Customer Service in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Futurist and best-selling author John Naisbitt turned 92 last week. A long life may be a fitting victory, or a crushing embarrassment, for a famous futurist. Mr. Naisbitt wrote a truly seminal book, Megatrends in 1982. One of the clever maxims and predictions in that book, that the more “high tech” humans have in their lives, the more “high touch” humans want and need. This simple premise led him to write a spate of other books with the title High Tech, High Touch and other variations on that theme.
I want to believe that Mr. Naisbitt was correct. It makes a certain intuitive sense. It is a comforting thought that people will look to friendship, companionship, and interesting discussions as our world becomes more capable of having machines, apps and artificial intelligence simplify or actually do so many of our tasks, so much of our thinking. But much as I might desire it, so far I am just not seeing it.
I have a younger neighbor I took a question to in his area of expertise. He was embroiled in an online game when I arrived. “Be right with you,” he told me. “I’m just finishing a game with my best friend.” Since I had never seen nor heard him mention any friend, I asked “So who’s your friend?”
“Just a guy I’ve known forever.”
“Great,” I said, given that this colleague is not known for interpersonal communication. “How long is forever?”
Oh, I don’t know. 10 years, I guess. Maybe more.”
Naively, I said, “So when is the last time you saw him?”
At which point he looked at me quizzically and responded, “Oh, I’ve never seen him.”
I stumbled on. “If you’ve never seen him, how do you know he is real?”
“Oh, he’s real. We have great conversations.”
“Oh, so you do talk on the phone every now and again?”
“No. We text. We’re on Instagram. You know.”
Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread. I inquired, “How do you know this guy is really a guy and not just some bot that takes all that stuff you write on social media, learns all the things that turn you on, and feeds that back to you?”
He looked at me with real, not artificial, disdain and said, “That’s crazy.”
Here’s a guy who believes aliens walk among us, that in our lifetime we will travel to distant stars, and who plays games where we shoot unlimited bullets at enemies we always defeat – and he thinks it is crazy that his best friend might be a bot that mimics his behavior and his emotions.
To me, this underscores the point that there are a whole lot of people out there who do not yearn for human touch or even the sound of a human voice. Indeed, he finds such to be both perplexing and annoying. The more people communicate with those who give them the most “likes” via Facebook and all the other apps or sites who wish they were Facebook, and disregard their co-workers and neighbors as too much work to get to know, the less they will ever understand the joys of a less mechanistic personal universe.
Philip Dick’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (remade loosely as the movie Bladerunner) begins to make more and more sense.
This relates directly to what is quaintly called “customer service” these days. There are scores of examples every reader can come up with (that’s what the comments section is for!) but I am going to use just one. Too many “interactions” between customer and vendor these days occur at the nexus of technology and offshoring. Each by themselves might be workable, at least for some, but together they create a very special kind of nightmare.
I am not quite old enough to remember when, to make a phone call, you had to turn the crank and tell the operator the number you wanted to call. However, I do remember when companies and businesses hired receptionists and secretaries and telephone answerers that were not designed to sound like a helpful human, but actually were helpful humans.
You would call a company that you had, say, bought a sweater from, but they sent the wrong color. You would call and someone in age between a nice young man or grandmotherly woman (or both or neither, or both at the same time depending upon their pronoun preference; I don’t want to engage in stereotypes or be considered “un-woke” – whatever the hell that means to a sentient, quasi-educated human being.)
In those unenlightened times, your conversation would go something like this:
“Hello, this is the Ugly Sweater Company. How can I help you?”
“Hi. My name is Billy Bob Joe Helkat and I ordered a sweater, but you sent the wrong color.”
“Oh, dear. I’m so sorry to hear that. Let’s get that taken care of right away. In case we get disconnected, my name is Chris and I will make certain to respond immediately if you have to call back.”
“Uh, OK…Chris. You sound very nice.”
Ring, ring, ring.
Hello, this is Betty in Customer Service. Chris tells me you’d like to return a sweater?”
Haltingly… “Yes, ma’am. B-by the way, is that a ‘bama accent I hear in your voice?”
“No, but that’s a good guess. I’m from Columbus, Georgia, just across the Chattahoochee from Alabama.”
“Yeah, I wondered. I’m originally from Montgomery myself.”
“Why, that’s almost just down the road from here. Let’s get you a return authorization number for you to ship your sweater back to us, and we’ll get the right one out to you as soon as we can.”
Whiz. Bang. Pow. This company can do no wrong going forward. There has been actual human contact, real, not automated, empathy, and a solution to the problem. If it takes two weeks to get the new sweater in the mail, Billy Bob wouldn’t worry. After all, Betty said she’d take care of and Chris would help if Betty was out that day.
Notice that Betty did not dawdle around, talking about Old Times on the Chatahooch; she was friendly to a fault, but also moved the conversation along to the issue at hand. Notice also the entire exchange for Billy Bob to give his information took, what? Maybe 60 seconds? 90 if we count the time he spent chatting with Chris? Efficiency, empathy and results in under two minutes.
I contrast this kind of service with the new! Improved! Efficient! way more and more companies are doing it today. You find the toll-free number to call and the first thing you hear is…
“Welcome to Big Company that overpaid its CEO to decide to automate all calls. Have you visited our website before calling? It is at wedontgiveadamn.com.”
Pause for 5 seconds. Super-expensive AI device says to its Self, “Damn, he’s still there.”
So we move to the next level of Hell.
“All agents are assisting other customers. Your call will be answered in the order received.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire! The agents working from home are multi-tasking by streaming Gilligan’s Island, listening to Rasta-men singing early ‘70s reggae, and changing diapers. (Do you really want them to touch the phone?) The ones forced to come in are seeing who can fly paper airplanes the longest distance and improving their “call time” by hanging up on every third waiting-for-45-minutes customer.
Source: phocuswire.com
“All agents are still busy. Your call is terribly important to us, so please remain on the line.”
The hell you say. If my call were important, you’d hire enough people to answer the phones instead of doing studies on how long a customer will hold on the line before giving up.
After a few minutes of this the New Roulette begins. “All agents are still busy. To serve you better, please listen carefully to the following options as our menu options have changed.”
Yes, they changed --in 1999. But they are too lazy to change the recording. So you continue to listen…
“If you know the name of your party, dial 9 and their extension now.”
You gotta be kidding me. Your company has a million agents, I have never spoken to you before and if I have spoken to you before, no one was willing to give me any extension except the one that rings right back here. Why is this the first option?
“Dial 1 for shipping questions, dial 2 for receiving questions, dial 3 for shipping and receiving questions, dial 4 for the mailroom, dial 5 for the newest agent hired this morning, dial 6 for someone who claims to speak English but doesn’t, dial 7 for the supervisor who also doesn’t speak English, dial 8 to hear these options again and dial 0 for the address of our corporate headquarters.”
All you want to do is return a sweater. As your mind races wildly as to which of these limited options might meet your needs (you really are a slow learner, aren’t you?) the recording continues…
“If you do not make a selection in 3 seconds, you will be disconnected so we can help the next customer in line. Have a nice day.”
NOooo!!! You scream. Hit something, anything, before they cut you off. You are now vested in this guaranteed-to-fail quest. Hit whatever number comes up first!
“Harro? Harro”” You dere, you not dere?”
Oh, God. The infamous offshore call center. Some of which are very good. I speak a couple of other languages, having been raised for part of my life overseas. I like hearing an accent. I often inquire where someone is located and have spoken to call centers in Colombia, The Philippines, Czechoslovakia and all over the Caribbean, to name just a few that have resulted in fun conversations.
As long as the person on the other end of the line speaks either intelligibly or slowly, that’s fine. But some of these offshore call centers hire anyone who is willing to work for peanuts and then terrify their employees with being fired if they exceed “x” seconds of call time. Chop, chop! It’s on to the next caller.
“Yes, yes, I’m here!” you plead, sitting in a puddle of sweat, your self-confidence and digestive self-control both shattered. “I want to do a return, please.”
“You come back heah, yes?”
“No, no, I’m not returning. I want to return a sweater I bought.”
“You wann buy sweatah?”
“No, no. I want to RETURN a sweater.”
“OK, you wann sweatah, I put you troo dat depahtmat.”
After 5 minutes, still no resolution. How can these companies believe this is saving them money? On the front end, they may save a couple bucks. But the back end is where they lose a customer forever. Then they can’t figure out why their new orders are down, so they hire some survey firm to create a hokey “survey at the end of your call.” Does any of this make sense? But you toss aside such thoughts as entirely too logical because you know, already, what “department” you have been transferred to:
“Welcome to Big Company that overpaid Its CEO to decide to automate all calls. Have you visited our website before calling? It is at wedontgiveadamn.com.”
Just because we can do something does not mean we should.
These companies pride themselves on being more efficient. After all, three-quarters of the time we spend on the call is listening to or responding to an automated recording. The remaining one-quarter can be offshored to some company called Yougetwhatyoupayforinc. "A penny saved is a penny more to my bonus” may make them believe they are being smart business people. They are not.
They may be more efficient (though I doubt as effective as Betty and Chris.) But the reason they are more efficient is because they have offloaded their workload and put it right on you and me. Our efficiency and our effectiveness have both plummeted as we try to work our way through to return a damn sweater. Many of us will give up and keep the sweater. Kind of makes you wonder if that isn’t part of the company’s strategy from the git-go, doesn’t it?
I predict that businesses that take Mr. Naisbitt’s words to heart will be the most successful businesses of tomorrow. The “efficiency” route has been tried long enough. People are fed up with the ways these companies’ efficiency makes our day ineffective. A lot of potential customers out there are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. Wake up, corporate America:
Efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.
© Joseph L Shaefer 2021
Well said!