Is AI Helping?
More and more companies imagine they are saving money by implementing AI Chat and Voice Response solutions to customers’ issues. Nobody there when you call or use the chat box, just an allegedly intelligent response mechanism which is supposed to understand your problem and give a solution.
Except in so many cases, it doesn’t. It can’t figure out what your issue is, it offers non-solutions to non-existent problems never getting close to what your trouble is and leaves you anywhere from frustrated to furious. This is especially likely if there are any nuances to your problems or questions. Some typical poor response scenarios are (the following generated by AI):
Common AI Failures
- Generic or Irrelevant Information:
- Responding to a request about a return policy with information about store hours.
- Offering a troubleshooting guide for an internet connection when the customer is asking about a billing issue.
- Inaccurate or Fabricated Information:
- Â AI can do what is called AI hallucination such as:
- Making up a nonexistent company policy, like falsely promising a refund that doesn’t exist.
- Providing false or misleading information that can damage trust.
- AI generated responses that are incorrect, misleading, or even complete fabrication.
- Repetitive or Confusing Interactions:
- Getting stuck in a loop, asking the same question repeatedly even after the customer has provided the information.
- Repeating irrelevant details that don’t address the customer’s actual problem.
- Lack of Empathy and Human Connection:
- Responding in a robotic or unnatural way, failing to acknowledge or understand the customer’s emotions, especially when they’re frustrated or upset.
- Delivering responses that feel cold and impersonal.
- Difficulty Escalating to a Human:
- Making it difficult or impossible to connect with a human agent when the AI cannot resolve the issue.
- Providing a clunky or non-existent escalation path, leaving customers feeling trapped in an automated system.
So, How Do We Feel About All This?
The upshot of this is that those many, many companies resorting to AI are fast gaining a reputation for being utterly out-of-touch and maddeningly unhelpful. It becomes painfully obvious that the customer does not, in fact, matter. All that does matter is money and whether we are aware of it or not, this hurts, and on a fairly deep level.
We’re long past the point of no return to a time when the pursuit of money was not the main or only concern, but must business become completely devoid of humanness?
Of course, much of this situation is generated by the long established practice of mass producing products in other countries (to save money) so that there is no one who is responsible, who we can turn to, speak with. Humanity – people – are less and less involved in the creation and sale of anything and consequently, in their support.
We can sometimes reach someone in the store we bought something from but good luck talking to the actual maker of a product you bought online. You can speeak to an artisan at your local craft fair or your neighbourhood bakery but it is rare in ecommerce to connect to the source – the maker of a product. And no wonder they want to stay hidden, their product is not what it pretends to be. Most likely it’s at least part fake and often cheaply made.
Which is the other pillar beneath the edifice of business dehumanized. Fake Stuff. So very, many, products these days, are fake. Plastic that looks like marble, fake wood, sprayed coatings passing for metal, gold plated nickel jewellery, artificial plants. The list is endless.
These three realities, AI customer (non)-support, outsourced, cheaply made items and imitation, artificial products are all of a piece and all contribute the disauthenticity of our daily life – our experience of commerce with which we engage daily, both in the purchase and the use of the products we buy. We’re living in artificiallity-land with imitation products cheaply made far away and designed to look like something they are not, with dehumanized, algorithm driven customer support that all too often is not supportive. And we are not liking it.
And, We're Not Having It
Which is, our customers tell us, what makes ThirstyCat Fountains so appealing. It is not only the high quality products we offer that really are, and not pretending to be, what they appear to be and that our fountains are completely handmade, but even more surprising is that every part of every process in their creation is done by humans. Nothing is automated, including our customer service. Call or email us and it is one of the founders of ThirstyCats who will respond to you, promptly and thoroughly.
Our entire shop is a window back to the days of artists and artisans learning and working within an utterly authentic environment, all of us doing what needs to be done for that piece at this time. Every fountain is worked with by at least six sets of hands a dozen times in its journey from the bag of clay to the loading dock. Throwing and trimming the vessels, moving the pieces to the drying room, assembling the sets for bisquing, making the glazes, glazing, loading and unloading the kiln, assembling the fountains, boxing them and getting them to the loading dock is all by done by all of us; by people.
AI Rules, Not Here
In countless industries AI and automation are taking over. It is the Next and the Now Big Thing. But not for us. As a business it is of course imperative that we generate a profit. If we don’t, we cease to exist. But profit is not and never has been our primary value. Our primary value is and has always been quality and beauty.
In that persuit we have created an enviroment in which people are happy to be, doing what they are good at and enjoy doing. That is who ThirstyCat Fountains is; real people applying real skills in the creation of real, quality fountains for cats. We are; Elise, Floyd, Jackie, Joyce, Keith, Lauren, Lorna, Madalyn and Vita. We welcome you and we thank you.