Depending on the skill and experience of the programmers and system designers, you may get serviced by a soulless robot with an algorithm designed to see if you are committing fraud, a robot customer service AI which will ask you endless questions to see if you meet their byzantine requirements for a low risk customer, or possibly a well-designed robot system that provides immediate access to a human being in case of trouble.
Which of these three AI systems would you prefer to deal with in your business transactions?
If you choose AI system number 3, you can summon live help when a problem occurs. If you have the misfortune to deal with either of the other two choices, you are dealing with machine logic designed by an inexperienced programmer and when things go wrong you will put your business at risk because the company has decided to save money on salaries and you will not get human help without threats of litigation or public exposure via the internet.
There is a growing awareness of the need for human intervention in AI systems, but you may still encounter a system powered by AIs in the first two categories. If that happens, you should add your voice to the growing number of people writing about customer support problems with AI.
This is what the best AI designers are working toward:
Provide paths forward from failure. The trick isn’t to avoid failure, but to find it and make it just as user-centered as the rest of your product. No matter how hard you work to ensure a well-functioning system, AI is probabilistic by nature, and like all systems, will fail at some point. When this happens, the product needs to provide ways for the user to continue their task and to help the AI improve.
golem: [noun] an artificial human being in Hebrew folklore endowed with life. – Merriam-Webster
According to legend, a golem was animated by instructions applied to its forehead and could be deactivated when those instructions were removed. The golem had no ability to think or decide. It could only carry out orders. This creature is usually brought to life through magical rituals or procedures and is limited to obeying any order of its creator in a literal way.
Like a well-designed chatbot, this modern golem simulates life until you present it with information it cannot handle, and then you encounter the implacable unreasonableness of a system that only mimics life but does not demonstrate it.
When an AI system is presented with data it is programmed to expect, it gives the impression it is capable of making intelligent decisions. When the data you are presenting to the system falls outside the limits of what it is programmed for, the results cannot be predicted and the system response fails its purpose.
Putting such a golem in charge of your life, as in an automobile or financial transactions, is extreme folly, which is why all AI systems interfacing with human beings should provide an override to access human support.
The trap we can fall into is that these AI designs are incredibly efficient when presented with inputs limited to what they are designed for. This lulls the inexperienced designer to assume they have covered all possible cases and not provide a means to override the design in case of failure.
This means that a poorly designed AI system handling human problems acts like a wood chipper which does not distinguish between human hands and the wood it is designed to chip. Fortunately, woodchippers have a manual override. Some AI systems do not.
Whining about mistreatment by a corporation is annoying news, even when it is the honest truth. If you want to get your message out, it needs to be interesting, even shocking, and if possible, amusing!
I am sure that many of you are familiar with the tale of the emperor’s new clothes which was written in 1837. Some con men sold the emperor on the idea of a beautiful new suit and the emperor and his court went along with the fiction because no one wanted to be the person who would admit that there was no suit. Even the emperor went along with the fiction, perhaps because he was a trusting sort of person. No one else wanted to admit they could not see the emperor’s new suit because no one wanted to be thought of as a simpleton or unfit for their job.
In today’s world, artificial intelligence (AI) is the beautiful new suit for corporations seeking to save money by replacing human employees with robots. AI is powering phone systems, chatbots, assembly lines, translation systems, driving automobiles, and performing customer service duties. AI does a remarkable job on routine tasks and saves thousands of hours of valuable human resources when it is applied to those tasks.
When AI replaces human beings in driving vehicles, there are many roads that this system cannot handle and a human driver has to take over.
When AI is used for customer service duties, it can be a catastrophe waiting to occur. Why? Because AI does not handle random inputs well. Customer data entry will always contain some errors whether voice-based or keyboard entries. If the AI-driven system does not provide the user access to a human supervisor, as is the case at Square, the system can make judgments that are costly to customers and ruinous to small businesses. If you are using Square to process funds, this could be you.
Man vs artificial intelligence. Pop art retro vector illustration drawing
If you search the internet for “Problems with AI customer support”, you will find many examples of scenarios where AI is ineffective. In financial transactions, when there is a problem customers want interaction with a real human being. A system that denies you interaction with human beings, as is the case at Square, generates more ill will than you can imagine. I am sure that this is not because the people at Square are evil, it is more a case that they have all bought the story that AI will allow them to replace human customer support with robots.
A robot cannot care for a customer and if it is set to detect errors in data input and freeze funds for 90 days, that is what it will do without fail. At Square, they have attempted to handle data entry errors by using another AI system to interview the business owner, instead of using a customer service person who could clear the matter up in one call. The robot interview contains some serious programming errors and as a result, it attempts to solve them by repeating the interview until you figure out the answer the system is looking for. The thousands of online complaints about this robot interview show that no human being is looking at the results. As a result, Square is building a reputation for freezing customer funds for no good reason and this will eventually result in many people realizing that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to customer support.
If your company is considering using AI for customer support, look at the suggestions given by companies who are successfully using AI in the customer interface. Use this search to help you with your system design: Pros and cons with AI customer support
Example of a Square customer support questionnaire
This is what you get when you make a data entry error or the AI system thinks you are a high risk customer because you have a transaction larger than what the system considers normal. They put you through a robot interrogation to determine if you are a high risk customer.
A high risk transfer according to Square, is an international purchase or a card not present transaction. If you are an online business with overseas customers, you should avoid Square. If you have a transaction larger than usual, you should use another service to handle it as Square will freeze your money based on their models. The risk evaluation is based on Square’s machine learning models which seem to be flawed if the customer complaints are to be believed.
After Square froze my account for 90 days after a data entry error and prevented me from contacting a human customer service person, I decided to look for others who may have been victims of Square’s automated customer support system.
It turns out that there are thousands of small and large businesses which have been damaged by Square’s robot card processing systems and it has been happening for years.
When they freeze money paid to a company, this impacts the company and the customer who has paid for service, since not every company can deliver if they have not received payment. Square is an enormous company with a terrible customer service record and they have been able to cover up the complaints until recently.
Here is a partial list of complaints against Square
Square uses AI to handle its customer interface and does not provide help from human employees. There are thousands of complaints about Square freezing the accounts of existing customers with no feedback on what went wrong. They then use a computer-generated questionnaire to determine if you are a suitable customer and if the system does not like your answers, your account stays frozen for 90 days or more.
I went to the BBB site to see what the BBB had to say about Square and found that customer reviews are not used by the BBB in calculating a rating! If you have questions about Square, you need to go to the Internet and see what customers are saying.
If you have an online business, you are putting your reputation at risk by using Square for money transfers.
