NemeskiMost consumers hate the idea of AI-generated customer service
scarabicThe other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.
I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I miss my pill and after years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.
So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?
Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.
I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those options. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons…
Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
Yup. I’m pretty good at avoiding talking to people, yet I’ve needed to call in a few times recently for stuff I should’ve been able to handle online:
- report fraud
- cancel credit card
- report internet outage
- buy insurance
If they want to save money on customer support, make the customer support less necessary to get routine tasks done…
Because they are not trying to design an efficient system. They are trying to design a system that is as cheep as possible, put off as many customers as possible from interacting with it while not being so bad as to fall foul of regulations. A well designed website that efficiently took you to the right place to make your complaint and get money from them/make them do something would fail requirement 2.
The thing is, I rarely want money from them, I just want to provide them information to make my experience as a customer better. For example:
- my card kept getting declined, so I wanted to help their investigation by flagging fraud
- close a credit card - feel free to show me retention offers and whatnot, I’m more likely to accept online than over the phone
- report an internet outrage and see whether there’s a known outage - I actually can make a report, but they’ve never followed up, so calling is the only way to make sure they actually got it; I just want to know that they know about it
I can see a reason for the credit card thing sucking since they want to make a bad offer and keep you as a customer, but at least for me, all of the above would make me more likely to stay a customer instead of switching to a competitor (and I’ve seriously considered switching each of the above).
My belief is that this is an unhinged take.