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| A robot is being built to help call centre staff deal with irate customers. |
More evil than Megatron, more threatening than The Terminator's T-800 – a Kiwi company is building a robot filled with all the irate interactions between customers and call centres.
Auckland-based Touchpoint Group is calling it "the world's angriest artificial intelligence program".
Named Radiant, the robot "listens" to and simulates hundreds of millions of angry customer interactions collected from banking and insurance call centres to better understand what leads to explosive conversations.
The more calls it listens to, the smarter it gets.
Radiant is still in development, but eventually call centre staff dealing with angry customers should be able to put them on hold while they ask their computers what the best way forward might be.
The company has spent more than two years collecting the furious interactions, Touchpoint Group chief executive officer Frank van der Velden said.
"We realised if we could identify patterns, companies could avert 'angry customer syndrome'.
"We kept voice calls and reverted them into text. You wouldn't believe what people actually say – people get pretty angry. We've seen expletives, all the expletives you can think of."
Based on all those examples, the robot should be able to advise call centre staff on how to resolve a situation before it gets ugly.
"There are literally thousands of variables that can cause a customer to be angry," van der Velden said.
"People get really emotional very quickly, so that's why the time to resolution is the most important thing. The customer might not be totally happy but at least they've got a conclusion instead of waiting on the phone while their blood is boiling even more."
The Radiant software would be an asset to insurance and banking companies that presently wasted time and money, and lost customers, over bad call centre experiences, he said.
"Contact centres are where most of us end up having a not-so-happy experience. There's a high churn rate, training is an issue, and people like you and I expect people in contact centres to know everything – and the poor sods don't.
"Companies all want to avoid that obviously, so the more tools they can provide to people at the front line the better."
Radiant is named after Prime Radiant, a supercomputer that could predict the future in novels by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov.
The project is one of the largest artificial intelligence projects of its kind, and Touchpoint has already attracted the interest of a Spanish insurance company.
The company is investing $500,000 in Radiant and is working with one of New Zealand's big banks on the project.
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