Robo-flop: How to bypass awful AI customer service
The robots are coming for your jobs – and this time they want to get creative too. Well, at least according to the news which has been full of stories lately about artificial intelligence.
All of this can be a bit scary, though many of the stories feature frankly clunky art generators to excitable engineers who think the machines have reached consciousness (they haven’t).
Most of the news has focused on CHATGPT, a ‘thinking’ bot that can apparently write convincing poetry for Valentine’s Day, do the kids’ homework and impersonate the writing style of famous pop stars, though Nick Cave begged to differ.
Should we be worried?
That all depends on how you feel about human interaction.
For years now, excitable executives have been telling me about how the chatbot is the future of customer service. I think we all know how that’s worked out.
Clunky, largely useless and frustrating to use, the chatbot is reviled by people everywhere. So while technological developments like CHATGPT are potentially a leap forward, they will only operate within the parameters set by the business. And if they don’t want to talk to you about difficult things like complaints, nothing will change.
The most common question I get asked is ‘how do I get a business to listen to me?’ There are a few tactics you can try.
Think strategically
If there’s a phone number, then the time you spend on hold is likely to be much, much longer due to the volume of people trying to get help and the reduced number of staff available.
Go for off-peak hours, with mid-afternoon being one of the better times to try calling in standard opening hours, and during the evening prime time TV slots for 24-hour helplines.
Confuse a chatbot
For all the industry excitement surrounding chatbots, they’re pretty low tech. Most are programmed to follow certain questions and patterns – and that isn’t going to change.
Many people give up when faced with this option but keep questioning the robot. Some bots default to actual customer service teams if you persist or respond randomly. Type in ‘blancmange’ if you’re feeling frustrated, till it gives up.
Social media
We really shouldn’t be forced to use social media, but it is a good way to get a business to notice you as the teams monitoring the tweets and posts are usually actual people. If you sign up to Twitter, it’s the most effective way to get attention (but don’t engage with the
angry, shouty people).
Find a forum
Remember them? Back in the early days of the internet, forums were the places to be for getting information on businesses that were reluctant to communicate. There are still loads out there. Type a question into a search drive if you’re struggling to contact a firm and see if any pop up. The Moneysavingexpert forum has hundreds of thousands of users.
Sound like you’re cancelling
If you have any kind of agreement with a business and they aren’t responding, see if you can start the process of cancelling it. That often prompts a call to talk you out of it.
Complain about service
All businesses should respond to written complaints, so make them and take the matter further. You can notify regulators if a business makes it hard to contact them or won’t give you a human response.
Increasingly, pre-empting problems is the best way to avoid them. So before you buy or sign up to anything, go online and check out the ‘contact us’ section of the firm’s website. If you can’t call or email, consider going to a competitor – after all, if they don’t want to talk to you, why give them your cash?