The story of DPD’s generative AI (GenAI) chatbot swearing and calling the delivery firm “useless” recently made global headlines.
Of course, the autonomous thought of the chatbot is incredible. Yet, the story – as shown below - exemplifies the dangers of businesses placing too much trust in the new technology.
Parcel delivery firm DPD have replaced their customer service chat with an AI robot thing. It’s utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company. It also swore at me. pic.twitter.com/vjWlrIP3wn
— Ashley Beauchamp (@ashbeauchamp) January 18, 2024
Indeed, exciting innovations mustn’t detract from the user experience.
Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder at babelforce, fears this is already happening, as he predicts a second wave of terrible bots in 2024.
The first occurred in the early 2010s, where the market was flooded with inadequate chatbots that failed to meet customer needs and sat in a separate silo to the contact center.
Then, many contact centers failed to put human factors or usability considerations first. Now, Buckley believes that history will repeat itself. He stated:
“Still, not many companies can get their teams organized around goals that are really driven by human factors and human perceptions.”
In providing an example of this lack of user consideration, Buckley draws upon his considerable experience in working with voicebot technology – explaining the intricacies of customer perception timing, where a delay of as little as 150 milliseconds can lead to people speaking over one another.
He explains that, although companies are aware of the importance of voicebot timing, “very, very few organizations are paying attention to the fact that you need to get your delays down to an absolute minimum. And you need to be able to respond within that timeframe.”
Start with the Human Experience
In order to truly elevate the chatbot user experience, Buckley underscores the need to incorporate the human perspective from day one: