Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Okay, so I think that you know when you say that “AI is damaging the customer experience”, that’s not a fact, that’s an opinion. Okay, AI exists. It’s penetrating into the customer service space, that’s a fact.  Now, someone’s an experience to say, and it’s damaging,  I’m not disputing your opinion, I get it. I mean, there are a lot of situations where  I just want to talk to a human being and instead, I’m stuck with a chatbot. And the chatbot is not well enough developed yet, so I’m getting frustrated. I totally get it.

Let’s look at what AI is going to be able to produce because right now, we have to accept these are the earliest, earliest years of AI showing up in the world of providing service. I’ll give you one example. This is my iPhone, I use Siri, which means I voice dictate. But I also like if I’m sending a text to somebody, I’ll hit record, I’ll go…and actually in real-time, it’s not a record, but in real-time it’ll change my voice into words. I’ve learned not just to press send. Right, I’m going to go back and see like, “how did that voice dictation system get what I thought I said or what did it think it heard?”. And I was sending a message to a member of our team today, his name is Jeff, he lives in Abu  Dhabi, and for some reason, it took his name “JEFF”  and it kept spelling it like “G E O F”, and I don’t want to send my team member,  JEFF, a message that says GEOF. So, what do I do? I go back in manually, and I change it, and  I changed it once, and the very next time that I  dictated I saw the spelling of “Jeff” and “Geof” going….  and it was toggling back and forth until I chose one, and I chose JEFF.

The third time I used his name, it wasn’t asking me the question anymore. That is a very simple example of AI improving the service that I’m getting from the voice dictation capability of a buh-buh-buh-buh-buh. Okay, so far so good? Now, on the other hand, because we’re in these early days,  and let’s face it, people of my age, we’re what’s called the digital immigrants. I did not grow up in a digital world. I grew up in an analogue world where you say something like, “grab a pencil”. I mean, kids today, they don’t even know what a pencil is, much less have one lying around to be able to grab.

So, we’re in the early days, and as digital immigrants, we’re not natively as comfortable with a lot of online stuff. Young kids, they grew up with a phone in their hands.  They can navigate an app like you and I can’t even imagine. They’re just seeing….they got a whole thing figured out, I’d go, “how’d you do that”, they go, “duh,  it was obvious”, not to me because I’m an immigrant.  

For immigrants, who are a little bit older, and by the way have money,  migrating into a more digitally enabled world of digital service like every bank wants all their customers to go use their digital services because it’s cheaper and potentially less error-prone than when you get human interface going on in the banking, but you get a lot of people who ‘have a  lot of money’ who aren’t comfortable doing that.  So, what’s going on here they say, “oh that whole robotics thing, that AI thing, that online thing  is giving me bad service!” What’s the human role in making this migration more effective? 

The human being is the one who should provide hands-on education to get you into the new world. The human being should be the one who’s right there to help solve the problem for someone, not send you off to an FAQ page, or a chatbot page or some support page that’s so automated you don’t actually get the answer to your question. The human being should be the service provider  who’s helping that person make the migration happen while the technology is getting better  and better, and better, and better, and better, and give the human to human encouragement that makes the customer feel like, “Hey, you taught  me something”, “hey, I feel better about this now”,  “Hey, next time I can do it myself!”

And once the customer has made that migration, the chances are, they’re going to teach the five of their friends.  So, that’s five more people who won’t come back to the company and say, “I got a problem”. So then, what should companies be investing in right now?  Not just AI automation. Because if you provide  AI automation without the human touch, you’re going to get the assessment that you had right now, which is, “it’s damaging the customer experience”.

What’s the reality? The AI capability is getting stronger,  and stronger, and stronger, and stronger, and will continue to do so. But right now, we need the human touch, so that people like you who ask the question, aren’t saying it’s “just damaging the experience”, it’s part of the experience. But because of the customer support I got, it was a better experience.