With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), will we still have human interaction when we need customer service? Will we be talking to a real person or just a computer generated bot.
Right now, the way you get customer service in many situations, is to stay on your phone for many minutes waiting to talk to a “real person.” When you do find someone “live,” you may or may not get a resolution to your problem. Some companies now use “chat” as a way to get a faster response. You type in your question, and someone with a “name” answers you. You ask your question. They type their so-called “name” and write “let me check that.” You wait. Then they may or may not come up with an answer. Are these “real people”? Or is this Artificial Intelligence? In many cases, these are “bots” that are set up to answer superficial questions. If your issue is at all complicated, sometimes you can ask for a real person, even in a chat. Other times, the bot will tell you that they cannot answer your question.
Today I needed to resolve a problem with Amazon over a delivery that I never received. I chose the”chat now” option under “I need more help.” I could have chosen “talk to a real person” but I wasn’t sure how long that would take. I typed in my question, and almost immediately I received an answer that asked for a few more pieces of information. At that point, the “chat person” said they needed to ask a supervisor. (That’s always good by the way.) Shortly, a person named “Belle” answered on the chat and asked me for more information. I entered a short description about my shipment that had not been delivered as promised. After a few back and forth comments, my “person” whom I will call a “bot,” said that I would receive a refund within a few days into my original payment account. (And I did, by the way!)
In the process of getting customer service, I acted as if I was talking to a real person and so I thanked this person after our conversation concluded. But I went one more step — I said “I appreciate your help but are you Artificial Intelligence or are you a real person?” The answer came swiftly. “I am a human.”
I responded, “yay” and signed off. Was it really a real person or a bot that just said that? All I know is that my problem was solved swiftly and efficiently, so why should I care?
The question here is — do we care if we talk to a real human being or a computer bot? If we get an answer, does it matter if it is from a human or a computer? For simple questions that have fairly straightforward answers, AI can speed up the transaction. If the issue is more complex, the interaction may require human input, at least at this point. Some like to hear their answers from a human voice, but it won’t take long before the voice “sounds” human but actually is computer generated? What will we lose if customer service employees are no longer humans? The more important societal question would be, “What happens to those jobs? Where do those people go to get employment if they are no longer needed?”
There is no question that more and more customer interaction is going to be computer generated and automated. Whether we like it or not, we may not have much of a choice. I have noticed that some companies advertise that their customer service staff are all “U.S. based.” That’s a shot at companies that outsource assistance to the Philippines or India. As incredibly good as many of those foreign-based employees may be, the preference for a Southern or clearly “American” accent may work as a marketing tool. The jobs that are lost will be outside the U.S., so we may not notice the loss as much.
Other companies advertise their in-person customer service as one of their selling points. So far that seems to be working for some. Zappos, the online shoe store, famously advertises their well trained, on the spot human customer assistants. If you have ever encountered them, it’s actually a pleasure to interact. They tell jokes. They sure seem human. However, if it costs more to have a real person adjudicate your complaint, will it be worth it? That question is yet to be answered, because we don’t know how quickly this new AI trend will take hold. A company would have to be persuaded that it was worth the money to keep real people employed, and we simply do not know what the economics are going to look like.
For now, I would prefer talking to a real person, no matter where they are located. Not all questions have simple answers, and I actually enjoy the person-to-person interactions. But I’m not fooled. I know it may not last. I feel extremely ambivalent about the loss of the human touch.
In the next post, I will discuss the use of AI and “CHATGPT, ” the language processing tool to try to explain what we can expect in the very near future.