Yossi simply wanted to find out why he was charged twice for the same transaction.
"A matter of five minutes," he said to his wife Ruthie.
Sit down on the couch and start a WhatsApp conversation with customer service.
Within seconds, a message appeared: "Hello Yossi! How nice of you to contact us! I am your personal bot, I would be happy to provide you with service."
"What fun?" Yossi muttered. "We haven't even started yet and you're already celebrating?"
Three options immediately appeared:
To check your account, press – 1.
For technical support, press – 2.
For other topics, press – 3.
Yossi chose the first option.
"Great! How can we help you?"
"You charged me twice for the same transaction," he wrote.
"Sorry, we were unable to understand your request. Please select one of the following options."
Yossi tried again, "Double charge!"
"Would you like to view your latest invoice?"
"No! I want you to give me my money back!" Yossi wrote.
"We were unable to understand. Please answer yes or no."
Yossi began to lose his patience.
"I want to speak to a human representative!"
"With pleasure! What subject would you like to receive service on?"
"On the same topic I've been trying to explain to you for twenty minutes!" Yossi shouted into the phone.
Ruthie, who was standing in the kitchen, glanced at him.
"Yossi, who are you fighting with?"
"With a robot!"
"Then why are you shouting? He can't hear you anyway."
"Leave it, Yossi."
"Drink your coffee before it gets cold."
"Ruthi, will you stop telling me what to do?!"
Ruthie placed the cup on the table.
"Very interesting, you beg the bot to talk to you, and when I talk you ask me to be quiet."
Yossi did not answer.
He looked at the screen again. Forty minutes had passed, and he still hadn't been able to reach the representative.
Suddenly a new message appeared:
"Dear Yossi, we recognize that you are having difficulty completing the task. Would you like to start over?"
"Start over?!" he screamed.
"I want to finish! Finish!"
He angrily threw the phone on the couch, got up, and began pacing back and forth in the living room.
"It used to be that you would call, a human would answer you! Today, everything is bots!"
The bank – a bot; the health insurance fund – a bot; the electricity company – a bot; soon they’ll put a bot in my house instead of my wife!” he muttered in an angry voice.
Ruthie raised an eyebrow.
"Trust me, Yossi, the first bot that accepts you will need an urgent software update."
He almost smiled, but the anger still burned within him.
A few minutes later he returned to the phone. Maybe an answer had arrived after all.
A message awaited him on the screen:
"Dear Yossi, we noticed that you left the conversation. Since your response was not received, your inquiry has been closed. Thank you for choosing our service. We will be happy to be at your disposal in the future!"
Yossi stared at the screen.
"They hung up on me?!" he grumbled again.
"Well, at least someone there knows how to end a conversation," Ruthie commented.
Yossi tried to return to correspondence.
"The referral has been closed. To open a new referral, press 1."
He pressed.
"Hello Yossi! How nice of you to contact us! I am your personal bot, I would be happy to provide you with service."
This time Yossi didn't shout.
He turned off the screen, placed the phone on the table, and said quietly:
"Ruthi, could you make me some new coffee?"
"With pleasure," Ruthie replied, "but first choose an option:"
Black coffee, press – 1; Miracle coffee, press – 2; and if you want to talk to your wife – start acting like a human being."
For the first time that evening, Yossi burst out laughing.
And perhaps herein lies the great problem of the digital age.
In the name of progress, efficiency, and savings, the human voices behind customer service are disappearing.
The person is required to adapt to the system, instead of the system serving the person.
Bots offer countless options, but the most important option of all is missing: talking to a human being.
In an era where bots are replacing human response, we have forgotten that behind every request stands a human being,
True service begins with listening, not with knocking.