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© Thomson Reuters 2024SoftBank Corp to help call center workers by 'softening' angry customer calls with AI
TOKYO©2025 GPlusMedia Inc.
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TaiwanIsNotChina
Lol, basically lowering the volume on customers I see. I dunno about Japan, but keep your call centers domestic and there is no problem.
dagon
With the recent ChatGPT4o demo this seems even more like Late Stage Capitalist last gasp make work.
Given the rote nature of polite Japanese customer service interaction it will be even easier to automate than English so soon the trauma of stentorian customer voices will go away when the customer service jobs are automated.
BertieWooster
When you have to sit through hours of "press 1 for XYZ, press 2 for ABC," and when you finally get a human to talk with, he or she apologises every other sentence, of course, people get angry. If the AI software just answers the questions without sickly apology, it might be an improvement.
sakurasuki
It would be much better if those AI were used to solve actual problem, not just make nice response while the actual problem being unsolved.
リッチ
Stupid at the least. How to make your customers more irate than to put push 1 and push 2 and talk to a robot. Self service customer service is becoming ridiculous here. They are returning to their roots. Softbank always was the worst company for customer service.
Peter Neil
sooner or later they’ll adopt the u.s. system.
no phone numbers to call and solve it yourself with theses instructions.
is it plugged in?
turn it off then on again.
is your router plugged in?
turn it off and start it again.JeffLee
Softbank suddenly cares about customer service? That's a laugh.
diobrando
Softbank is well known for its worst customer service, AI will push it in grave.
factchecker
This will just make them more irate. Another example where Japan treats the symptom not the cause.
GBR48
Be nice to customer service staff. It's not their fault, they don't earn a sack of cash and they have to follow a script. And consider yourself lucky to get through to a human being. Companies are shifting to AI bots and web only support.
puregaijin
Seems like more of attacking the direct cause than the root cause. It could make an already irritable customer, more so.
Daninthepan
What if I call crying and emotional? Does it neutralize this too? What if I call and I'm jovial? Will my jokes be ruined? (No great loss there).
hooktrunk2
I'm not sure how it's going to work, but I think it might be a relief for the support workers. I can't imagine taking call after call frustrated customers' calls. I try to remember that when I am having a problem with some device and call the support number--when I can find one that is.
rainyday
And the societal descent into an AI dominated dystopian hellhole pauses to take an unexpected detour into the realm of making angry people physically incapable of expressing their anger.
Didn’t see that coming and am not looking forward to seeing where developers will be 5 years from now with this stuff.
yakyak
Just wait how angry you will be when AI shuts off your service and you have no one to talk to?
TaiwanIsNotChina
I just hope and pray that similar AI bots can end the scourge of spam phone calls or that the fight between spammer and AI can go off into the stars.
Redemption
A miserable job. Why not transfer them to a call center in India like US companies do?
Zaphod
We are just at the beginning of the AI age. While calming customs sounds benevolent, there is much more in the pipeline. Think political influence, election meddling, information suppression, mass indoctrination. We already see the beginning of this. Just think of corporate SNS are using AI to censor politically unwanted comments in real time now. Try it yourself on Insta etc.
Jonathan Prin
Suppressing the way how a human expresses himself ?
Soon every human will have his AI butler that will call AI customer service.
I can tell you it won't be paradise and won't solve anything.
Redemption
You will have to pay up to avoid the AI nonsense. For example, I pay an annual fee for an Amex card because I can call and get a response and action. My other visa card is useless if anything comes up.
Wesley
The problem is not AI.
The problem is the humans who PROGRAM the AI.
DanteKH
So the company with THE WORST support in Japan, and on top 10 in the world, will become even more unfriendlier with the Customers. Nice.
But they will still charge callous prices for their mobile services and very crappy 3rd-world Internet, without any hesitation.