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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.
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?
It would be amusing to hook the angry robot up to one of those online automatic assistants.
You want Skynet? Because that's how you get Skynet!
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