Call Centers Replaced Many Doctors’ Receptionists. Now, AI Is Coming for Call Centers.
Call Centers Replaced Many Doctors’ Receptionists. Now, AI Is Coming for Call Centers.
Artificial intelligence products with lifelike voices are being marketed to schedule or cancel medical visits, refill prescriptions, and help triage patients. Soon, many patients might initiate contact with the health system by speaking not with a human but with AI.
At one call center in the Philippines, workers help Americans with diabetes or neurological conditions troubleshoot devices that monitor their health. Sometimes they get pressing calls: elderly patients who are alone and experiencing a medical emergency.
I coached my grandma to just repeat "I want to talk to a human operator, please" over and over until she got through. It worked about 70% of the time but some are nearly impenetrable.
I called Comcast and it was horrible
human, operator, GET HUMAN, person, technician, for fucks sake! Bomb? Give me a fucking human!
Nope, nothin, mashing 0 on the keypad also did nothing.
I build call centers.
When we design the call flows, those are the first tings we disable. You can tell a company at least slightly cares about their customer base if they actually do allow you to escalate to a human without a ton of effort. Most don't, and want to shove "AI" in front of everything, so they can hire even less people in low-cost markets. Offshoring wasn't cheap enough for these
leechescompanies, now they want AI to replace those folks making starvation wages to get yelled at all day.And sometimes, these solutions work well. Most of the time, they work just well enough to not have people quitting their service in frustration.
This won't go well.
So, the Klarna pattern?
I do call center work for a medical insurance company and some providers are already doing this. There is one that has a bot called EVA and she’s really pushy, doesn’t understand challenges or handle being told she’s wrong, she will ask several questions but let you only answer one before moving on rather than letting you answer her completely, she’s just a disaster. In some cases she will just hang up on you can call back and do it all again. I am absolutely certain she’s going to get that provider sued eventually.
I recently had a good experience with one of these where I was able to schedule an appointment for a contractor. They actually repeated my info back to me to make sure it was correct and I understood it.
So many times receptionists are either hard to understand or make a fuck up on some simple task.
fuck yeah!
Soon we will reach peak enshitification