“Technology makes everything more complicated,” an elderly relative said to me. It’s hard to argue with.
In this specific situation she had paid to reserve a parking spot that, it turned out, she didn’t need. She tried to get a refund only to find out that’s not possible—all you can do is try to sell your parking spot to another customer on the parking complex’s “innovative” re-seller platform. Since situations like this did not happen in the recent past (when the company would have simply had one more spot to sell again), she blamed the technology.
That’s not an irrational feeling, but is technology to blame? Or is tech making life easier for companies while making it harder for their customers?
The tech investment class has complained, loudly, that mainstream society has a negative view of technology, allegedly due primarily to what they see and read in the media. I think people’s negative views of the tech sector has more to do with that parking spot, and situations like it, than anything else. Every day people experience companies using technology to make their lives worse. Those paper cuts, more than media narratives, are the reason people have increasingly negative views of technology.
The economics here are not complex. Customer service is an expense; companies are also always attempting to lower expenses, and now technology makes it easier than ever to shift more of the cost of customer service onto the customer themselves.
The parking spot is an example of this. Not that long ago a customer could reasonably expect to get at least a partial refund for an unused parking reservation, likely by talking to a person on the phone. It was easy for the customer, but it wasn’t optimal for the company, which had to pay a human to talk on the phone and then actually give money back to their customers. Now, technology could have made that faster for the customer by automating the return, but the parking barons saw an opportunity for more. Thanks to the internet, they can instead keep their customers’ money until someone else buys the parking spot (the parking lot takes a cut of the sale, of course). The customer does not benefit from this change—only the company does.
That’s not technology making things more complicated. It’s a business making things more complicated and using technology to obscure that. Pay attention and you’ll see this all over society. There’s stores replacing their clerks with self-checkout, forcing customers to do what was a paid job. There’s ‘home screens’ on our televisions full of service offerings we don’t have, obscuring what we are trying to find when we turn on the screen.
Anyone who has waited on hold for customer service is experiencing this same phenomenon. The company could, in theory, employ enough customer service agents so that you wouldn’t have to wait so long. They don’t, though, because that would cost more money. They could use technology to let you hang up and call you back when an agent is ready to help you (and to be fair, some organizations do), but even better to keep you in a holding pattern until an overworked agent is available or (ideally) you give up.
And there’s a brave new world of cost cutting coming up: AI customer agents. Instead of waiting for a person to solve your problem you can talk to a bot! This, if implemented, will allow companies to lay off thousands of workers, so they’re going to try. There’s only one downside: AI bots have a habit of making up policies, which can sometimes cost companies money. Ideally this would discourage companies from using the technology until it’s ready (even if that day never comes). More likely, though, the company lawyers will be sure to draft language that puts the burden of working out whether what the bot says is true or not on the customer.
Am I being pessimistic? Possibly. But the pattern is a clear one—too many companies, when given the chance, will happily use technology to increase their revenue by making their customers do more work. Technologists who want people to have a positive view of technology should start thinking of ways to reverse that trend.
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