mechanical_head.jpgI am interested in looking at technology through the lens of humanizing or dehumanizing a process, action, goal or algorithm. Human computation is often the center of these thoughts. A few examples: a CAPTCHA is humanized authentication. Click-to-dial and live chat on e-commerce sites is a humanizing touch in the e-commerce conversion process. By contrast online reservation systems for restaurants and hotels dehumanize what was once a more personal process. You get the picture.

An IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system is the classic example of a dehumanizing technology. I often pound away at the zero key in hopes of human contact as soon as I hear an IVR system, particularly for tech support and sales. I quickly get frustrated as I have to guess my way through IVR trees and poorly-created natural language processing agents. Yuck.

Dehumanizing or humanizing a process will sometimes generate a backlash in the other direction. This is understandable, as people are adverse to change (often people are most adverse to dehumanizing processes where they preferred a more human touch, like in the case of IVRs).

So, I was elated to find GetHuman.com, a retaliation to corporate sales and service IVRs. People come and enter a business, a contact phone number, and a quick set of instructions to get straight to a human and avoid the IVR guessing game. Brilliant. There are already hundreds of listings.

The next time you need to call a customer service line, check out GetHuman.com first. I know I will.