A majority (64%) of 5,728 people surveyed by Gartner in December 2023 said they would prefer companies not to use AI in their customer service. Additionally, 53%...
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those options. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons…
Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
Because they are not trying to design an efficient system. They are trying to design a system that is as cheep as possible, puts off as many customers as possible from interacting with it while not being so bad as to fall foul of regulations. A well designed website that efficiently took you to the right place to make your complaint and get money from them/make them do something would fail requirement 2.
The thing is, I rarely want money from them, I just want to provide them information to make my experience as a customer better. For example:
my card kept getting declined, so I wanted to help their investigation by flagging fraud
close a credit card - feel free to show me retention offers and whatnot, I’m more likely to accept online than over the phone
report an internet outrage and see whether there’s a known outage - I actually can make a report, but they’ve never followed up, so calling is the only way to make sure they actually got it; I just want to know that they know about it
I can see a reason for the credit card thing sucking since they want to make a bad offer and keep you as a customer, but at least for me, all of the above would make me more likely to stay a customer instead of switching to a competitor (and I’ve seriously considered switching each of the above).
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those options. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons…
Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
Yup. I’m pretty good at avoiding talking to people, yet I’ve needed to call in a few times recently for stuff I should’ve been able to handle online:
If they want to save money on customer support, make the customer support less necessary to get routine tasks done…
Because they are not trying to design an efficient system. They are trying to design a system that is as cheep as possible, puts off as many customers as possible from interacting with it while not being so bad as to fall foul of regulations. A well designed website that efficiently took you to the right place to make your complaint and get money from them/make them do something would fail requirement 2.
The thing is, I rarely want money from them, I just want to provide them information to make my experience as a customer better. For example:
I can see a reason for the credit card thing sucking since they want to make a bad offer and keep you as a customer, but at least for me, all of the above would make me more likely to stay a customer instead of switching to a competitor (and I’ve seriously considered switching each of the above).