Talking to bots

Everyone has a story like mine. I ordered a package on Amazon and received it in the promised time frame. But nobody told Amazon. They kept extending the delivery date, then told me it might be lost; did I want to process a refund? At first I ignored the messages, because after all I didn’t have a problem; I got my package. But finally I got tired of all the messages. I figured the problem would be easy to fix. So I clicked on Problem with order and started interacting with the chatbot. They offered me a textbox so I could send a message to the seller. Here’s what I typed in: “Package received October 15, 2021. Please update the Amazon record”. That was too complicated for the bot. The reply was, “There was a problem with delivery”. And that was the end of the road.

I guess they’re using the kind of bot that just has a fixed number of FAQs programmed in, with some fixed language variations. Not all bots are that dumb. Some now use artificial intelligence, so they learn from customer interactions and gradually can respond to more complex requests. But of course customer service bots are all about saving money, and those simpler ones are pretty cheap. Some are even free. From the company’s perspective, all that matters is that they can say they are maintaining a customer service function. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work.

Not that live customer service is any better. It’s just a different kind of hell, where you’re left on hold listening to ads or Muzak or “Your call is important to us” messages, sometimes for hours. Or you’re connected to a call centre in another country, where people with impenetrable accents enter into a tug of war with you, with neither person able to understand what the other person is saying.

How did it come to this? Isn’t the customer always right? We seniors grew up believing that, and I think that it’s still true, only the customer isn’t the shopper any more. Now the customer is the shareholder; that’s the person the company has to keep happy. And the shareholder isn’t easy to please. He wants to see his portfolio values keep on rising every quarter. How can you do that, except by driving down wages, raising prices and cheapening the product or service? And if the shopper doesn’t like the shoddy product or indifferent service, where can he turn? Corporate concentration has narrowed so many markets that companies no longer have to worry about losing us to rivals. The few companies running a sector can operate in lockstep, offering the same poor quality products or services at the same high prices. This should be very familiar ground to anyone who has, for example, tried to buy a Canadian cellphone plan.

So we’re stuck with the bots. I looked hard for advice on how best to communicate with the beasts, but all I could scrape up were these few tidbits:

• Keep your language simple. Talk to the bot as if it were a child.
• Just make one request per message, in a single sentence.
• Use bots only on trusted sites.
• Don’t give bots any sensitive financial or medical information.
• If you’re not getting anywhere, tell the bot you want to talk to a person or a human. Sometimes you’ll get one.