When your AI tool for customer service causes so much frustration that it’s featured in the nation’s largest newspaper, you know you’ve got a problem. That’s where Walmart finds itself this week.
The leading brick-and-mortar retailer, and second-biggest company on earth by revenue (recently edged out by Amazon), left a New York Times writer with no choice but to cancel her Walmart account altogether.
The story of what happened is instructive. So is the solution. There’s an easy way to avoid this problem. And small businesses that do so are in a position to grab market share from the giants in their fields.
‘Over an hour attempting to get help from a human’
Ivy Liscomb is a writer for Wirecutter, an independent review site that’s part of the Times. She recently shared her all-too-familiar story of contacting a company for a customer service issue and getting caught in an endless AI loop.
Walmart no longer carried a product she wanted, so she tried to cancel her delivery subscription online. But there was no button to do so. So she called customer support. “A bright, automated voice insisted that I could cancel my subscription online, even after I explained that I couldn’t. At some point, Walmartbot appeared to accept that I was ‘experiencing a glitch.’ And then it dropped the bomb: I could reload the page and try again, or delete my Walmart account.”
She set about trying the usual methods to get a real person on the phone—saying the right word or phrase, pressing the right buttons, even hanging up and calling back. “Finally, after spending over an hour attempting to get help from a human, I deleted my account. In an age of countless digital storefronts vying for my cart, it seemed unbelievable that such a successful brand would allow faulty AI to cost it a customer.”
She’s far from alone. Recent surveys show how critical this issue is: 87% of consumers “say it is essential for companies to provide an option to reach a human agent when using genAI,” Gartner reported. And just this week, Consumer Cellular released results of its survey of consumers 50 and older: More than 80% said they’d consider leaving a company if its automated system kept them in a loop.