RUTH SUNDERLAND: ‘Annoyance economy’ hurts us and AI will make it worse
The ‘annoyance economy’ is a term coined in the US to describe how the irritations visited upon us by companies add up, taking a financial and psychological toll on consumers.
The hidden fees. The mendacious messages on customer service lines that have been claiming ‘we are experiencing higher call volumes than usual’ ever since lockdown.
The unexpected items in the bagging area. The chatbot that has an answer for every question except yours. The amount of effort needed just to find a phone number to speak to a human, then having to wait another 45 minutes to get through the menus and muzak.
Annoyance is too mild a word for the feelings of oppression and dread these interactions provoke: Rage economy more like.
This is not a minor bugbear of modern life but a major daily blight on modern Western economies. AI risks making it worse. The US study that came up with the ‘Annoyance Economy’ label, co-authored by a Stanford University economist, found that these frustrations are costing Americans at least $165billion a year.
The attrition is bound to run into billions in Britain too.
Technological gains: AI is improving and the potential to aid customer service is there, but the current situation does not inspire optimism that it will be used for consumers’ benefit
The UK Customer Service Institute’s latest research says a record 83.2 per cent of customer experiences were right first time, as if it were a good thing. This means nearly one in five customers have a problem, which surely is far too high.
Companies say they are using technologies to ‘improve the customer experience’ and other anodyne twaddle when too often the motive is to cut costs, even if it means driving us up the wall.
Even worse, some business models are deliberately designed to thwart customers in our legitimate choices, for instance by making it difficult to cancel subscriptions.
Trying to help an elderly family member to stop a regular payment to a telecoms provider for a service they no longer use took almost an hour.
Obstacles included an interrogation on why they wished to leave and forcing them to make a final payment.
Infuriating stuff for a customer who had already been handing over money for nothing for months.
Even when we are not being ripped off financially, the rage-onomics merchants are stealing our precious time.
They don’t want to help customers but to turn us into unpaid workers to do their jobs for them.
These phone-phobic obstructors are coercing us into sorting out our own problems so they don’t have to bother. As for AI, at its current stage of development it can be like interacting with a bright six-year-old, who is surprisingly clever in some ways but also unreliable and badly behaved.
The technology is improving very quickly and the potential to improve customer service is there.
AI could get rid of those life-sapping ‘Press One for…’ phone menus by smart routing of queries to the right department. It could provide personalised self-service tools so customers won’t need to trawl through endless FAQs.
There is even scope for it to send out alerts about unused subscription services and make it easy to cancel. But the current situation does not inspire optimism that it really will be used for consumers’ benefit.
The boardrooms of Britain seem not to care about us losing our money, our time and our tempers.
It’s crazy this even needs saying, but being hated by your own customers is not good business sense.
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