Automating Customer Service Comes With Risks

It’s a universal experience to have something go wrong that shouldn’t have seemingly without any ability to correct it.

It’s absolutely maddening to be able to prove something shouldn’t be but the person or people who could, and even should, fix it won’t listen.

Everyone hates it, but it’s something that’s all too common in customer service. How many of us have sent off an email or filled out a form online to try to correct an error only to receive some kind of form letter? How many times have you tried to call a company, medical provider or utility trying to reach a human being so you can actually explain the particulars of your situation and instead have to navigate through menus and speak to a computer program?

There are benefits, of course, to having an automated response system in place for large companies that deal with seemingly countless customer issues. Long wait times on the phone are just as rage-inducing, and writing out individual responses to each email would take up quite a bit of time for each employee.

But there has to be a middle ground, some kind of compromise between bespoke responses and automated responses that appear to have been created and let loose without any human review.

We recently passed around the newsroom an article from Motherboard, Vice’s tech-focused news section, about Airbnb’s use of a third-party vendor to do criminal background checks on both guests and hosts and how the system has kicked out quite a number of people with minor infractions long in their past with little chance of success in appealing these decisions.

Each of the guests and hosts the reporter spoke to had positive reviews from other guests and hosts and no indications they caused any problems for anyone.

One guest was kicked out for two misdemeanors in 2013 for not having her dog registered or on a leash. A “Superhost” was banned with several reservations on the books for a public intoxication charge and a driving while intoxicated charge from 10 years prior — the result of a bad interaction with medication he was on — and a missing taillight.

Both of these users had tried to reach out to Airbnb to learn more about why they were banned and received automated responses telling them to reach out to the vendor performing the background checks. After learning the details, they started the appeals process to go over the nuances of their situations, but they received automated responses that said the background checks were found to be accurate and the decision to ban them was final.