According to Centrica’s boss, Chris O’Shea, most people using British Gas prefer to talk to a chatbot rather than a person (Customers prefer AI chatbots, says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre and back office jobs axed, 23 July).
He says that 90% of his customers prefer to use digital channels than speak to a person in the first instance, and that the number of customer calls has fallen by 20%. Well, this is hardly surprising, given the difficulty of getting through to a real person. Finding a telephone number to do so is a challenge in itself, and then there are all the layers of numbers and deflections to encourage use of the digital channels while you are kept on hold at your own cost before you can get to an employee.
We are being gaslit by large companies, including banks, that have gradually withdrawn face-to-face access to customer service, which is more expensive, but more efficient from a customer’s viewpoint. First we saw the emergence of contact centres taking phone calls, and then digital channels of access to a human, and now it is digital access to a bot.
The cost saving goes to the company and the cost is exported to customers in the time and effort they have to spend having a text message “conversation” with a robot. Clearly for these large firms, company human time is precious, while customer human time is not.
This is not about improving the quality of service or adding value to the customer experience. It is simply naked cost reduction using available technology, and removing the expense of employing people from the balance sheet. Customer preference has nothing to do with it.
Charles MacKinnon
Glasgow
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