A New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group is building a robot which it says will get really angry.
The big idea is that companies really have not got a clue how to deal with angry customers and even actors have a job being accurately angry all day for training purposes.
Touchpoint is investing $500,000 to develop, is being built with input from one of Australia’s big four banks, which is supplying reams of real-life customer interactions that have been collated over the past two years. Telecommunications companies and insurance firms are also contributing data.
The project carries the name Radiant which in the novels of Isaac Asimov predicted how humans might behave in the future.
Once complete, the project will simulate hundreds of millions of angry customer interactions that will help companies better understand the behaviours and processes that trigger customer outbursts. Such as not mentioning the war when talking to Japanese or German customers, or referring to the French as cheese eating surrender monkeys/
Touchpoint CEO Frank van der Velden said that companies don’t have the numbers of staff to go through this manually. A bank receive data every day. But it gets to a point where that dataset grows so large that it becomes meaningless unless you can interpret it. That’s where Radiant will fit in.
“We’re not in the business of managing complaints; we are in the business of managing issues that might turn into complaints. We’re at the top of the cliff, not at the bottom. This will allow companies to better predict and identify those issues,” he told the Australian Business Review.
