Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/12/new-ai-converts-customers-abusive-phone-rants-into-calming-tones.html
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I bet I could have done that for them a lot cheaper. Mind you, all the customers would sound like Darth Vader.
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People shouldn’t be abusive of customer service reps.
Banks and corporations should also not be abusive of their customers. Who hasn’t spent 2+ hours on hold trying to get through to their bank/airline/ISP? And once you get through, many customer service reps are trained to deflect, obfuscate and otherwise make the process so frustrating that the customer gives up.
Unfortunately this technology kinda starts from a place of “the customer is always wrong.”
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It also doesn’t address the bigger issue of companies that abuse their customers and design their IVRs to waste time and make resolving issues painful enough that people who aren’t really pissed off are more likely to just give up.
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IME people, in general, are just way too damned abusive.
Sweet dreams…
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Basically everyone in this country is in an abusive relationship with corporations, and a lot of them get it from the government too.
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“I’ve had it with your &@#$! raising monthly bills! And #$%! increasing blocking of channels! #!@! internet slow-downs and random @#$! outages!! All that’s left of the cable TV line-up is home shopping and fox"news”!!! Your @#$!!! service is total crap!!!" → [A.I.] → “Why yes, I would like to sign up for your business internet service”
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I get pretty heated and ranty on some customer service calls, but that’s because they record them; and I am careful to not only calmly point that out to the CSR, I also make it absolutely explicit that I am upset at the company and not them personally. I also don’t mark them down in any way when I get one of those “how was your call” emails. Those poor bastards are caught between a rock (angry customers) and a hard place (performance metrics from a shitty employer).
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One of the things I hate most in the whole world are those surveys you get after a “customer service” call where you rate the quality of the call, rather than the utterly shitty quality of the service which forced you to make it.
However I take revenge by switching companies often.
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They’re not “stuck” between a rock and a hard place. They’re put there intentionally. They’re there to waste your time, absorb your ire, and (worst case scenario) upsell you on crap you don’t want. Any help they can give you is almost incidental, at this point.
Something can be put someplace intentionally and still be stuck!
I don’t dispute that CSRs are put in place intentionally to basically not satisfy customers. But I think it’s also true that the CSRs are not as cynical as their employers, and don’t know they’re being put in place just to sop up anger. Hence, stuck.
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