Good lord.....

Unfortunately, it seems most "internet chat" CSR's are chatbox nowadays x.x

@Namilia: I cannot believe I spelled "chatbot" as "chatbox"...

My Turing tests are always qualitative questions with multiple choice answers. Like:

Which shape is most round? A Triangle, an Oval or a rectangle?

or

Which of these is fluffy: A frog, a bird or a bunny?

WOW.

Good post. Made me laugh!

I refuse to sign up for efax anyway. They'll give my bf TIFF files but they won't give me tiffs. They want to charge me but they don't charge him.

Screw them. Anyone know good alternatives with STANDARD file formats that are free that work with Macs? (most formats that aren't reinventing the wheel will)

Good story, a similar situation happened to my this week with eFax. In fact, after being frustrated with their lack of customer service, I did try to upgrade simply to get a problem solved and it took them 19 hours to do it. These guys are a joke.

Mark

This is why I get bad customer service over emails to large companies. They need to scale, so they've resorted to cut and paste answers.

Of course, my favorite was from maytag: "Please _call_ customer service at..."

What I do is have my bot take on their bot... My bot almost always beats their's down to a crash or loop.

What exactly is a bot? I've read about them everywhere and never understood. Are they computer programs or something?

Just an artificial intelligence program, robot, that uses a fixed or additive knowledge base to field questions through some type of electronic communication - generally chatting.

eFax uses a fixed bot that has limited but owner defined responses. That is the best way to go, generally, for if a bot is set up to learn or add to its knowledge people can teach it wrong info. Like that eFax is a man; or whatever. "Fixed" bots will eventually loop its replies or miss understand the topic. "Additive" bots can generally reply to anything but the answers are often nonsense.

It is a bit basic but give http://www.alicebot.org/ a try. There are bots for AIM, ICQ, ones that work as apps, etc.

btw my bot knows, what is what, about the Simposons:

zoli: Who is your favorite Simpsosns character?
mebbot: I love the Simpsons, especially Bart and Homer. I like Homer best.

@mantari: I get that too. To someone with a hearing impairment (that would be me) that's totally unacceptable. Complaints get the same "please call ..." to which I tell them that they lost me as a customer. I've even included proof that I bought from a competitor.

Mean? No. I just don't support callous disregard for those with disabilities.

I'd better start testing those online CSRs. I think I've encountered a few "cold sounding" crs that I simply dismissed as overly scripted people in some other country.

Notes to self: Test chat csr's. Also, when chatting, be sure to USE THE COMMA INSTEAD OF THE ENTER KEY.

I was a satisfied efax customer with a local number until they raised my rate to $20 - too rich for my tastes. Efax went to hell when jfax bought them. Last year efax notified me that they were canceling my free fax number, so I took it off my letterhead. About a week later they reconsidered. But I didn't.

In January I signed up with Smartfax. They never activated my service and ignored 2 emails asking them to fix it and ignored 2 more asking them to either fix or cancel my service. About a week later I received a telephone message asking if I was happy with my service and mumbling a toll-free number that I simply could not make out.

Thanks to Comsumerist, I knew to initiate a chargeback. About a week later I received an email asking if I really wanted to cancel. I said Yes and, to their credit, Smartfax refunded my money. Because their service appeared to be OK, I might be a satisfied customer if Smartfax had merely activated my service.

Alright... I can see how a bot would be a CSR (albeit a crappy, scripted one). I am curious about why we saw a bot in chat for people of my disability- it never talked, but it was obvious it was a bot. What was it doing? Spying on us?

If this is a bot, I can understand the confusion--okay, now, don't throw tomatos at me...I was a chat CSR for Pitney Bowes (a company that rents and leases postal machines and other office equipment). I promise we're real people! Where I was, what we could say and how we could say it was pretty limited. Yes, we could type, but since we had so many of the same questions over and over, we did have "canned responses". Double click "for more information, please visit our website at www.pb.com/ratechange" or whatever would appear in the chat window.
As far as my company was concerned, we had very specific things we could answer in chat. For other things, people would have to call--hey, you can't get someone in the sales department to help you with tech support, right?
And with up to 8 chats going at once, I know I certainly would not have had time to mess around with some bonehead who can't type everything they need to say on one line asking me who my favorite Simpsons character was. I would have sent them a general information link and gone on to other, greener chat windows!

And...t's Ralph Wiggum. ;)

@MentalDisconnect: Probably. Asshole spammers are lurking everywhere looking for email addresses.

http://www.winfax.com/

I think I torrented my copy, but it's easy to use and works great.

Don't use eFax. I've been using a service called MaxEmail for a year or so, and although it is a paid service, it's cheaper than efax and more flexible.

hah that was funny. gotta give it to them though; who uses the word avail this way: "...you will need a credit card to avail this special offer"

HAHAHA boy that was funny; people should put this stuff on REAL news networks like BBC World

Well, it didn't advertise a human chat session.

I've been using Comodo's TrustFax service (http://www.trustfax.com) for a few years, and it's been painless and reliable. Never actually tried it on a Mac, but since it's all browser-based and doesn't rely on any IE-specific brokenness, I'd be surprised if it didn't work.