By Chris Teasdale,Google Gemini

Copyright cityam

75 per cent of people would rather deal with a person than a chatbot concerning their finances; one in five has shouted at their robot antagonist; and one in eight admits swearing at them. Rather than save money, Chatbots may actually be driving business away, says Chris Teasdale

If you’ve interacted with customer services in the last three months, it is highly likely you encountered a chatbot. According to department for culture, media and sport statistics, two thirds of people dealt with one in the last quarter, with 40 per cent speaking to one in the last month. Moreover, their rise seems as unstoppable as the tides. The government figures show 68 per cent of companies now use AI in customer service; arguing against them seems like luddism, as doomed – and as backwards – as demanding a return to hand looms. But it is possible their increasingly widespread adoption is going to hit the buffers for a much simpler reason – people hate them.

Most questions over an AI-powered future have so far concentrated on either philosophical questions – such as ownership of intellectual property – or legal ones, such as liability, for example for bad advice. Both are clearly important, but recent figures from the Institute of Customer Service throw up another challenge. Nearly half of people simply think chatbots make customers service worse – despite the fact they enable faster, more responsive interaction. We wanted to understand public attitudes to chatbot service, so we commissioned independent nationwide omnibus research. The results were conclusive; the public overwhelmingly wants to deal with human beings.

Nearly half of people simply think chatbots make customers service worse – despite the fact they enable faster, more responsive interaction

The results cut across all ages and all regions. Overall, seven out of ten people said they would rather deal with a person than an automated system. When it concerned their finances, this rose to 75 per cent, and when it was regarding “something going wrong” it was 76 per cent. Recording experiences with chatbots, respondents catalogued a litany of frustration – a third had ended the conversation without resolution. One in five had shouted at their robot antagonist, whilst one in eight admitted swearing at them. But, most crucially of all, customers are being driven away. Almost half said they had switched providers, cancelled a product or service, or simply decided not to deal with the company any more. For our sector, financial services, the average amount lost to the company was £1,600 per person. Scale that up to a national level and it would mean £9.3bn in lost revenue – just to banks.

Clearly the use of automated systems saves both time and money, and there are many reasons why any customer-facing company might want to integrate them. Equally, not everyone demands personal service, and even those who value it may not want it for everything. The development of AI in particular has opened up whole new possibilities for businesses; computers can, after all, do many things better than people. When it comes to crunching large amounts of data, or repeatable, scalable tasks, automation will eventually win. There may come a time when there are tasks we would no more assign to a flesh-and-blood employee than we would choose a scribe and a carrier pigeon over a quick text. But until now, the savings have been the only story – there have been few attempts to measure the cost, whether in business opportunities or the impact on the bottom line. There is clearly a place for automation in modern business – and financial services, a sector at which the UK excels, should be at the head of the queue. So where is the line?

Examining the evidence, the crucial element is empathy. All our research suggested that what people wanted was to know that the business they were dealing with was actually invested in the relationship. Invested enough to want to resolve their query or complaint, not to hasten them off into a digital void. This was particularly true for their finances. We are all familiar with the cliché of being told “your call is important to us” whilst no effort is made to show that that is the case – what this showed was that there are real-time consequences.

The last century has seen a range of technological innovations that have changed the business landscape forever. The development of the National Grid electrified the world of work in the 1930s. Then the telephone, the personal computer, and the internet would all mark further paradigm shifts in how companies deal with customers. Artificial intelligence now has the potential to enable greater steps forward. But this can only happen if business remembers that technology can only ever complement, not replace, the human touch. Ultimately, the major lesson of our research appears to be quite simple: when it comes to doing business, your customers fundamentally want to know that you care.

Chris Teasdale is chief branch officer at Handelsbanken