Digital Love

Conversational AI handles more and more complex use cases each day. Simple deflection bots are now fully automated agents, serving increasingly complicated customer needs. But there is still a type of task that AI doesn’t resolve - that sticky issue where the caller ‘just needs to speak to a human’. So far, the pure service of emotions - the diffusion of a confrontation with a caller about an issue with the company’s product or service - has been the province of human agents. WIth the rise of generative AI, those days of getting emotional service from humans are numbered: machines are going to handle emotional labor too. Conversational generative AI systems will be better at handling emotional customers - and it won’t bother them one bit. In this post, I explore emotional labor in customer service and how advances in generative AI make AI poised to take over even the most stressful of customer situations.

Customers Demand An Emotional Style of Service from Modern Institutions

Human customers have feelings. The American Psychological Association describes emotions as “conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings, usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.” It is fundamental to the human condition to feel things in response to our environment and changes to it. Feelings are varied and intense, and as a part of engagement in modern society, humans keep some things to ourselves - humans manage their feelings. In her 1983 book “The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling”, Arlie Russell Hochschild argues “Managing feeling is an art fundamental to civilized living…in the broadest terms the cost is usually worth the fundamental benefit.” Managing feelings is a core aspect of operating in modern society.

Managing feelings can extend into the workplace as the predominant task of a job. Modern institutions, private and public, supply satisfaction to their customers, and customers expect a level of service from companies and public institutions of every size. These service jobs encompass constant face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public and require the worker to produce an emotional state in the human customer on the other end of the service transaction. Hochschild describes that in service jobs, “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself.” When a customer experiences emotional distress because of an institution's product or service and reaches out to the institution, the customer expects both transactional and emotional remediation of the situation.?

Customer Service Agents Supply Emotional Labor, to Their Own Detriment

The customer service agent’s job is to resolve the situation - to unwind both the scenario and the customer’s emotional state. The agent performs this task by altering his natural emotional state in service of the customer. Hochschild calls this type of work ‘emotional labor’ and describes it as “the management of a feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display…[emotional labor] requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in another”. Every time an agent smiles through his teeth while hearing the riot act from an angry customer, the agent is performing emotional labor.

Performing emotional labor has real costs for the worker. Hochschild argues that “emotional labor poses a challenge to a person’s sense of self”. Over time, as a service worker continuously performs emotional labor in service of customers, the worker can become alienated from his own feelings. In the contact center, this cost manifests itself through employee burnout and chronically high turnover. The customer’s desire to ‘just talk to someone’ saddles the agent with a taxing burden on their emotional well-being. The consequence is existential: if the agent’s feelings belong to the institution and not himself, what exactly does the agent feel?

Conversational AI Is a Good Fit for Customer Service

Computers have several advantages over humans when it comes to certain types of labor. They can perform massive computations instantly; they never tire; they can scale themselves instantly; they can run complex systems continuously, without forgetting a step. Conversational AI in the contact center leverages these characteristics to provide high-quality, on-demand service for millions of calls each year.?

Advances in AI have enabled high-fidelity real-time audio transcription, human-like voices, and sophisticated understanding of complex human natural language. This set of features enables conversational automation to complete a workflow based on what the customer says to the bot. When it comes to the scripting, many automations leverage a wide range of pre-written scripts, played back depending on what the machine transcribes and understands from the caller. This architecture enables complex scenario handling, but the bot scripts themselves are pre-determined by the human conversation designer. So when it comes to the customer who ‘just wants to speak to a human’ and read someone the riot act, the bot isn’t much help. Calls that ‘need a human touch’ are escalated to agents.

Generative AI Is Primed to Handle Emotional Labor in the Contact Center

Generative AI unlocks the tireless capacity of computers with respect to handling emotional labor. Applying generative AI to a conversational system’s scripting enables the AI to generate a novel response to the caller’s input every time. In lieu of a canned script, a system leveraging a properly trained generative system could tarry back and forth with an upset customer, letting the caller unload all grievances, without the AI incurring any of the emotional cost of the situation. Customers can get angry at computers, and they can handle that emotional labor as easily as they can tackle a complex algorithm - literally, no sweat.

The virtual customer service agent who never tires of human emotional baggage is less eye-catching than a coding co-pilot, an AI tutor, or AI girlfriend, but the concept is the same. Humans tire out! People become exhausted by the emotions of other humans. A service agent who can answer an infinite number of questions, to an infinite number of customers, at all hours of the day, no matter the demand, is right for the job. It actually can fulfill both the transactional and emotional needs of customers, where humans just can’t.

AI Is the Future of Customer Service

As AI agents proliferate, some customers will continue to ask for a human, needing ‘the human touch’, even if the AI is ready and able to take the verbal punishment. ‘The human touch’ is an interaction that feels good for the angry customer, but probably not great for the receiving human agent. It’s faulty to assume that the human touch is optimal for all parties involved; even if the human agent on the other end appears to handle it well, there is an emotional toll for taking verbal abuse from an angry customer.?

Generative AI will revolutionize emotional labor in customer service. With advanced capabilities in handling complex scenarios and providing on-demand service without emotional fatigue, AI offers a valuable alternative to human agents. Embracing AI in customer service ensures better experiences for customers, reduces employee burnout, and maintains consistent service quality. The future of handling tough situations with empathy and efficiency lies in leveraging AI's capabilities to manage emotional labor effectively.