Making Ripples

Artificial Intelligence can save a company a great deal of money while providing superior customer response if a few crucial points are observed. The customer must be informed that they are speaking to a bot and there must always be the option to transfer to a human agent when the customer chooses.

When a robot call center does not include the option for a customer to access a human agent, the customer experience can be disastrous, as I have recently come to realize. Human customer service people can be rude, inexperienced, and even stupid, but thoroughly destroying a customer’s trust in a company can easily be done by a robot because robotic behavior at the customer interface demonstrates that management has not observed customer interactions and does not understand how lack of a human touch when a customer needs help destroys the customers trust in the company.

In the quest to reduce costs, companies are employing more AI customer support systems than ever before. In phone trees, the robotic replies may be annoying, but most phone trees offer the option to contact a real person by pressing “0” when none of the choices give you the information you need in financial transactions, robotic replies are more than annoying.

When you encounter a terminal system like the ones that Square uses, the lack of a human backup system becomes costly and you may find yourself being scrutinized for fraud because you entered an incorrect CVV number and the Square system only reports that your transaction was denied with no reason. You check with your customer and he says the card is good so you attempt to enter the transaction again with another report that the transaction was denied with no reason given.

If you discover that the customer has given you the CVV number with digits reversed and enter the transaction again, the transaction goes through but the funds are frozen because the AI system has detected that your transaction is fraudulent.

The system then interrogates you to prove that you are a real business and another AI system asks questions appropriate for a brick-and-mortar company incorporated in the Nineties. When you do not provide the robot with a Federal ID that it likes, you get requests for bank statements and lists of customer details. After several rounds of interrogation by a robot, you finally manage to reach a real live person and explain what happened and ask them to contact the customer and see whether the transaction was approved.

And this is where you completely lose any respect you have for the company because the human says they cannot simply contact the customer as you request! They have to determine whether you are a real company and you have to answer their questions in order to access the money you received from the customer.

I went to another company’s virtual terminal system and entered the original data I had received from my customer and it rejected the transaction and flagged the CVV as incorrect. This is the way a capable robot system should work. If data is entered incorrectly, it should be flagged immediately so it can be corrected.

Refusing a transaction with no other feedback introduces an unnecessary delay and when this is coupled with an assumption of fraudulent activity rather than machine or customer error, the user is given the impression that the company is run by incompetents and can expect more service problems in the future. When the human backups repeat the same lack of customer concern, the wise user will find another company to handle their money flows.

Would you trust your business to be handled by a badly programmed customer service robot? A robot is only as good as its programs and if a programmer has no experience dealing with real customers, they can easily choose simplistic solutions when the customer’s responses do not satisfy what the robot is programmed to receive.

When the user instructions do not agree with what the robot is programmed to receive, the situation is irretrievable without competent human help. In the example given above, the instructions asked for a Federal ID or a Driver’s License, but the robot could not accept a driver’s license.

I am sure the competence level of robot customer service will improve once companies use humans with real customer experience to run quality control on their design. Until then, be careful about the companies you trust with your online financial transactions.