Insurance company MetLife Inc. has begun using computerized
analytical tools to coach its call center operators on how to interact with
customers.
When I read that two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal’s regular feature frighteningly named “The
Future of Everything”, it made me laugh, made me sorrowful, and made me think
for a very long time about the state of the relationship between man and
machine. Using computers to analyze
“things”—I can accept that. But the
software employed by MetLife “listens” to the conversations between customers
and employees—“the conversational dance” as the behavioral science officer at
the software design company called it—and coaches the employees in real time on
how to enhance the interaction. This
could include prompts to be peppier if the agent is perceived by the computer
as not being energetic enough or might even cue the agent to act more
empathetically, based on the computer’s perception of the caller’s emotional
state.
Pardon me, but aren’t those skills we should expect people
to possess without needing a machine to tell them how the other person in the
conversation is feeling? And how genuine
is the empathy offered only after being prodded by a machine?
To my thinking, this trend owes to society’s growing dependence
on computers rather than human interaction, the prevalence of screen time over
face-to-face time. Instead of playing a
game of baseball in the vacant lot with some neighbor kids, a child sits alone
with a computer game for hours on end.
Instead of attending a funeral, we send online condolences. When a friend is down, we send an emoticon in
a text message and think that our duty to that friend is done. We are losing the art of interacting with
each other in any but the most superficial and meaningless ways. How do we learn to get along but by
interacting in ways that demand our attention and require effort and
empathy? Is it any surprise we so often
hear the plea these days, “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, no; not if we’re absorbed in entertaining
ourselves and posting selfies, waiting for our online “friends” to comment on
them.
It would be a comical irony, did it not raise such a
disturbing thought, that the name of the company that designed the program used
by MetLife is Cogito. As in the Latin
verb form “to think”. As in the
philosopher Rene Descartes’ proposition “Cogito
ergo sum”: “I think, therefore I am.”
So if the machine is doing the thinking and we react, do we then cease
to be? Or at the very least, are we less
human?
In 2016 MetLife abandoned its 30-year marketing program that
featured Snoopy and the Peanuts
cartoon strip characters. At the time,
Adweek.com wrote that “A major driver for the rebrand was MetLife’s polling of
some 55,000 customers worldwide, when the company learned that many people feel
overwhelmed by how quickly things change in today’s world.” The new tagline, new logo, and supposedly new
approach to doing business were all meant to reflect the company’s “partnership
with its customers”. And just who, or
what, is it that’s “partnering” with the customers?
Perhaps MetLife is just trying to work with the hand it has
been dealt: a new generation of workers who have no idea how to engage in a
real conversation without the aid of technology, or how to read social
cues. For that, I can’t blame MetLife. But it’s a shame that these workers could not
be more like the comic strip characters, playing baseball together, chatting at
the school bus stop (without smartphones), starting a business like Lucy’s
psychiatry kiosk (which was all about talking to each other), or any of the
other dozens of ways the characters learned about life in their two-dimensional
world.
I miss Snoopy, MetLife.
Until next time,
Roger
“But Jesus, on His
side, did not trust Himself to them—for He knew them all. He did not need anyone to tell Him what
people were like: He understood human nature.” John 2:24, 25, Phillips*
*Copyright 1972 by J.B. Phillips
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