For CX, Chatbots should follow the Accent Training Guideway

The Robots are taking over the world !!! … or so, several trending stories in trade publications would have you believe.

From additive manufacturing to robo-advisors, adoption of bots (shrunk from the term ‘robots’ which conjured up worst images of SciFi movies) is now mainstream across enterprises to reduce the transaction cost, improving responsiveness and bringing unparalleled scalability.

With the explosion of digital world esp. the social media, enterprises have frequently turned to bots to manage the multitude of apps through which their customers try to reach out to them. Just of Facebook alone, over 10,000 of developers are introducing chatbots to assist enterprises in managing interactions over the messenger apps, reveals Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

The current emphasis of the technology community has been to make these Chatbots to make these interactions as similar to those with human customer service agents to encourage client adoption and make the experience ‘seamless’.

To my mind, this strategy is misplaced.

A recent The Financial Brand article by Ron Shevlin highlights the key talking points in a Chatbots vs. Human Interaction debate before chiding the reader:

you’d think that neither author had ever heard of, or has ever had to deal with, interactive voice response (IVR) technology.

Airlines, telcos, and yes, financial services firms do everything in their power when you call them to keep you from actually talking to a live human being. So if you’re going to criticize chatbot technology for not providing a personal touch, you might want to start by bashing IVR technology.

So, how does the Head of Customer Services for a services company resolve this conundrum? Do they invest more dollars in a chatbot technology which promises to ever-more-finely simulate a human customer services agent only to be dinged, and not appreciated, by their own customers for doing so?

I would point to the experience of using Accent Training for Customer Service as a way to resolve the same.

As a backstory, let us roll back a few decades to when enterprises sought to take advantage of the labour arbitrage offered by offshoring their customer service to low cost locations. In order to reduce end customer angst, such enterprises sought to recreate, especially for the voice interactions, their ‘usual’ experience i.e. interacting with an in-country service agent (most frequently, American) in these locations.

While it was easier to do so in Philippines as a result of long years of interaction with Americans with the general populace, it was much harder to do so in India — a very attractive location for a greater labour arbitrage and depth of hiring talent. So, as per the prevailing wisdom of the day, started the advent of voice accent training i.e. training hired Indian service agents to speak in an American accent, in conjunction with cultural sensitization training so that these agents can ‘build rapport’ and fill ‘dead air’ by taking about the latest baseball game or weather in the city that customer is calling from — hopefully mimicking the experience which the customers have been used to for so long.

Evidently, despite the best voice training, immersive work environments (i.e. putting screens playing the local regional news, new anglicized names allocated to the Indian service agents ala Shawn instead of Subramanian, along with all sorts of decorations to act as reminders put up in the seating bay of service agents), the customers noticed the change — and they didn’t like it…. at all.

After years of experimenting, the enterprises have dialed back the voice training and modified it to accent neutralization so that the voice accent of the customer service agent is easily understood in a multi-cultural environment. Gone too (mostly) are the requirement of anglicized names and dial back on the requirements to be acutely aware of the hottest local news.

The customers have grown to grudgingly accept the new norm for customer experience, and did not feel weirded out by hearing an Indian agent trying to discuss the game of Seattle Seahawks vs. New England Patriots (The Seahawks won and that is all I know about it).

This should act as a guideway for Chatbots.

Instead of trying to hide the reality of chatbots usage, enterprises need to subtly indicate to the customer whom they are interacting with.

Most customers seek a convenient and efficient resolution to the queries and would continue anyways. Others who prefer to interact with a human customer service agent can use alternative means such as emailing or calling in, if available.

Seldom do people react well to situations when they feel that someone is trying to hoodwink them to do something, and making them to talk to a Chatbot under false pretenses is one of them.

As with our learning from many other things, providing customers with the choice of interactions only empowers and endears them.