I’m Sick of Robots in Customer Support
I appreciate technology. It can make our lives easier sometimes.
But damn I hate its so call evolution in Customer Support. Namely chatbots and voiced interactive voice response (IVR).
In the last couple of years, the growth of AI assistance blew up and everyone and their mother decided to implement it in their company’s Customer Support system.
This would be a good move if the technology wasn’t so limited in some regards.
Feelings Matter to Communicate
As much as AI is capable of self-learning, it doesn’t know empathy.
As someone with 3 years of customer support experience, what I mean by this is that frustration can be a communication blocker.
If I seek to have a certain problem fixed and the person on the other side can’t help me, because I’m unable to express myself clearly, both sides start to get confused — that’s a given.
The agent who’s there to help me must be able to read my emotional state in order to understand the issue I’m presenting.
Chatbots are way beyond flawed in this matter: I haven’t stated my issue yet and they start bombarding the conversation with comprehensive and vague options that I don’t know to choose from.
How come can the bot give me a solution if I haven’t stated the problem yet?
And if I don’t find what I want, I try to type it and the bots just continue to show me the same useless options.
This just makes me even more anxious and madder.
A human would most surely have the emotional intelligence that chatbots lack and would be able to read between the lines of my frustration.
The Language Barrier Is Insurmountable
With voiced IVR the problem is more recurrent.
I’m known to be a fast speaker and sometimes my friends complain that I don’t open my mouth enough to speak — ok…
Regardless, when I have to talk to a robot I try to pronounce every word at the right pace in order for it to understand.
More often than not the response from the bot is: we could not understand what you said, please repeat.
Ok. Let’s try again then.
“We could not understand what you said, please repeat.”
What the actual f*ck?! Is this bot dumb or am I the one who doesn’t know how to speak?
I choose the first option, of course. Not because I refuse to believe that I don’t know how to properly pronounce words in my own language, but because I’ve had a lot of people agreeing with me in this regard — especially my friends who joke about how I speak.
Customer experience for me has been falling further as humans are being pushed away from it. I know that it’s a hard job to deal with emotionally unstable conversations that often happen in this line of work, nonetheless, humans are needed in customer support.
Companies look to bots as a way to save money since they can simply respond to hundreds and thousands of people at the same time. But is this actually viable if customer supports — or the lack of it — starts to be the main reason people choose not to use certain products or services?
For me the answer is clear.
If I find myself screaming with my phone or smashing my keyboard before I can see a glimpse of any solution for my initial problems, I won’t ever look to use anything of that brand again.
