I have some speakers that I have not been able to connect to my home Wi-Fi ever since my internet provider replaced my router. Nothing in the company's app has helped, nor has anything on its website. Then I noticed that there was a chatbot on its website. The bot asked me for a few pieces of information, including which make/model of speaker I had, which I easily found at the bottom of the speaker. Credit to the bot, it quickly understood my problem and realized that it would not be able to help me.
This is when the adventure began. I was then transferred to another bot from a third-party company that used informal gig workers to support a variety of products from various companies, including my speaker company. I was informed that I could talk to a rep for $5, which would be automatically refunded to me when I signed up for the third-party service at a cost of $48, which included the first month's subscription fee. I'm not sure how much was subscription and how much was sign-up. With this subscription I could get free service from their gig workers on any product that they supported, although if they told me what those products were, I missed it. Shocked and choking, I decided to move forward with the deal since I knew I could cancel and only be out the $5. I was more curious than I was upset at that point, and I really wanted to hear some music on these very nice speakers that I own.
Right away, the bot informed me that they were looking for the next available expert who could help me with my problem. I was told to expect a call within four minutes and that the bot would be available to me through the chat window while I waited. After 10 minutes, I decided to make myself a sandwich. As I started to eat my sandwich, I decided it was time to complain to the bot. I asked when to expect someone and reminded her (all the bots in this story had female personas) that she had told me my wait would be under four minutes at the start of our interaction. The bot apologized and said that I was now a priority contact. After finishing my sandwich, I had been waiting more than 30 minutes for the apparently nonexistent expert and decided that I had enough. I asked the bot to end this hold and refund my money.
The bot tried promising me that things would be different now, that I was a priority call (that was 20 minutes ago, not overly hopeful). I pushed a bit, and with apologies for my inconvenience she gave me a toll-free number to call. I bid my bot adieu and called the number, where I was greeted by a third bot. Her voice was top notch, clear, friendly, and very human-sounding. She understood who I was and why I was calling. At first, she tried to convince me that this was a very good service and that I would be happy if I stayed on. At that point in a loud voice, I said "I want to cancel my service and get a refund now."
This time it was clear that there was no option to save my business, so the bot said she was cancelling my service and asked me to hold for a moment. The cancellation and subsequent refund went smoothly and took less than two minutes to execute.
As someone who has been promoting the benefits of generative artificial intelligence for self-service, this experience was truly chilling. Every bot in this story behaved admirably, efficiently, and effectively. My self-service experience was great. Too bad I never did actually speak a human being when one was clearly needed. To state the obvious, being charged for waiting on hold is not OK.
This is not an acceptable support option. On the other hand, I can just hear the pitch in the boardroom: We will outsource our human agents to a gig worker company and provide excellent self-service options. The gig folks will be experts, and everyone will win. That all sounds great until it leads you down an absolute dead end and you had to fight to get your money back.
Here is one man's prayer that our future doesn't look like this.
Max Ball is a principal analyst at Forrester Research.