There’s still a widespread belief that humans have an edge over AI-powered chatbots when it comes to one of the most important challenges that businesses face: connecting with customers on an emotional level. Those who believe this do have studies to point to that suggest human superiority in this arena.
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 respond when chatbots express feelings. They found that while a human representative’s expression of positive emotions make customers feel more satisfied, the same could not be said for chatbots that were programmed to do so.
Meanwhile, a team of researchers from Oxford University (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 humanlike chatbot 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 work includes tracking thousands of interactions that businesses have with consumers, I’m able to see what goes wrong. And all too often, the biggest problem is that the representatives are rude, unhelpful, or dismissive.
This problem has not been adequately addressed. While a survey on “customer rage” got a great deal of attention for its findings that customers are expressing more anger and frustration these days, far too little attention was given to what’s making them angry and frustrated in the first place. Sometimes, it’s the service they’re getting.
There’s a vicious cycle at play. When customers are angry, representatives by nature are likely to get defensive. They’re then more likely to respond in ways that will exacerbate the problem rather than solving it.
Sometimes, representatives don’t even realize that they’re being discourteous, or that they may be coming across that way. And given how grueling their work can be, the problem is understandable. After hours of dealing with angry customers, they may lose patience and unintentionally take out their exhaustion on the next customer.
A survey of 2,100 call center workers showed just 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 looked into the struggles of these workers. They found that just over three quarters (77%) reported high or very high personal stress levels. Less than 10% reported having low stress. More than half said they feel emotionally drained every day and have sleep problems often or always.
This, of course, does not excuse inappropriate behavior toward customers. Service agents need training in how to handle a wide range of difficult customers. That training must 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 doesn’t have an emotional response to the way people treat it.
But it can learn to give people the kinds of responses that help them feel better. Bob Dougherty, a vice president at the biotechnology Compass Pathways, discussed this in a column for Psychology Today. “The scientific study of the human mind has progressed by measuring the behavioral products of thought, such as spoken and written language. The recent advances in AI and LLMs (large language models) have provided the necessary building blocks for quantifying the expression of emotion in human language (sentiment).”
New discoveries of what AI can do and new understandings of the human mind are both helping bring us to a point in which AI can process and respond to people’s emotions in ways that are helpful. So it’s no surprise that, in a study of answers to patients’ questions, evaluators found the responses provided by an AI chatbot 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 can master the challenge of responding to customer emotions without the hassle of actually feeling those natural, pesky human emotions themselves.
None of this will erase the need for humans in dealing with any and all customers. Just as every technological shift brings new opportunities, the transition of some jobs to AI will open up new jobs for people. Those jobs just may be likely to be more fulfilling, less tiring and, quite possibly, less likely to trigger “rage.”