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 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.
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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.