Our story began with a frustrating experience disputing a credit card transaction with Bank of America. After enduring 30 minutes on hold, I finally connected with a human, only to be disconnected due to a technical glitch. The entire ordeal took 1.5 hours to resolve a mere $200 transaction. And that was just one of many similar experiences. Whether it was calling Morgan Stanley to sell shares, negotiating a bill with Xfinity, postponing an appeal with the Palo Alto traffic court, or explaining mistakes to the IRS, the frustration was the same. I often found myself contemplating if it was worth losing money just to avoid these exhausting customer service calls.
This Bank of America experience got so much under my skin, that I was urged to dig deeper to understand the issue. I found out that credit card company makes more than $12b from late fee payments annually. The truth behind this data is that either people don't know most of late fee can be waived if you call or people were just as sick as I am of calling customer service. Then I got one more step and tried to understand why people don't want call customer service even though there is immediate payout by doing so, and I found out more interesting facts:
- Most of service bills are negotiable, such as mobile phone, cable, utility etc.
- Credit card company is willing to dispute a transaction as long as you call them
- Only 5% of customers trust the automatic callback option
- 79% of customers are being transferred at least once while they are calling
- 53% of consumers say they need to repeat their reason for calling multiple agents
- 60% of agents lack tools they need to deliver meaningful CX
The list can go much longer! You can find more interesting facts here
Despite advancements in customer service technology, businesses often still fail to resolve issues efficiently, and there are various reasons: to begin with, it is costly to maintain a call center, and one customer inbound call could cost more than $10; secondly, there are emails, chatbot, and Q&A etc. to leave customers to automated system for cost reasons, and those system cannot cover all cases; lastly, businesses often have conflict of interests with customers such as waiving a late fee or negotiating a bill, and they don't want it to be too easy.
What happened recently in AI made it possible to handle communication with customer service. We spent 3 months to build an AI Agent, Pine, and it works really well and helped many customers deal with customer service on various issues, saving tremendous amount of time. We don't mean disrespect to send an AI agent to communicate with a human, but it means a lot of disrespect to let a loyal customer wait for more than half an hour or even longer and be transferred multiple times and keep repeating themselves just to solve their problems related to the product or service they are sold to.
We believe Pine is the first step in revolutionizing customer service. Our goal is to be your dedicated assistant, tackling various business interactions. We are working on more features to fight corporate bureaucracy!
