As I go through life interacting with various chatbots on various customer/member service phone lines, I make a mental note of each experience in an effort to track the progress of the technology. Most often, the experience falls somewhere between this sucks and this really sucks.
I should preface this by noting that I’ve been a California driver for nearly 50 years. And based on decades of experience dealing with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, I’ve come to expect very little from this esteemed organization. I’ve found that most interactions with the DMV are some combination of woefully boring, painfully time-consuming, and ridiculously expensive.
Well, just the other day, I was looking at the registration renewal for my personal vehicle and noticed that it was marked as a commercial vehicle. I looked back at my current registration card and it was marked the same way. It’s an error I just never noticed before. So I braced myself for a this really sucks phone experience and dialed the DMV.
An Unexpectedly Perfect AI Hand-Off
Imagine my surprise and delight when I reached the absolute best chatbot I’ve ever encountered. I sh*t you not. She was awesome. She was able to understand every word I spoke and respond with complete, human-like sentences.
She informed me that unfortunately she can’t make such changes herself and that I’d need to speak with a live agent. However, since no live agents were currently available, she’d be sure to have one call me later. What’s more, to ensure that I didn’t miss the live agent, she promised to send me a text message when the agent was ready to dial so I’d know the next call would be from the DMV.
Absolutely fabulous! Or so I thought. The problem was what happened next—or should I say, what didn’t happen next.
You see, I never heard from the live agent. And I know I didn’t miss their call because I also never received that text—a text I assume was supposed to be automatically triggered by the agent preparing to call me.
Was this a technology failure? A human failure? A little of both? I don’t know. But I do know that from a user standpoint, it was the live agent who let me down.
Where the Loop Breaks Down
I’ve written about “human in the loop,” or HITL, numerous times. It’s a concept that seems tailor-made for the credit union movement. We pride ourselves on the “human touch.” Using advanced AI to handle the mundane tasks while routing the complex, high-value interactions to live staff has become the gold standard of modern member service.
But here is the hard truth: It only works if the humans in your loop actually do their part to fulfill the promise of a better, AI-powered world.
It’s not complicated. Write a big enough check and I’m sure you can have the same awesome chatbot as the DMV. Likewise, fail to train your employees on the importance of the digital handoff and you’ll achieve the same end result as the DMV.
Your members deserve better.
The bottom line: Don’t be the DMV. If you’re going to build a high-tech loop, make sure your humans are fully awake and ready to steer when it’s their turn at the wheel.