How I unwittingly put myself and others out of work

If you’ve ever had to complain to a company, you probably contacted their complaints department. Most customer-facing organisations seem to have one. They’re staffed by one or more hapless drudges who:

• serve as punching bags for angry customers
• have to talk and write to the customers to cheer them up. 

I know what they go through; many years ago, before becoming a copywriter, I was a complaints clerk at Selfridges, in London’s Oxford Street.

Since then, I’ve helped many clients with their customer comms, including replies to complaints.

Never did I think my advice might put anyone out of a job – until recently. I was working for a financial services provider, revising a wide range of comms, when they tasked me with improving their replies to customer complaints.

Now, each customer complaint is different from another. And so are the actions a company takes to remedy those complaints. But while their details are unique, you can create a template approach that works for replying to any complaint. It includes:

• A particular tone of voice
• A structure 
• If/then logic rules covering all possible scenarios

Using direct marketing experience, I wrote such a template for my client. I intended it for their executives to use as a guideline, but my client had a different purpose in mind.

The next time I heard about the template, it was from someone I didn’t expect: an AI specialist in the company’s IT department. I wondered what was going on. He thanked me for the template, saying he appreciated how detailed my instructions were. And then, I listened with concern as he explained what he was going to do: He planned to use my template to train the company’s AI. In future, neither I nor the company’s executives would write replies to customers who’d made complaints. The AI would do this.  

I wonder how successful LLMs will be at this. I’ve found writing some replies to complaints among the hardest letters I’ve had to write. Unlike other communications, they need a human touch.