I had plenty of things to do this morning, but instead I had to call my health insurance company upon noticing that someone claimed I’d taken an ambulance in Kentucky last week. The good news is, I did not need an ambulance. Even better, I wasn’t in Kentucky.
The AI chat bot wanted to help! It was not helpful. Chat bots can’t make any of the decisions we want them to make because it’s too risky for a company to bestow permissions on technology that has such intimate client data (thank god.) Health insurance companies also want to be coy about connecting you to a person — even the chat bot sent me through a loop of hyperlinks, advising that I could call the number on the back of a physical card I do not have, because the company only sends digital cards now. (The printing savings were not applied to my deductible.)
We don’t have to journey down this rabbit hole of frustration—you’re already familiar with mashing 9 or 0 or * or # on your keypad while screaming “speak to a representative!!”, as though volume or urgency or emotion could ever resonate to a machine. I’m setting the scene because you know as well as I do that the tedious experience of form-filling is rotting our souls. I don’t even need to cite empirical data here for two reasons: 1. I don’t need you thinking I got AI to write this, and 2. you already know it’s true because the hole in your soul is throbbing just reading about it.
The flattening of information for the sake of volume is packaged as convenience. “Convenience” here is shorthand for a cost-cutting measure that evades accountability for a confusing product or service the customer can’t manage on their own. Maybe the company has saved money on hiring customer service reps, although AI integration ain’t cheap. They’re still not solving their customer service problems, they’re just handballing it to automation. Ta-da! Now everyone hates the company, but at least people can’t call and complain anymore.
Health insurance is an easy example to dunk on. Those companies are also massive, and one can understand how unwieldy a company of that size must be. I won’t entertain the problems of scale inherent in automated solutions because often, it’s the scale of the company itself that’s the problem.
New client evasion
Requiring someone to input something is now, by default, our only available first connection with a company. I wonder how many businesses really need this, though—because most companies are not big. 96% of companies employ fewer than ten people.
Our generation’s deterioration of personal communication began with a fear of answering the phone, and then even listening to voicemails, to straight-up ghosting people in our lives… and it seems to have extended naturally to include clients. I call this “new client evasion”.
I have a small business, and I provide a service to other small businesses who need branding and design. I like my clients! I want to talk to them and understand who they are. I want them to know me, too. We can’t assess each other’s vibes if I put a chat bot between us, or an intake form. Digital input and output is already a massive part of our everyday lives. So I distinguish myself from this tedium simply by being available and attentive. Talking is remarkably efficient.