Chatbots can up anxiety in already fraught situations

People experience anxiety around money issues, such as financial services and health insurance. And while they look for advice from others in such situations, says a paper from the Harvard Business School, being responded to by a chatbot instead of a human can drive their anxiety even higher.

Yet if given the choice of talking to a human or a chatbot, most opt for the bot—despite the fact that their very anxiety surrounding the situation in which they find themselves (the situation that is prompting their quest for advice) has a negative effect on customer choice satisfaction, firm trust and long-term engagement.

Interestingly, just knowing they can have access to a human if they want it can improve those attitudes, but that doesn’t mean that by choosing the bot they’re opting for the best choice.

In fact, says the paper, “customer anxiety during SST [self-service technology] encounters can ultimately exert a negative influence on service relationships that firms may not have factored into their operational design—that customers in such settings may be asked to take on more responsibility for service delivery when they feel least equipped to do so.”

The study suggests that some operational design choices “may unintentionally provoke customer anxiety; others may offset anxiety’s impact”—and reminds that just having to use technology can be an anxiety-producing experience that cuts customer satisfaction—especially in situations where the number of choices can be overwhelming.

To make it worse, it adds, “SSTs are increasingly being deployed in settings that are inherently wrought with anxiety. Prior research has shown that when people are anxious they become advice seeking”—in other words, in need of human help.

The authors write, “SSTs, which are designed to enable customers to serve themselves without the intervention of a service employee …, can leave anxious customers isolated at a moment when they may need to access human guidance.”

When it comes to employer-sponsored retirement plans, a report in Investment News finds that the questions people most ask a chatbot focus on the nuts and bolts of how 401(k) accounts work, rather than on investing, financial concerns and priorities, according to Grant Easterbrook, a cofounder at Dream Forward Solutions, a turnkey retirement plan provider.

The report quotes Easterbrook saying that although there were questions about rollovers and how employer matches work, the chatbot got lots of 401(k) questions, such as how to withdraw money from a retirement account, as well as the differences among in-service withdrawals, 401(k) loans, early withdrawal tax penalties, hardship withdrawals and in-kind distributions. “Actually, the complexities and headaches of managing your own 401(k) is a much bigger burden than people give credit for,” he’s quoted saying.

A post on G2Crowd suggests that an appropriate use for a chatbot might be to answer FAQs and to automatically direct tough questions—or those it can’t answer within two tries—to a human. That’s a common theme among the business professionals whose companies rely on chatbots to interact with customers, but who rely on humans to intercede when the intricacies of the issues become too nuanced.

It also appears to be the ideal way to avoid the anxiety users experience around already-fraught issues such as finance, retirement and even health—when an individual may already be dealing with a tough diagnosis and finds the use of a chatbot just too challenging to satisfy his or her needs.