I dunno, something like a year ago, a guy I know started retweeting a client of his who was working on building a chatbot platform. Now, let’s be honest: in customer facing positions, a lot of interactions are going to be the same. People are way more similar than they are different, and so if one person has a problem, it’s probably true that lots of people have the same problem. So, as a customer service operator, you’re going to spend a lot of your day saying the same things over and over. It’s understandable, then, that companies want to use automated systems to handle customer requests. Why pay a human to tell customers the same thing over and over when you can pay a human to type it once and have a computer send the text a zillion times?
I get irritated by this, though. Given that I understand the motivation and the logic, why do I get cranky? Because although I am far from unique, I am still far from the 80% case and there’s never a clear path past all the B.S. to get to a real, problem-solving human being. (And even when I get to a human, empirical evidence suggests that the human in question is more likely to hit a hotkey response than to actually answer my question.)
Chatbots, artificial voice systems, call center scripts, they all bug me a LOT. Why? Because they all are trying to send the signal, “I am a human being who deserves compassion and respect and engagement,” all simultaneously with sending the signal, “I do not respect you, I do not actually care about you, I am not going to listen to you, and I am going to consume your time and energy.”
If you’re going to build a system that pretends to be human, you need to build it to feel and to empathize.
I have mixed feelings. Or not — I like script bots that are there to answer my typical questions. What’s my balance, when is my payment due, etc. The class of question “give me information”, not the question “WTF?” For WTF I want to talk to a human and I want to talk to them right now.
Because if I’m asking WTF, then it means (to me) that their product/solution failed me. I don’t want it to be the case that it failed so consistently that they spent the energy to write a script for it instead of fixing it so that 1M people don’t ask the question WTF…
And also http://assets.amuniversal.com/a833bfe06638013642f4005056a9545d