With the recent upsurge of technology, many companies are employing these technologies in many of their operations including sales, record keeping and as far as customer service. Advertising and publicity are now done more effectively than ever, reaching more customers. Another big area that has also evolved with technology is customer service.
Organizations are now employing sophisticated methods to get feedback from customers and give the appropriate response. Some organizations have however gone too far in their bid to employ these sophistications in delivering customer service to their clients. Customer service is now run entirely by automated systems instead of human beings.
Google has reportedly been running most of its services by automated systems. Automated systems provide help to customers; disseminate information to customers and almost everything. Google Health is being run by an automated system, but offers no live help for the system. It means that sick people using this facility only get to interact with a piece of software and not a human.
The fundamental flaw here is that, software is designed to accept a predictable input and produce a predictable output. Human behavior is however unpredictable. If for instance, the health system is designed to prescribe malaria drugs for a patient reporting with a headache and fever. What happens if a patient walks in with a headache but no fever? Provisions could be made for such cases, but there will always be an element of unpredictability at play. A customer service system that suggests solutions may be ineffective when the user encounters a new problem that was not factored in the design of the system.
In any information system that will be used by people, it is very crucial to offer human help to customers, though it may come at a higher cost. Google must be able to offer human help for its facilities as humans are in a better position to handle unpredictable situations than software and hardware.
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