Why Bots for Customer Support Isn’t Customer Care

How talking to machines cost a business my loyalty

Bots are fast.

They can be nice, or at least programmed to be. AI can also be humanlike. And oh, they can reply conversationally like humans too!

Sure, you can’t be irate at them.

You won’t hurt a living soul as you go through a bad day. You can’t act entitled around them, report them to the manager if you feel like it.

I never thought about human support reps that much until recently. I miss them. And whenever I get to have a live chat with a real human support rep, I get really giddy excited. Another human I can have a small talk to.

(Shoutout to Namecheap for their stellar support people)

I had to cross a series of hurdles to get a problem fixed with an online payment platform. I’m still getting fraud flags here and there even if I’ve been with them for more than a decade.

That day was different.

It was my birthday. And no, you can’t f* with me and hold my funds on my birthday.

Every problem, even a tech problem, is painful.

There’s real pain you can literally feel whenever you have a problem that calls for a support call. There’s frustration, desperation and the occasional self-doubt.

For most people, a support call is the last resort. We tried our best to figure things out and make things happen by ourselves before we decide to raise our hands in desperation and surrender our pride to professional help.

So when I found out that their “Live Chat” is nothing but automated replies from a bot, I felt that I was given another set of problems.

Worse than Canned Replies

The thing with automated responses is they can only give me answers to existing problems they had in their database.

The live chat gave me links to their FAQ pages, threw URLs here and there and didn't’ give me a chance to select “talk to a real person” right off the bat.

A couple of times it told me it doesn’t understand my question, I can let that pass. If only I had the patience for four more tries…

My situation is different. It’s not something we can magically pull from the FAQs. You held my funds. This is my birthday. What now?

When I finally was able to chat with a human, she handled it faster than the bot did. One minute and everything’s fixed. The 15 minutes I spent time talking to the bot felt like forever. I was literally crying in the process.

Chatbots Make Customers Feel Undervalued and Unimportant

A lot of the companies I continue to use are now investing in chatbots. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It makes me feel that they’re cost-cutting, which in return makes any customer feel undervalued.

This is how it hurts customer loyalty.

There’s that lack of personalization. I’m not talking “Hey [First Name]” here, I’m talking about addressing the problem itself.

They can only give generic pre-programmed responses which may not cater to the customer’s individual needs. This makes customers feel like they’re not valued as individuals with unique perspectives.

Once the customer feels unimportant or frustrated, bots are unable to handle these complex issues. They lack empathy and can’t relate from previous experience.

We Need Our Humans Back

Although the company was able to address my concerns in the end, their decision to invest more in bots than human support was a red flag for me. It made me feel insignificant as a customer, to be fed in the automations like that.

The moment the agent said “I’m very sorry you had to go through this, it must be frustrating for you,” regardless of whether or not that’s a canned response, felt so real to me. That gesture alone took me a long way from feeling like shit. It was a milestone in the problem solving process.

That someone actually feels for me. That another human knows that I’m in pain… Is a huge step to fixing the problem itself.

I don’t want you to just fix my problems. I don’t want the candy to make me feel better. I want you to know how I feel first, to listen to my vision or my thoughts about the problem. I don’t want to be another number on your helpdesk software.

And if we get this thing right, I’d like to have someone I can express gratitude to. You changed my life today and your help is appreciated.