Raise your hand if you like things to be irritating and difficult.
Sure, the tin-foil lining of things not going the way they need to be does give me something to complain about, and I do like the sound of my own voice. But by and large no one really enjoys not having things be right.
Now raise your hand if you expect things to be irritating and difficult—especially with regards to customer service.
And that’s where security issues arise.
At this point, we’re so used to fake ‘Our menu options have changed’, ‘We’re experiencing higher than average call volume’, and this song in particular that customer service phone errands being like falling down the stairs is just seen as the cost of having business to do. But this is one of the things that catches us off our guard, and makes us easier to scam.
Yes. Us. Not just the uneducated, or the seasoned folks, but people with businesses and degrees and a sense of poise and rationality.
Take Cory Doctrow for instance. His account of how the Swiss cheese model of causality and how accustomed he was to subpar service from his credit union’s night reps cost him about eight grand was both unflinchingly honest and eye-opening.
“I’d dealt with these folks before – they service a ton of little credit unions, and generally the call quality isn’t great and the staff will often make mistakes like mispronouncing my credit union’s name.
That’s what happened here – the guy was on a terrible VOIP line and I had to ask him to readjust his mic before I could even understand him.”
In his already irritated state, Doctrow, listened to the person on the phone lay out some charges he knew he didn’t make, verified the last seven digits of his card number, then went about his business. When he went to his credit union days later to get a new card, he detailed his frustration with their after hours line, citing fraudulent charges he’d seen made the day after the initial call, he was told there was no record of the institution contacting him…because that call was from the fraudster.
“I frantically rewound my conversation, trying to figure out if this could possibly be true. I hadn’t given him anything apart from some very anodyne info, like what city I live in (which is in my Wikipedia entry), my date of birth (ditto), and the last four digits of my card.
Wait a sec.
He hadn’t asked for the last four digits. He’d asked for the last seven digits. At the time, I’d found that very frustrating, but now – “The first nine digits are the same for every card you issue, right?” I asked the VP.
I’d given him my entire card number.
Goddammit.”
The holes in the cheese lined up perfectly. But the biggest of them remained the expectation of horrible service.
“I trusted this fraudster specifically because I knew that the outsource, out-of-hours contractors my bank uses have crummy headsets, don’t know how to pronounce my bank’s name, and have long-ass, tedious, and pointless standardized questionnaires they run through when taking fraud reports. All of this created cover for the fraudster, whose plausibility was enhanced by the rough edges in his pitch – they didn’t raise red flags.”
He went on to describe how the advent of AI in customer service will train people to expect even more tedium and erroneous paths—leaving more and more people open to exactly what happened to him, with even less effort.
“As this kind of fraud reporting and fraud contacting is increasingly outsourced to AI, bank customers will be conditioned to dealing with semi-automated systems that make stupid mistakes, force you to repeat yourself, ask you questions they should already know the answers to, and so on. In other words, AI will groom bank customers to be phishing victims.”
Yikes. But he’s right. If we’re all throwing our hands up in the air and primed to be frustrated, things will only get easier and easier for the circling con artists. And it’s not just a problem for consumers and employees—your business transactions are just as much at risk. The only way to shrink or shift the ‘hole in the cheese’ is to do right by employees and customers by bringing on a full, dedicated staff who’re both inclined to thrive in a customer service environment and compensated enough to truly care about what they do.
Of course it’s not going to be easy. A local person, physically living even right next door to you, might have a noticeably “bad” foreign accent. Will hiring them as an agent make your company look bad? Can you afford a discrimination lawsuit loss if they can prove their accent was what knocked them down as a candidate? And as always, won’t somebody think of the shareholders? Will you get dinged as a poor investment because you’re willing to provide and retain a well-trained human staff?
I can accept that combatting the issue is one of those things that’s only simple if everyone gets on board at once. But if we can get lead out of gasoline, we can come together on this, regardless of foot dragging and allegations of “complexities” from people who don’t want to deal with the realities of a better world not involving infinitely exponential hoards of cash to sit on.
Budget and hire accordingly. We all have a lot to lose.