Artificial intelligence can be a fabulous tool when you are trying to make a complaint. It can help you work out where to start, organise a muddle of emails and correspondence, identify information you may have missed and even turn a muddle of dates and conversations into a useful timeline. However there is a big difference between using AI to help you make a complaint and allowing AI to make the complaint for you.
That was one of the key messages I conveyed as I took part in a series of 13 BBC local radio interviews across the country this week, talking about the growing use of AI when consumers complain. While I absolutely believe AI has a place in the complaints process, I am increasingly concerned that we could be creating a new problem: complaints that are longer, more complicated and harder to deal with rather than clearer and better.
Photo by Anna Shvets
AI can be a good starting point
I am not anti-AI. Used properly, it can be incredibly helpful for consumers. If you have been dealing with a company for weeks or months, you may have emails flying backwards and forwards, telephone calls with different departments, reference numbers, names of different members of staff and a whole host of dates to remember. It can be very difficult to see the wood for the trees.
AI can help you organise all of that information. For example, you can provide the dates of emails, telephone calls and conversations and ask it to create a chronological timeline. That can be a really useful starting point when you are trying to understand what has happened and where things went wrong.
It can also help you structure your thoughts if you are not confident about writing a complaint. For some people, simply having somewhere to start can make the difference between complaining and giving up. We shouldn’t be put off complaining simply because we don’t know how to word their complaint.
AI can give people confidence. It can help them identify questions they hadn’t thought of and make sense of complicated information. However there is an important caveat: AI should be your assistant, not your replacement.
Don’t simply cut, copy, paste and send
One of my biggest concerns is the temptation to put a few details into an AI tool, ask it to write a complaint and then send the resulting document without properly reading it. Please don’t.
If you have only given AI half the story, you could end up getting half the story back. AI doesn’t know what you haven’t told it. It also doesn’t necessarily know which parts of the information it produces actually apply to your individual circumstances.
This is particularly important when it comes to legislation and consumer rights. AI-generated complaints can sometimes sound incredibly authoritative. They may contain references to regulations, laws or pieces of legislation that sound impressive but that doesn’t automatically mean they are correct or relevant to your situation. Don’t assume something is true simply because AI has written it confidently.
Check the facts, check the legislation and, most importantly, make sure that whatever you are quoting actually applies to your circumstances. You don’t need to become an encyclopaedia of consumer law before you complain. In fact, quite often you don’t need to quote legislation at all. If you do use it, understand what you are quoting and why it is relevant.
AI should make your complaint clearer — not longer
AI should make a complaint clearer, not longer. There is a temptation to think that a complaint must be impressive to be effective. It doesn’t. A complaint running to 20 pages isn’t necessarily stronger than one that takes two minutes to read. In fact, the opposite may sometimes be true.
If you have turned a straightforward complaint into pages and pages of background information, unnecessary legal references and irrelevant detail, the actual point you are trying to make can become buried. Imagine being the one who has to deal with hundreds of complaints. You open an email expecting to find out what has gone wrong and what the customer wants done about it, only to be faced with 15 pages of AI-generated text. Where is the actual complaint? What does the customer want? What evidence do they have? What does the company need to do to put things right?
Less really can be more. You don’t need to tell a company your entire life story if most of it isn’t relevant to the problem you want resolved. Give them the information they need to understand what happened and put it right.
Start with what you want to achieve
Before you even start writing your complaint, ask yourself one very simple question: what do I actually want the company to do?
Do you want a refund, compensation, a replacement, an apology or an explanation? Perhaps you want something corrected, or maybe you simply want the company to change its procedures so that somebody else doesn’t experience the same problem. Whatever it is, say so.
A company cannot properly resolve a complaint if it doesn’t know what outcome you are seeking. Give a reasonable timeframe for a response, providing the evidence that supports your complaint and make it clear what you intend to do next if the matter isn’t resolved. AI can help you organise all of this, but you need to decide what a satisfactory resolution looks like.
Keep the human element
Complaining is ultimately about communication between people. If you are speaking to somebody on the telephone, or dealing with a member of staff face-to-face, remember that the person dealing with your complaint may not be responsible for the original problem. They may actually be the person who can help you fix it.
Be firm but fair. You can be assertive without being aggressive and you can make it very clear that you expect a company to put something right without ranting at the person trying to help you. Never forget, persistence beats resistance. Don’t be fobbed off but don’t make the person on the other end of the phone your enemy. It’s not just what you say it’s how you say it.
Don’t be afraid to complain
As consumers, we don’t always like complaining. We worry about making a fuss, we don’t want to appear difficult and we wonder whether we are being unreasonable. If something isn’t good enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say so. If we don’t pipe up when something goes wrong, nothing changes. Then we have exactly the same experience again and complain about it afterwards.
Any company worth its salt should appreciate genuine feedback. A complaint is an opportunity to identify something that isn’t working properly and fix it. That could benefit not just you but the next customer who comes along.
If something goes wrong face-to-face, raise it at the time if you can and give the business an opportunity to put it right there and then. If you make a complaint by telephone, always follow it up in writing. That creates a record of what you said, when you said it and what was agreed.
In a nutshell, should you use AI to make a complaint?
Only if you use it wisely. Use it to help organise your thoughts, create a timeline, identify gaps in your evidence or structure a complicated situation. Use it to make your complaint clearer if you are struggling to find the right words.
Don’t blindly copy and paste whatever it produces. Read it, check it, fact-check it and remove anything irrelevant. Most importantly, make sure it actually sounds like you.
Don’t allow AI to turn a simple complaint into a novel. The person dealing with your complaint needs to be able to quickly understand what happened, why you are unhappy about it and what you want them to do about it. Get those things right and you are already giving your complaint a much better chance of being taken seriously.
AI is a good starting and supportive tool but t it shouldn’t replace your common sense, your judgement or your own voice. Used properly, it should help you communicate more effectively with a company, not create even more work for the person on the other side of the complaint.
Use AI to make your complaint better, not simply bigger. Less is more.
