Is your AI chat bot making it harder for customers - even if it's easier for you?

If your AI chat bot costs your customers time and frustration, is it really worth the time and resources you think it’s saving your organization?

This is both a true story and a cautionary tale.

It’s easy to get excited about the potential time and resource savings an AI chat bot might bring to your organization. After all, time is money. But if you don’t focus on the experience your customers have and only focus on internal benefits, you may find that you have unhappy and frustrated customers who shop elsewhere.

Yesterday I spent about an hour and a half trying to get a refund on a book that I ordered but didn’t arrive. The packing slip in the box noted four items, but there were only three. When I went online to figure out how to contact customer service, I was directed first to an AI chat bot. The bot asked me to explain my issue. “I ordered four copies of Big Karma and Little Kosmo Welcome New Cat Zenni but there were only three in the box. The packing slip that came in the box listed four, but there were only three.”

The bot said it was “thinking”, and then replied, “Can you tell me more about what you mean by 'four were listed on the packing slip but only three were in the box?'”

So, I explained it again. As simply as I could. Because even though the chat bot had a friendly, human-like interface, I am cognizant that I’m not speaking with a person, but a machine. “The packing slip that came in the box said that there were four copies of the book in the box, but when I counted the books, there weren’t four. There were three. One was missing.”

After more time “thinking”, the chat bot asked for the same explanation again. So, I copied and pasted. It then informed me that it wasn't yet trained to understand this very basic kind of customer service situation and asked if I wanted to be connected to a person.

Perhaps, from an internal perspective, this could have been a time saver for human customers service reps. However, for me, the customer, it was a waste of 30 minutes of my time.

It then took another hour on the phone with a live customer service rep and a supervisor to simply get a refund for the missing book. The total? A whopping $4.20 USD.

Luckily, just before I was connected to a human being the client I had scheduled for the next hour texted and asked if they could push their call until later in the afternoon as they were at a healthcare appointment that was running late. If that weren’t the case, I would have hung up customer service and had to start the whole process again after I cared for my client. Because I’m in the business of helping people improve the world, and my clients come first. They are what I want to spend my time on. What gives me joy. What helps me fulfill my purpose in the world. And how I earn my living.

As a business, you need to remember what I call The Business Equation: No customers = No business.

It’s super simple. Your customers’ time is valuable. They want to spend it on what they want to spend it on. And I can guarantee that it’s not on being put through the extra step of dealing with an AI chat bot gatekeeper. This is the contemporary equivalent of the old on-hold message of “our call is important to you...” Because if your AI chat bot can’t speed up your customer’s experience and get them the answer they need more quickly than talking to a customer service person, it’s not saving you.

Truthfully, it’s potentially costing you their business.