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.
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
Which is why you pay with a credit card and issue a chargeback at the first sign of bullshit.
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?
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.");
}
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.
Thank you for mentioning how polite we are here in the Shaky Isles.
As my sig shows we are a well-balanced people.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
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.
I actually met an angry New Zealander once. Mind you he wasn't angry at first. I was giving him a lift to work in the mornings and afternoons. It took about 8 days before he grabbed me on the arm, shook it and yelled "THIS IS WHAT GOD'S PRESENCE IS! IT IS REAL. IT ISN"T IMAGINATION!". He had a lot of patience that guy but he eventually broke.
The only other one I met of note was my ex-brother in law's wife who had a large head and was mostly teeth. Her lips didn't cover her gum line and you couldn't help but stare. She was never angry but had a really thick accent i.e. 'Fush and Chups' for fish and chips etc.
New Zealanders are OK. Love their music.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
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.
sounds like you don't value your left arm very much. I'D bet you are the kind of guy that calls support to recover "mysteriously deleted files"...
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
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.
...only to be blacklisted by EBay for such an action and excluded from using them again.
"But you're able to charge back" is a nice slogan, but know that doing so usually means that company you charged back from won't do business with you again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We're not angry at the CCAs. You're just the poor grunt that gets to take the bullet, we're actually angry at the idiots that make you do it. Sadly, we can't get through to them. So sadly, you get to get burned.
Believe me if we tell you that if we could skin one of your mangers alive, we would gladly do so. Their only reason for survival is that killing them isn't worth one nanosecond of jail time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Would you really want to do business with the company again at that point, anyway?
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!
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
So just like Australians then...
(Disclaimer: NZ is one of my favourite places in the world. Australia... not so much)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
As a buyer, eBay accounts are throwaway.
For things like Steam, where one chargeback could nuke / limit your whole account and the operators ignore all of your rights because "LOL VIDEOGAMES", create individual accounts for individual titles you're unsure about. Alternatively, don't buy from stores with shitty fucking policies.
....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.
Or Verizon...they quote 115$ for services and then charge 180$ claiming that their quote was wrong "due to a computer glitch". Such customer abuse is much better than any emotionally unstable robot to generate irate calls. Needless to say, Verizon needed three days to understand their own billing and after that still could not make sense of it. Luckily for them, their competition is even worse.
Having previously worked at a helpdesk I can only say one thing..
they are creating an abomination!