Our topic for this month deals with an issue very much on the minds of businesses currently: artificial intelligence. The topic is “The Danger of Making People Into Robots with AI.” With minutely detailed instruction evolved by AI and religiously followed by employees, they are no longer required to think for themselves.
Interestingly, artificial intelligence itself may end up spelling the death of artificial intelligence. How would this come about?
AI-Evolved Sales and Customer Service Tools
As discussed in another article this month, one major application of artificial intelligence is sales scripting. Artificial intelligence is being used to create sales scripts for less successful salespeople based on the sales of successful sales reps.
Scripts have also been created for tech support and customer service reps so they don’t have to be well-trained. Based on the customer’s issue or complaint, the rep could simply refer to a script that would hopefully address the caller’s problem.
Another application that has been with us for some time is using artificial intelligence to create automated customer service call routing. An automated system receives a call and prompts the caller for various keywords that will be used to route the call either to a prerecorded “solution” to their issue, or to a live person.
Reception of Artificial Intelligence Systems
Neither of these approaches has been well-received by customers or prospects.
Even before the advent of artificial intelligence, scripting already had a bad reputation. Having a product or service “explained” by a salesperson reading from a script was usually very annoying to the customer. The main reason was that the salesperson had no idea what the prospect or customer actually wanted from the product or service, so the script almost never addressed it. Sales by script almost always failed.
There is probably great hope that sales scripts created by artificial intelligence will be more accurate and effective—but this is wishful thinking. AI-evolved scripts will not be any more geared to a prospect or customer’s issues than the traditional scripts have been.
As for automated answering schemes, just remember the last time you called up your bank, or your cable or internet provider, and had to navigate one of these systems. How aggravating was it? Needless to say, no one has anything good to say about these systems, either. They are often so off-the-mark with a caller that they end up screaming, “Operator!” into the phone or repeatedly pounding the “O” key until a live person is finally reached.
Customer Pushback
Given the negative feedback from people having to endure both scripted selling and automated phone systems, it’s amazing that they’re still in use. It’s obviously a question of profitability for companies—they still hoping that they’ll work and they can save the money which would otherwise be spent on live representatives.
In the end, prospect and customer dislike, and even downright hatred, for both of these AI-based approaches could very well spell the end of artificial intelligence applications in sales and business. There is no substitute for a live person who can understand a caller’s (or prospect or customer’s) actual challenges and issues.
Artificial intelligence certainly has powerfully promising potential—but that potential has not yet been shown to be applicable to sales, customer service, tech support or business in general.
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