THE RACE TO DIGITISE AND ITS DOWNSIDES
I get it. To remain competitive, companies are racing to digitalise and streamline business and IT processes and scale up quickly as demand for their products and services increased, especially after a pandemic struck.
From food delivery services to late charges over credit card bills, automated voice services and customer support have reduced the need for human interaction with customers. Many customers don’t mind either. Just look at how they use supermarket self-serve lines with ease.
In a manpower-lean economy short on staff, this is a sensible strategy. Airlines and hotels will incentivise customers to use their apps and automated service either by giving a slightly lower price for transactions conducted online or by charging extra fees for transactions conducted by a live agent.
The customer services of most telcos are completely online with most if not all transactions done through mobile apps.
Change is also being driven by the lure of lower costs. Investors prefer start-ups to use chatbots than live agents. Many commonly ask start-up founders whether they would automate business and IT functions to keep costs low.
As chatbots become the default touchstone with customers, however, the downsides have become more obvious.
Most of us have had a bad personal experience, going around in circles and needing to navigate complex sequences of buttons on our phone before we finally speak to a real customer service representative or having to scour through the Internet for a company’s customer service phone number to skip this wall of automation that doesn’t address our issue.
Granted, phone automated systems have gotten more adaptive. Most hotline systems can recognise our phone number and complete common customer service functions like those credit card annual fee waiver requests or send you a replacement card when you’ve lost yours.
We know we have it good – compared to when we had to key in our credit card numbers when calling a bank’s hotline, only to be asked to verify the whole sequence of numbers again by a customer representative – not for security reasons, but because systems can’t talk to each other.
However, the recent online scams and subsequent customer service disaster playing out in public raise the question: Have companies relied too much on automation for customer service?