Japanese tech companies NTT Communications Corp and SoftBank Corp are developing systems utilizing artificial intelligence to help call-center workers deal with abusive customers.
NTT Communications has created a call center support system that can monitor exchanges between customers and workers and display examples of appropriate responses on operators' screens.
In a demonstration open to the media, a prototype system offered an operator an example response to a customer complaint about a telecom contract. After the operator replied to the customer in line with the advice, it tagged the response "No problem."
The company says the system can reduce employees' psychological burden, with many operators finding it difficult to remain calm when receiving strongly worded complaints.
It is also expected to help reduce customer anger by offering swift responses, the company said.
SoftBank is also utilizing AI to develop a system that softens the tone of customers' voices when operators respond to their calls. The company aims to make it into a business by fiscal 2025, it said.
The development comes as so-called kasu-hara, or abusive behavior by customers, has become a social issue in recent years in Japan, a country known for its hospitality culture.
Some victims end up leaving their jobs or suffering from mental illness as a result of behavior ranging from verbal abuse to being forced to apologize by prostrating themselves, prompting many firms in the retail and restaurant sectors to draw up guidelines to handle abusive behavior by customers.
© KYODO
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Peter Neil
that’s not ai.
it’s a list of canned responses to questions or comments, like every customer service person in the world has now.
more ai buzzwording to seem relevant.
didou
Prostrating behavior is the extreme but a very rare and uncommon case, put in the headline by the media when it happened.
The issue I faced here when complaining about issues is that many staff, especially the young ones, do not have any answer rather than the sumimasen, which is sometimes annoying when expecting a clear reply.
Some dude
In a previous life I worked in a credit card call centre, and we were always told to agree with / try and empathise with an aggrieved caller, but without being dramatic or obviously fake. The main thing was, they want to know that someone has heard them and understood what their issue is. A nonstop stream of "sorry" doesn't provide that guarantee.
If a caller started crossing the line into verbally abusive territory, it was often recommended to transfer them to a manager, who was more experienced and therefore better at defusing such situations.
I once heard a possibly apocryphal story about an exceptionally abusive caller. The agent got rather upset by this caller and a manager of considerable seniority took over. The caller continued to be abusive, at which point the manager simply cancelled the caller's card there and then.
virusrex
I missed the part where the AI automatically reports abusive behavior to the proper authorities when it clearly surpasses what any employee should be dealing with.
DanteKH
Japan has the most polite and friendly customer service in the world by far. That's not an exaggeration. But as always, there are some customers who abuse this kindness and still follow the mindset "Customer is God". This is now a cultural thing and is so deep rooted that it can never change.
However, as a customer who had dealed with both Softbank, Docomo and similar overpriced mobile companies here, sometimes I can understand where the abuse and frustration comes from.
Those mobile companies support in Japan, but not only, are the most incompetent and cold I have ever got a chance to interact with. For all my queries or inquiries, the only questions I was receiving was "we cannot", "we do not", "I don't know", "this is part of the contract's details", "we cannot help because...", etc, etc. The tech support is actually that bad. But very polite. :)