Susannah Grant
WE live in Bot City. Bots are driving me dotty.
Whatever happened to personalised customer service? We are constantly subjected to endless algorithm-driven adverts, but where is the human element in the sales pitch?
The other day I wanted to book a night out with the girls in a pizza restaurant, Grosso Napoletano.
I tried booking via their website, and whilst the restaurant claimed to be open on a Monday night, it wouldn’t let me book a table for 7 a fortnight later. I even tried booking for one person.
Again, apparently no tables available. Whilst I recognise that I am a pizza-holic and willing to devour Marinaras throughout the Four Seasons, I very much doubted that the cavernous branch of this restaurant chain had already been booked out by Madrileños clamouring for pillowy charred crusts on a wintry Monday night.
The phone number on the website turned out to be a WhatsApp-only number, and thence commenced the bot chat. I don’t know if the programmer of this bot was one pizza short of a pepperoni, but it was incapable of understanding that I just wanted to book a table.
In the end, I deleted the chat and called a competitor with humans who seductively purred “Ciao Bella” as I spelt out my name.
Having arrived early at my human-booked restaurant, I popped across the road to have a word with the staff at the deserted Grosso Napoletano. The manager stopped folding napkins briefly to hear me out. She agreed that there were teething problems with their bots, and after much persuasion, she handed me the restaurant’s direct telephone number, usually reserved for delivery drivers.
Ironically, disobedient chatbots don’t seem to have tarnished the success of this winning formula of a restaurant that boasts branches from Murcia to San Sebastian.
Far from it, there are now 50 of them, plus a kiosk and a food truck. The pizzaoli hail from Naples and each scorch 300 pizzas a day in authentic stone ovens. Ninety seconds is all it takes, which might sound like ultra-fast food, but the two-day double-fermented base keeps their pizzas firmly in the slow food category and puts me off attempting to imitate them at home.
Ever since I returned from a stint of teaching English in Florence in my 20s, I need a weekly dough hit, and I’m far from monogamous when it comes to pizza parlours.
In fact, I’ll happily flit from pizzaiolo to pizzaiolo searching for that uniformly crunchy romana base rather than the Neapolitan inflated-edged variety. My children, on the other hand, could live solely off top-heavy Domino’s.
It’s a standing joke in our family that I will peruse the pizza menu for hours before ordering a margherita with rocket on top wherever we go.
In my book, the benchmark of quality of any establishment can be measured against whether the waiter checks that the rocket is indeed a replacement for the oregano as opposed to an addition.
No self-respecting Italian would have both. Whilst I admit the peppery rocket topping is a personal invention of mine, I am pretty much a purist when it comes to pizza; less is definitely more. In every other aspect of my life, especially when it comes to money or chocolate… more is definitely more. In fact, the more the merrier. However, on my margherita, I want top-quality ingredients, sprinkled thinly over a crispy base.
Despite the frustration they can cause, around 1.5 billion people worldwide are using chatbots. The countries with the largest share of these automated bots are the United States, India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.
On a good day, the two main benefits are, firstly, that they offer instant support (or an instant headache) and, secondly, that they offer it 24/7. It seems that chatbots are predicted to become the primary customer service channel for a quarter of businesses by 2027. (Source: Tidio).
As with all technology, artificial-intelligence-powered virtual assistants, chatbots, customer service, and engagement are becoming increasingly sophisticated. To the extent that, according to Price Waterhouse Cooper, almost 30% of customers don’t know if their last customer service chat was with a human or a chatbot.
Let’s hope that in years to come, the authentic pizza experience is not reduced to a virtual pizzaiolo called Gino singing “Just One Cornetto” in perfect pitch. All I do know is that as I write this, I am conversing on WhatsApp with a Hewlett Packard chatbot who is supposedly fixing my printer.
After an hour and forty-five minutes of repeating my personal details and my printer’s woes, I’ve just asked him if he can just phone me. He obviously didn’t appreciate my slight on his digital aptitude for fixing the issue and hung up.
I tried the callback service, and less than 5 minutes later, a lovely South American lady asked if she could access my laptop to fix the problem, which she did in less than 5 minutes. She even took the trouble to talk through the process afterwards while I took notes so that I can do it myself on all the other house devices. Amazing what humans can do these days.
It appears that nurses are not even required to look after patients in hospital these days. Following a recent operation, I was hooked up to a sleeve in intensive care. It seemed to wait until I was just nodding off before suddenly tightening its iron grip, squeezing the life out of my upper arm and taking my blood pressure at regular intervals throughout the night, whilst the rest of the staff cheered Viva España at a football match on their mobile phones.
They may as well have sent me home with a camera to monitor me remotely. They certainly didn’t notice I was happily munching on dark chocolate almonds I’d squirreled into my toiletry bag. Even my surgeon was trying to persuade me to be operated on by a robot—presumably so he didn’t have to miss any of the footie either. Maybe in years to come, patients will be put to sleep with 3D glasses on so that they can play interactive football with Ronaldo while a robot takes out their appendix.
