What happens when a machine provides a better answer than a person?
The Spanish government is to draft a bill regulating corporate customer services, limiting waiting times and the use of answering machines, guaranteeing attention to vulnerable people, requiring companies to publish customer evaluations, and for “companies to maintain personalized communication.”
Companies will have a maximum of one month to resolve queries, complaints, claims or incidents, which must be made through the same channels that were used for the purchase.
The draft bill has already been dubbed by the media as the “right to talk to a person.” This is erroneous, and is due to companies’ long-standing abuse of automated interactive voice systems (IVR), a technology that while it reduces costs, has not improved customer service, and tends to leave people feeling frustrated.
As voice processing technologies advance, their role will be to provide a level of customer service that, in many cases, will be more than sufficient to resolve many customer queries, complaints and claims, and a major improvement on the old IVR systems. In which case, the “right to talk to a person” as some sort of “ethical commitment” may be counterproductive, given that it is quite possible that technology will mean a voice assistant will provide better service than a person.
