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!”
What makes the callers angriest? Call center employees who act like robots.
It would be more fun to turn it loose on Comcast. Their call centers would go supernova.
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?
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 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.
I thought it was obvious what generated heated calls. Companies could just listen to their customers and then they would know.
Listen to our customers? What a radical idea - you're fired!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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?"
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.
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.");
}
... and hook it up with the Judge Judy sound board.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/sou...
Worse. The latest *hotness* is all about community support and open forums. Have a problem with a product or service?? Go online or talk to your co-workers and neighbors. Got a billing question? E-mail us and maybe it won't get lost in our junk/spam folder.
Phone line? Yeah, business will soon be cutting that cord real quick. It's nothing but a cost center.
Life is not for the lazy.
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
Almost. It was doing fine until it told the service rep to kiss its shiny metal ass.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
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!