...please hold until it ceases to be important to you.
I had reason to call my new broadband provider yesterday. I was looking through my bank statement and there was a direct debit for far more than I expected. I checked the previous month – same. Some mistake? Maybe I was mistaken so I got out the contract and looked for small print or hidden costs to my introductory offer. Nope, there was supposed to be 12 months of reduced fees and it was supposed to start 2 months ago.
There was nothing for it but to call them. That meant looking up online to find an actual number to bypass the FAQs and Chatbot that thinks it can solve my problems. By and large, I find that when I have a problem, I need a human being to fix it. This might not always be the case, but it is for the time being.
I rang the number and was greeted with a recording that welcomed me to the company I had just tried to connect to and then gave me an option of pressing certain buttons for broadband or mobile phone service or tech support etc. After pressing more buttons I was greeted by the company’s “digital assistant”. It even had a name, and was spectacularly unable to deal with my enquiry. I was directed to an automated voice that told me how much I owed the company (zero euro and zero cent as I pay by direct debit) and then there was almost incredulity from the various robots that I chose the option that this had not answered my question (because of course, my question was to do with my payments). After 3.5 minutes of a cybervoice saying “I’m sorry, please say what your enquiry is related to” again and again, I was finally reassured that I would be “transferred to an assistant”.
I found myself on the receiving end of another automated message to tell me that I was number 9 in the queue. I would as happily have been number 9 or even 10 if I had been directed to a person right away. Obviously there would be a wait because they “were experiencing higher than usual numbers of callers”.
When I did get connected, the guy nailed the problem and sorted out the solution in about 90 seconds.
From what I hear on TV and radio the AI revolution is unstoppable, but at its most mundane human interaction it really needs to do a better job at promoting itself. I don’t know how many problems it actually solves for punters who call in, and how many hours of human interaction it avoids, and accordingly how many euro it saves for the company, but it doesn’t endear itself to me as a punter. The company had made an error that I was paying for and was making it unnecessarily difficult for me to resolve it….I think I’ll be changing broadband provider again in 10 months.
Swords Orthodontics will presumably be taking on as much AI as the next guy as time goes on, but basically it’s run by human beings for human beings. What we do is real, in the physical world. You’ll know if you get a voice mail during working hours, it’ll be because the front of house are already involved in a call to another patient or working with them at the front desk, so leave a number and we’ll get back to you shortly afterwards.
Where do you think AI can help an orthodontic practice?