putting some time into it to extract the information, that's a good option.

If you do want a one-on-one, undivided attention of an expert, you have these other options. Like I said, BetterHelp is one. JustAnswer.com is another website. TelAdvice is a website. So you have these options for accessing experts. But again, it's a trade-off. Do you want to pay the money or put in your time?

There's no right or wrong answer. You can do either one. It's just this option is now available. And I think consumers are now a little bit more accepting of the fact that, well, it might be worth paying to talk to somebody. You know, for years, attorneys sometimes had a free initial consultation. Well, that's a thing of the past. You're lucky even to get an attorney that is willing to give you a consultation if you pay them.

Most attorneys have too many cases to spend an hour just talking to somebody about a potential case, even if you pay them. Law firms right now are very difficult to get through and get answers back from, just like every other industry: general contractors, builders, professionals, government agencies. It's tough to get people to call you back.

So think about those options and what other alternatives you might have. Put a message in the comments. Let us know what you think. Is this the wave of the future? Is it insulting to have to pay to talk to somebody? Or is it something that at least is the best of both worlds, where you can talk to an expert that's not trying to slam dunk you into a product with a sales pitch, or the alternative is talking to a low-level administrative person that maybe doesn't have the direct knowledge of your question.