Your call is very important, which is why you are talking to a bot
Technology is about serving human beings. Interestingly, some plan otherwise. Illustration with customers’ contempt for pushing costly, useless, dystopian bot assistants.
Initially published on 14th Sept 2020 | Republished on 12th Feb 2022 and 12th Jul 2023
We republish a Post which is now more true and relevant than ever since its initial publication: the invasion of (stupid) bot grows like mushrooms after the rain. And this seems far more important than genuine interaction with customers.
Our early analysis anticipated how perseverating in the wrong would become Business as Usual with many businesses, which in Evolutionary Economics is called Path Dependency.
Today, another interesting post caught my attention on LinkedIn regarding a key business topic, Customer Excellence (CEx) and the invasive spread of bots we experience more and more often when calling for support or looking for help on websites.
The LinkedIn post highlights a company selling clothes and shoes. ZAPPOS, that “prides themselves on the duration of customer support calls, where staff are rewarded for spending MORE time on the phone with their customers rather than less.”.
This is to better understand customers and build more genuine and long-term relations. No bots.
Some common sense and professional approach back to Customer Excellence?
Because, of course, chatting for a long time just for the sake of chatting for a long time would be as useless as expediting customers within minutes if not seconds: proper Customer Service spends the time needed with each customer, in a genuine and fair approach, and should aim to address concerns from the first time.
For years, it is well known that LEGO’s chief executive spends every week up to a couple of hours listening to customers’ calls to feel their real, deep needs. LEGO perfectly know what they are doing and why. Their customer service is one of the best in the world, and LEGO even organises the possibility for other businesses to visit it and understand what it is about.
A Proper Customer Service spends the time needed with each customer, in a genuine and fair approach, and should aim to address concerns from the first time.
Many businesses, however, feel the need to implement a 180-degree different approach, and The Marketoonist summarises brilliantly this growing contempt of customers: “Your call is very important, which is why you’re talking to a bot”.
Where are suddenly gone Learning from Experience and from the past (Lessons learned), Best Practices implementation and all the buzz wording around Customer Focused/Centric approach? Our feeling suggests this one was framed as “Innovation”, obviously.
One constant never changes, though: the customer’s wallet-focused approach… But it appears now even more important to push such inefficiency and annoy customers (or take the risk of losing them), rather than better train already working people, fix buggy infrastructures and UX/UI/HCI, or simply rationalise and make sense of these too often hectic, inconsistent menu choices (hit 1 to …; hit 2 to …).
There is a sort of sick fascination emerging all around for a kind of technological nihilism invading all areas of our lives, society and businesses.
In what can be seen as a singular flood of auto-proclaimed best-knowing thinking, many businesses and people put huge money into pushing this one-only-narrow-vision of Customer Excellence/Service, which in practice is entirely useless, built on clunky systems and algorithms, and costs real people’s jobs, while these could perfectly talk with you.
There is a sort of sick fascination emerging all around for a kind of technological nihilism invading all areas of our lives, society and businesses. Technologies, which can support doing the good but also the bad, are not presented fairly to society as the Guardian did recently by deceiving readers about an article allegedly written by ML/AI but in truth, fully edited by Guardian’s editors. Why do they need to do this? Why do they have to hard-sell ML/AI in such a deceitful way just a few days after the freedom of the press was remembered as such a key element in healthy democracies?
At Reason, we can’t see why a business like EE can afford all their customer service to be based in the UK with real people, while some other mobile providers often feel the need to have their customer service centre based 1) in a country with low salaries (essentially, managers of these offshore companies make money, not people answering the calls), and 2) push now at all cost customers to talk to stupid machines/bots, daring even to lure customers with human being avatars on their websites, as if it was the same.
Please do not tell me ‘it’s because EE is more expensive’ that they can pay people in the UK – facts show that it is not true. It is a business choice, translated in a carefully planned move towards bot invasion, rather than an approach as preferred by ZAPPOS, EE or LEGO business models.
Unfortunately, many of today’s decisions appear, singularly and in truth, desperately poor, one world vision-oriented, i.e. dystopian, not caring for the living and therefore decadent and nihilistic.
Don’t tell us ‘It’s a matter of time that all works fine’ because it would be surrendering your reason and critical thinking, and forget the fundamental question about why do we need to replace people with chatbots in such a sensitive and strategic area like Customer Service / Excellence, where hundreds of new contracts or churn can happen at the snap of fingers?
Do not tell us, please, “This is the future” either because the future is not written, it will be what we decide today, so we always have the choice about how we plan innovation and use technologies’ evolution and their direction, how we design business strategies and business plans, how we look at customers – people all around us, and therefore what our approach to protecting and nurturing the living is.
It’s about Sustainability and Social Corporate Responsibility (SCR) too, in fine.
We can have a positive, efficient and happy use of technology for business performance and growth while serving people’s well-being.
Let’s decide right and do the good: Makes Sense.
And there is nothing wrong in doing things right first time, as we say at Reason.
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