Earlier this year I wrote about an Accenture study that looked at how consumers responded to automated customer service.  This, and a couple of other studies revealed that we often crave the human touch when it comes to getting our problem solved.  I should add however, that this isn’t so much because we desire human contact so much as the humans are usually better at resolving our issues.

Care over chat bots

With chat bots becoming an increasingly popular means of delivering customer service, it’s perhaps something for companies to consider, especially as a recent study from the University of Wisconsin found that we’re much more likely to punish a company if we get bad advice from a machine than if we received the same advice from a person.

The study involved participants having to complete a task with the aid of either an expert system, or an expert human.  Unbeknownst to them, each system was programmed to give bad advice half way through the process in order to test how they would respond.

The results showed that people quickly dumped the automated advisor as soon as it gave them bad advice, whereas the human advisor was forgiven for their mistake and continued to be used in providing assistance.

The experiment is useful in that the tasks being undertaken mirror the kind of sophisticated endeavors that computers are increasingly participating in.  What’s more, it wasn’t testing the level of trust participants had in the advice given to them by the human vs the machine, but instead how they responded to each having been given bad advice.

“This has very important implications because time and time again we are seeing humans being replaced by computers in the workplace,” the authors say. “This research suggests that any potential efficiency gains by moving towards automation might be offset because all the automation has to do is err once, and people will rapidly lose trust and stop using it – this is one of the few studies out there that really show the potential downsides of automation in the workplace.”