customer-service misfire

[cellio]

This blog post ends with an email exchange between the author and Amazon customer support that made me laugh and sigh at the same time. (You can skip right to it without loss of context.) I think they need to tune the AI or involve humans a little more. (Granted that it's also challenging to effectively use irony, sarcasm, and humor when contacting anybody's customer-service department.)

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

or involve humans a little more

Oh, I think "Melody G." really exists, but her name is Malini Gopal and she's making 2500 rupees a week in a call center in Mumbai.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

From what I recall of how Amazon works, it's also likely that that's a canned response written by the Chinese dev who has to maintain the customer mailing system.

[hildakrista.livejournal.com]

Nah, no problem with the English language here. The phrase "...all books..." is a fill-in to a standard letter meant to refer only to one book. (I write them, so I recognize them) The CSR was being lazy or incautious.

I find it impressive that the writer got an answer so fast, or at all. It was likely the speed of the response that caused the fill-in error.

I can pretty much guarantee the CRS looked at it, rolled her eyes or sighed, and asked her supervisor if she actually had to answer that insane letter. She may have even printed it out to show to her CSR friends and had a great laugh over it. But as the voice of an international organization, the *only* thing you can say to *any* kind of crusader (yes, this this a crusader letter, whether I agree with it or not) is, "Thanks for your input", which is what she did. Really, there's nothing else to say. What did he expect, exactly? Engagement with crusaders is never advisable, and it's a waste of time when you have hundreds of other people to help that day who have actionable concerns.

That being said... yup, it's funny.

[cellio]

Thanks for bringing the perspective of someone who's been in the trenches.

It looked to me like an automated response because if a human (who understands English, as I presume the reps do) had read the first paragraph, the response probably wouldn't have been "we're sorry we didn't have the book you were looking for". Humans can see what's really going on easily, but that's a pretty hard problem for artificial intelligence. I assume that Amazon is using something more sophisticated than searching for keywords and less sophisticated than an expensive cutting-edge natural-language-processing system (and even those would probably miss on this input). It's possible that a human reads all messages and chooses a canned response from a list, but if so I'm surprised in this case.

When a message like that one -- yes, it's a crusade, but it's still feedback and it was actually polite, rational, and grammatical, unlike most in that class -- reaches the customer-service rep, I think the right response is to forward it to whomever sets policy in that area and tell the sender that this has been done. Of course the employer gets to define "right"; this is just my opinion on what it should be.

I'm not expressing an opinion on the complaint itself, by the way; I'm just commenting on how it was handled. (That's why I suggested skipping the rest of the post.)