Slashdot Mirror
World's Rudest Robot Set To Simulate the Fury of Call Center Customers
An anonymous reader writes: A New Zealand-based company called Touchpoint Group has unveiled the world's angriest robot, which is designed to help train call center employees in the art of dealing with frustrated customers. The project, named Radiant, will involve one of Australia's biggest banks, which is providing researchers with recordings of real-life interactions with customers. Once finished Radiant will simulate hundreds of millions of angry customer interactions, helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls.
I definitely want to set that thing loose on Slashdot!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That will provide them with the angriest and most justified to be angry customers in the world.
I'm 40% anger!
Whilst mostly super-polite and friendly, grumpy New Zealanders with a chip on their shoulder may even beyond AI.
What makes the callers angriest? Call center employees who act like robots.
It sounds like somebody is justifying have their head in the sand by commissioning a fancy study on mineralogy.
People fucking hate call centers because they have to traverse some hellish phone tree, wait too long to talk to a representative who is generally underinformed and insufficiently empowered to actually do anything about the problem. In some cases the rep is even required by company policy to be actively unhelpful, attempt upsells, and the like. Plus, of course, nobody calls phone support when things are working properly, so you start out with a somewhat skewed sample of people who are having issues of one kind or another; not so much happy people just looking to transact.
What do they want? The magic fancy AI to tell them how to keep customers from being pissed off because of bad service without actually making service better? The one weird trick to making someone feel calm about being told that the problem cannot be fixed? A deeper understanding of why listening to hold music and inane recordings about how much we care about your call for half an hour is obnoxious?
"helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls"
helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls?
ARE THEY MORONS?!?
I thought it was obvious what generated heated calls. Companies could just listen to their customers and then they would know.
It better have a Les Grossman mode.
I seriously doubt that a machine can ever match the vehemence of a live person.
I mean to say that you'll have a machine following a script shouting at a live person also following a script. No one will really get creative.
The real challenge is to get these callers so upset that they hang up on you because that's the one thing that their script does not allow.
Bollocks, it'll be used to better understand how to pacify and palm off heated calls.
That's not hard to answer. Nobody wants to spend hours on the phone with somebody who:
Modern call centres appear to be designed specifically to infuriate people by politely wasting their time without solving any problems.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
twenty automated levels before you can speak to a person , hit the wrong option oops have to redial and start again. Then you to valdiate with a person before they will transfer you through to the appeals dept. Where you have to validate again. After 25 attempts the appeals department wont tell you how you appeal .
All for an item the that never arrived because the courrier company delievered it to the wrong house number , wrong street , wrong postcode - but as it was signed for according to ebay it was successfully delivered.
I'd do it for HALF the fucking money and with TWICE the rudeness, but do these boffins fucking even ask? IDIOTS.
Every call center I've ever encountered is designed to ask you if you power cycled your thing and then call back if that doesn't work. If you call back, the person you speak to will ask if you power cycled your thing. You really have to put up a fight to talk to someone who can actually help you, assuming that such a thing even exists at that call center, and most people give up long before they reach that point. Most of the time you can find an answer with a bit of googling anyway.It seems like to pointless waste of money to have a call center that everyone is just going to hate and which will give everyone who calls into it a negative impression of your company.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We get frustrated for the following reasons:
1) Call centers all too often make it difficult to talk to a person.
2) Long waits before our call is picked up.
3) Clueless staff.
4) Staff who insist in sticking to (potentially) long and tedious protocols, despite the fact that you tell them that you have just done so.
5) Staff who give you misleading, or even outright false, answers.
6) Staff who take advantage of the call to try and sell you as many services as possible, despite the fact that you tell them, over and over again, that you are not interested.
There, that was easy. Forget about your stupid robots; just fix those six items.
If this robot gains self awareness, we are all doomed.
Sooner or later these phone line workers are going to initiate a class action law suit for permanently damaging their emotional selves and making them insensitive to anger they have cause to their relatives outside. Such a law suit might not have any merit, but it is the fear of the law suit alone that reigns in the corporations, for now. Once they complete their purchase of all the three branches of the government, they would have nothing to fear.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I saw this coming in the mid 2000s. Companies realized it was more cost effective (read:cheaper) to have happy sounding customer service than a good product and knowledgeable staff. For people wondering why they don't just create an environment and products that don't make people angry in the first place it's because that costs money. Lots of it. So you dump the job of cleaning the mess left by management's lousy decisions onto some poor bastard in Bangladesh or some barely literate goof in Alabama. The sad thing is it works. People remember how the interaction felt more than it's content... For anyone who isn't an overly emotional idiot it's incredibly frustrating; and all the robots in the world don't help that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They could have just called my wife.
Bender, is that you?
The "Genius Bar" (is that still around?) never gave anyone answers. They just gave you tons of dripping empathy, but no help.
"Yes, I can understand completely how frustrated you must feel; however, Apple doesn't feel that your computer not working is a serious enough issue for us to warrant talking to anyone else in the company who cares or will listen. Thank you and have a wonderful day. Would you like to buy this other shiny piece of matching crap over here that doesn't work either?"
Gotta be Westpac. And they wouldn't need 'angry customer' training if they didn't treat their customers like dicks with open wallets.
Exactly what I was seeking for to answer telemarketers.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Since Comcast can't seem to service their customer service lines in a timely, intelligent or helpful manner, and nearly all of the callers end up angry, why not just use the excess calls for training? It's not like these callers will be any more frustrated by operators who know nothing about Comcast than they are by actual Comcast customer service agents.
Does it pass the Turing test?
"My device died two days after my warranty"
"My plan was canceled due to some error"
"Why am I being charged 3 times for this?"
"I lost or broke a tiny, fragile, important piece"
Even if many of the calls aren't related to products or services...
businesses are taking advantages of their customers, unilaterally.
Subconsciously, they will be angry.
I sure hope I'm getting residuals for this. I'm pretty sure my voice is on these recordings.
helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls.
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
say("Your service fails intermittently.");
say("Your service costs too much relative to similar services in other developed nations.");
say("You don't test your services thoroughly before and while providing them to us.");
say("You don't staff your call centers adequately.");
say("When presented with reasonable customer complaints, your call center employees aren't empowered to alter policy appropriately.");
say("Your corporate governance is ethically lacking.");
}
They want to be able to train CSR's on what not to do with more realistic settings.
You can listen to a tape of CSR being chewed out and talk about what not to do, or you could let the CSR talk with the robot, and then have a discussion with the CSR about where his individual script went off the rails and needs improvement.
You can let the CSR's learn how to deal with terrible customers in the actual environment they'll be doing it, without having them anger actual customers.
Why do we want to train customer service representatives to be angry and rude? Can't they learn how to do that on the job?
The funny thing is, with unemployment so high, and call centre work not being intrinsically difficult, companies can hire motivated, people-oriented workers with excellent listening and problem-solving skills and super-friendly personalities. So they do. But the job turns them into the call centre workers we talk to when we call.
That says a lot about the employer.
"... helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls."
No it doesn't. A robot pre-programmed for being angry can only help companies understand the best ways to endure / pacify angry callers.
Yay for treating the symptoms of bad customer service without even attempting to touch the cause.
... and hook it up with the Judge Judy sound board.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/sou...
They would have to understand why customers were angry to begin with, in order to build a decent simulator. To understand "what triggers heated calls all you have to do is care and listen your customers.
Threaten to forward the call to Comcast customer retention.
Move over Big Brother's Zingbot.
these call centers are fronting for operations that could care less about whether their customers are angry or happy. just about every big operation these days is a monopoly, and the customers are going nowhere. they don't need to solve customer problems or soothe the raging callers. the only real motivation is to talk the customer out of more money.
Comcast should buy this angriest robot to answer calls from customers. The angriest robot would still be much better than talking to a Comcast person.
Seriously, people get pissed when you:
1) don't get what they paid for
2) get lied to
3) have to put up with clueless cue-card-reading tech support
4) have to wait inordinately long periods of time to talk to someone
Want happier customers? Don't fuck them around. If mistakes are made, own up to it and make it right. Above all, train your staff well so they actually understand what they're supporting.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
What a waste of money. This robot would need to be programmed based on the company product line or support model to be effective.
Every support center has different reasons for upset customers. Rather it be dealing with complete rookies that just got thrown on the phones 2 days after being hired, to seasoned staff who don't want to hold your hand through something you could have easily googled yourself. I don't see this being any more helpful that having a training seminar where veteran staff call new hires with their version of an "angry customer." Not only does it more closely mimic a real interaction with the customer base of the company, but it also gives the jaded employees a good laugh.
Dealing with banks is what triggers heated calls. I should have thought any adult who has ever had to deal with an bank knows that. I have had more intelligent conversations with parrots than with banks.
OK, I live in the UK, but banks are banks.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Oblig comic reference:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2100/fc02064.htm
Edge is easily the rudest robot I've ever come across.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca...
The white box is a, rather sarcastic, AI inside an SGI O2 computer box.
One of the few things there is no shortage of, irate customers. Have them go work for BT in the UK or any cable company in the US for a week, and they'll learn everything there possibly is to know about dealing with slews of pissed off people.
He'd just take over management and no measurable difference could be noticed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
millions of angry customer interactions, helping companies better understand what triggers heated calls."
I'll help you cut to the case, it's shitty service and shitty call center reps with no power to do anything helpful. Until you fix that, you're gonna have pissed off customers.
You said my call could be recorded for quality control or training purposes, but you never gave me an opt-out. Selling it to an outside vendor to use this way is a clear copyright violation, and I'm going to call back to complain!
How's a robot going to simulate the douchebaggery of the bankers? it's not the CSR that's the problem, but the bastards and policies.
Artificial belligerence?
If you make it cloud-based software, you could sell it as a service...
What could go wrong?
So I should sign up with Comcast?
I want this thing to answer all the calls from telemarketers and collection agents, and to call them back and harass them too!
....can be avoided by providing great product and service instead of screwing over your customers at any opportunity possible. And call center employees deserve the abuse, they should have stayed in school and got a real job or should have applied to a less craptastic company. What comes around goes around.
Having previously worked at a helpdesk I can only say one thing..
they are creating an abomination!