In a T-Mobile online video, actor Rainn Wilson demonstrates the value of human agents.
It was only a matter of time before the oldest kind of customer service became the latest thing.
This week, telco T-Mobile is launching a new kind of intelligent customer service that counters the move toward better, smarter and AI-powered systems that seem almost human.
Instead, it is offering the original bot, humans.
Called the T-Mobile Team of Experts, this new strategy promises that customers won’t have to deal with phone menus or AI-powered bots unless they want to.
“Real customer service takes real people”, the company said in its announcement. “There are no robots or automated phone menus and no shouting ‘representative.’”
T-Mobile’s move is one of the most visible in what could be a building reaction to voice bots that don’t quite do the job (hello, American Express!) or phone menu trees that go on forever (we’re looking at you, Target!)
In other words, we may already be at the point where the coolest new intelligent tech is the oldest one we know: us.