Design trust into customer contact
Enduring a thirty-minute flute solo while on hold is one of the annoyances in customer service that generative AI promises to end. Yet as firms rush to replace call centres with chatbots, new risks emerge. Air Canada, for example, found itself liable for the hallucinations of its customer-service chatbot after it invented a refund policy for a grieving passenger. And in a survey of over 5,700 customers by Gartner, an advisory firm, about two-thirds said that they would prefer that firms did not use AI for customer service. One of their worries is “deflection”, when firms create digital mazes that prevent users from reaching human support.
E.on’s response is to treat customer-facing AI as an addition to its staff. In its contact centre, the energy giant has built two voice agents, Claire and David, to handle routine queries and triage calls, leaving more complex matters to human staff. The agents follow a “decision tree,” a predetermined series of yes-or-no steps that channels each query to a defined outcome, and are additionally trained to stay within scope. If a conversation drifts beyond their remit, or the system appears unsure, the agents pass the call to a human adviser. “You need to have a clean path to say: this is outside the remit, and the human will help,” Ms Humphreys argues.
The broader point is instructive. An AI system that never admits uncertainty creates one kind of problem: customers learn to distrust both it and the firm deploying it. But if customer-facing AI acknowledges its limits, maintains a record of what it attempted and escalates to a human when appropriate, customers might appreciate it for what it is worth.