By Brad Tuttle
Maya told me to bring in the car right away.
After I plugged details of our 2008 Honda Pilot into vehicle resale sites, Maya, a "business development specialist" from a nearby dealership, emailed to say it would give me a good price for it. I told her that we wanted to sell the car and not buy a new one, and that our mechanic said the Pilot had blown a head gasket and wasn't worth fixing.
No worries, Maya replied: "We are definitely interested in evaluating your Honda Pilot, even with the blown gasket. Our team can provide a thorough assessment and offer."
So in August, I nervously drove to the dealership with black smoke rising from the hood. The front desk agent smirked when I mentioned my emails with Maya. Turns out she didn't exist. "That's actually AI," he said.
I felt simultaneously duped and impressed because the messages were customized so well.
I stopped being impressed when I started dealing with the humans. The agent asked if I was looking to buy another vehicle while selling the old one. I wasn't -- something I had already communicated in my earlier email exchange with Maya. The agent was undaunted. He asked the same question again and said the dealership probably wouldn't want to buy our car unless I was purchasing another one.
He left to consult with a manager and returned to say it might be a few hours before anyone was available to inspect the car and give me an offer. I asked if I could leave the car overnight so that their mechanics could look the Honda over at their leisure, and he said no.
"You can wait," he said, "if you like."
Contrary to Maya's messages, the dealership didn't seem interested in buying our car, unless it was a trade-in to buy another car. I decided the whole exercise was going nowhere fast and hopped in the Pilot and drove home.
American businesses seem set on injecting artificial intelligence into an array of customer interactions. AI is being hyped as a miracle solution for customer service, whereby businesses can provide lightning-fast assistance to clients, boosting sales and loyalty, all while cutting internal costs dramatically.
That may be. But my recent experience shows that AI is only as solid as the humans deploying it. Absent the right human touch, it could lead to worse not better customer service.
Today's AI customer service goes beyond simple email and text responses. Hundreds of restaurants are using human-sounding AI voice agents to reserve tables and answer questions over the phone with conversational phrases. Salesforce says that AI will help banks offer "a more personal touch" because "customers can use their own words and language to communicate with chatbots that sound human."
Companies have long sought ways to lower customer service costs. After decades of outsourcing service to cheaper overseas call centers, the next logical step is to decrease costs further by replacing humans with AI. A 2023 McKinsey report proclaimed AI-enabled service as a win-win for businesses because the technology "can increase customer engagement, resulting in increased cross-sell and upsell opportunities while reducing cost-to-serve." This summer, the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna announced plans to cut roughly half of its workforce, mostly in customer service and marketing, by ramping up use of AI.
The advent of AI customer service comes with some upsides for consumers. Often, the service provided by today's bots is just as accurate and helpful as you would get from any human, and AI's response time is nearly instantaneous. Say goodbye to endless waiting on hold and those aggravating "your call is important to us" messages.
Yet many Americans hate the idea of an AI takeover of customer service. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a 2024 survey from the research and advisory company Gartner said they wish companies didn't use AI for customer service. In another survey, from the AI customer service firm callvu, 57% of people thought the top reason companies embrace AI in customer service is to eliminate jobs and reduce costs.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission both report customers are frustrated by companies that channel complaints and queries to AI and make it difficult to talk to a real human being. As companies cut more customer service agents in favor of AI, it will only become harder to get a live person on the phone.
Critics have also decried the use of AI to "soften" the accents of overseas call center agents in real time in order to make them more palatable to customers.
Many companies make it clear when they are using bots for customer service, but they are generally under no obligation to be transparent. Still, hiding the use of AI can backfire.
"Being upfront with customers about AI involvement builds trust and reflects ethical business practices," says Colin Campbell, an associate professor of marketing at the University of San Diego who studies AI. "From a pragmatic perspective, this also prevents backlash should customers eventually discover they are talking to a robot rather than a human."
Ultimately, I didn't leave the car dealership because an AI agent convinced me to bring the vehicle in under false pretenses. The real deal breaker wasn't stealthy AI customer service, but lackluster human service. I would have been fine interacting with AI if it led to the sale of our car at a reasonable price. It didn't.
If the car dealership's goal was simply to get me to show up, the strategy worked. But, presumably, the true goal was to win me over as a customer -- and here it failed. The dealership's general manager hasn't responded to multiple requests for comment.
After receiving an apology of sorts from the front desk agent, I left and started from scratch. I sold our Pilot a few days later through an online marketplace, after multiple rounds of conversations and negotiation with living, breathing humans.
Weeks later, emails continued to pop up in my in-box from Maya, asking if I was still interested in selling the Pilot. I didn't respond, but that didn't seem to bother Maya.
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December 14, 2024 04:00 ET (09:00 GMT)
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