AI will surpass humans in dealing with customer emotions
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There is still a widespread belief that humans have an edge over AI-powered chatbots when it comes to one of the key challenges businesses face: connecting with customers on an emotional level. Those who believe this have studies that point to human superiority in this area.
Researchers Elizabeth Han of McGill University, Denny Yin of the University of South Florida and Han Zhang of the Georgia Institute of Technology explored how customers react when chatbots express feelings. They found that the expression of positive emotions by a human representative makes customers feel more satisfied, but the same cannot be said for chatbots programmed for this purpose.
Meanwhile, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford (Cammy Crolic, Felipe Thomaz, Rhonda Hadi and Andrew T. Stephen) found that “when customers enter a chatbot-led service interaction in an angry emotional state,” a human-like chatbot only makes things worse.
But there’s another emotional aspect to these interactions that gets much less attention: the emotional state of the customer service representative. Because my job involves tracking thousands of interactions that companies have with consumers, I can see what goes wrong. And too often, the biggest problem is that the representatives are rude, unhelpful or dismissive.
This problem has not been adequately addressed. While a study on “customer anger‘got a lot of it attention Due to the findings that customers today express more anger and frustration, far too little attention has been paid to what makes them angry and frustrated in the first place. Sometimes it’s the service they receive.
There is a vicious circle. When customers are angry, reps will naturally become defensive. They are then more likely to respond in a way that worsens the problem instead of solving it.
Sometimes reps don’t even realize they are being rude, or that they may come across that way. And given how tough their jobs can be, the problem is understandable. After dealing with angry customers for hours, they may lose patience and unintentionally take out their exhaustion on the next customer.
A questionnaire of 2,100 call center employees showed how tough this work can be. In a report for the Communications Workers of America, Virginia Doellgast of Cornell University and Sean O’Brady of McMaster University examined the struggles of these workers. They found that just over three-quarters (77%) reported high or very high personal stress levels. Less than 10% indicate that they have little stress. More than half said they feel emotionally exhausted every day and often or always have trouble sleeping.
This is of course no excuse for inappropriate behavior towards customers. Service agents need training in handling a wide range of difficult customers. That training should include self-awareness and tools to keep a cool head and focus on solving the problem without getting caught up in emotions.
Where AI excels
Chatbots don’t have this problem. No matter how many people they work with or how rude those people are, AI – at least as we know it today – does not experience stress, exhaustion or burnout. It doesn’t get frustrated or angry. It has no emotional response to the way people interact with it.
But it can teach people how to give the kinds of responses that make them feel better. Bob Dougherty, vice president at biotech Compass Pathways, discussed this in a column for Psychology Today. “The scientific study of the human mind has advanced by measuring the behavioral products of thought, such as spoken and written language. Recent advances in AI and LLMs (large language models) have provided the necessary building blocks for quantifying the expression of emotions in human language (sentiment).”
New discoveries of what AI can do and new insights into the human mind both help us get to a point where AI can process people’s emotions and respond to them in ways that are useful. So it’s no surprise that in a study of answers to patient questions, raters found an AI chatbot’s answers to be more empathetic than those of doctors.
Given the speed at which AI is developing, I expect it won’t be long before chatbots master the challenge of responding to customer emotions, without the hassle of actually feeling those natural, annoying human emotions.
None of this will eliminate the need for people in dealing with all customers. Just as every technological shift brings new opportunities, the transition of some jobs to AI will open up new jobs for people. It is likely that these jobs are more satisfying, less tiring and less likely to provoke ‘anger’.