The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
I Hate Talking to a Computer
Wednesday - October 12, 2005 04:33 PM in
In the testing of self service customer care technology, the title of this note was probably at one time the most often read comment in any VocaLabs study. But roughly two years ago, that changed as we saw more praise of well designed systems and fewer complaints about bad ones.
The shift was so dramatic that it caught our attention and caused us to look more deeply. What we discovered was that people would much rather speak with a human than with a poorly designed speech recognition computer application, but actually prefer good automation over speaking with a human.
The evidence is incidental, but my sense is that Americans in particular are an impatient bunch. We'd rather get on the phone, enter our account information once, get our business transacted and then move on. That good automation is more efficient than a human is very true when we are speaking about routine repetitive tasks such as account transfers and bill paying. But a computer cannot have empathy or easily deal with exceptions that require thinking. This is why systems that try and force callers to stay with automation versus dialing "0" to reach a human are doomed to fail. People are smarter than machines and the caller knows when his needs can be met by a computer and when he/she needs to speak with a real person. Trying to force the caller one way or the other benefits no one.
Posted by Rick Rappe
The evidence is incidental, but my sense is that Americans in particular are an impatient bunch. We'd rather get on the phone, enter our account information once, get our business transacted and then move on. That good automation is more efficient than a human is very true when we are speaking about routine repetitive tasks such as account transfers and bill paying. But a computer cannot have empathy or easily deal with exceptions that require thinking. This is why systems that try and force callers to stay with automation versus dialing "0" to reach a human are doomed to fail. People are smarter than machines and the caller knows when his needs can be met by a computer and when he/she needs to speak with a real person. Trying to force the caller one way or the other benefits no one.
Posted by Rick Rappe
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