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A few months In the past, my fiancée and I spent a couple of com. ebikes. We live in a particularly hilly area of Atlanta, a very hilly city, and we both had just earned bonuses at work, which made $2,000 or so per bike seem easy for a moment.
We placed our orders online, and days later, my fiancée’s beautiful, feature-rich bike arrived at our door. My product, purchased separately from a different retailer, was backordered and then delayed again and again.
Finally, one Wednesday evening, I received a text from FedEx confirming that my bike had been delivered to our address and signed for. This seemed impossible, given that when the message arrived, I was standing in my kitchen, without my bike, air frying a batch of chicken thighs.
I checked outside our apartment. My package was not there. So, I checked my order confirmation, only to learn that the bike had been signed for by someone with the mysterious initials “MM,” which did not match mine, my fiancée, or anyone in our building. Whether it was stolen, misplaced, or delivered to the wrong address, it doesn’t matter as much as finding a solution. I proceeded to do this the next day by calling FedEx Customer service Helpline.
What followed was a months-long descent into customer service hell, during which I spent hours working virtually, chatbotManaged waiting rooms—with FedEx, the bike company, my bank, my credit card company, and even the local police department—trying desperately to find a real live person who could talk to me, let alone solve my $2,000 problem.
The new “sludge”.
Perhaps the strangest thing about my situation is that it has become incredibly ordinary. In recent years, companies have used artificial intelligence With particular vitality in their customer service arms, often at the expense of human staff.
In a survey of customer service leaders published in April, 31 percent said They have already reduced or are planning to reduce headcount due to the adoption of AI. The majority of leaders surveyed say they are shifting their human agents to new roles or adding new tasks to their workload rather than simply laying them off.
But some leaders were more impudent. Verizon CEO Dan Shulman She recently told Bloomberg AI is likely to replace a “large proportion” of the company’s customer service work, noting that it is one of the business sectors most exposed to changes brought about by technology.
For consumers like me, this has led to a less humane and more severe version of the frustrating wait times, stuck music, and lack of answers that have characterized bad customer service for decades. Furthermore, these systems are sometimes used intentionally, via an industrial tactic known as “Sludge“, in an attempt to discourage customers looking for a solution.
As Ryan Hamilton, a marketing professor and consumer psychology researcher at Emory University, points out, artificial intelligence has given sludge a new face.
“Sludge existed before AI,” says Hamilton. “But artificial intelligence, as with everything else, has intensified its dystopian nature.”
Whether it’s due to organically bad experiences, intentional sludge, or a combination of both, it’s clear that shoppers aren’t satisfied with the state of AI-driven customer service. In a report published in May that included consumers from the US, UK and Canada, 59 percent said they were Frustrated with customer service agents who use artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, 85% said they would prefer to talk to a real person.
My personal Chatbot hell
When my e-bike disappeared, nearly every phone call led me to a chatbot, where FedEx’s AI agents often ignored my requests to speak with a human representative.
Even my local police department made the dilemma more brutal. When I called them to file a lost property report, I was asked to leave my information with the chatbot and wait for an officer to call me back.
