Ciara O'Brien

Like if you have a problem, if your experience is smooth and you don't have any issues setting stuff up or you don't have any kind of service interruptions, great.

But there will be people who do prefer to talk to a person.

They don't like using web chat for whatever reason.

I don't mind using web chat, but there are sometimes now, particularly as things shift more towards AI, where it can be a little bit frustrating because sometimes you just need to talk to a person and explain to them what's going on because it doesn't fit into those narrow boxes of what a bot on a web chat can deal with.

Or you just really don't feel like typing in lines and lines and lines of text.

Sometimes it's just easier to explain to somebody over the phone exactly what's going on.

Now, again, though, I mean, look, you know, this doesn't mean that just because something is on web chat that the customer service is inferior.

Because at the end of the day, like a lot of time when you're talking to somebody on the phone, they're dealing with a script that they have to run through anyway.

You know, so if this customer says this, ask them this.

If it's not this, move on to this.

You know, so...

You know, it is just down to personal preference.

And you are going to get some people who will always prefer to talk to a person.

Just like when you go into a supermarket, you will always get people who prefer to use the human checkouts instead of the self-service ones.

Now, I am a committed self-service checkout person because I like just being able to get in and out.

I don't mind using web chat.

I'm still kind of a bit stuck on whether or not I... You know, you ring a company now for customer service.

Sometimes they're using AI kind of chatbots to guide you through the system.

To me, I just find that's the same.

A very... Kind of a slightly smarter, but not too much smarter version of press one here for this, press two here for that.