In call centers, more and more workers in Japan are dealing with increasingly obnoxious customers. To the point that a company has developed software capable of erasing the emotions in angry voices, and thus protecting employee morale.
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The subject of harassment by customers is very often raised in the media in Japan. Consumers can be particularly aggressive and unpleasant with employees, in restaurants, stores and especially on the telephone, when it comes to contacting after-sales service or administration. They yell at the employee, may insult him or threaten him with retaliation. The UA Zensen union has just published a major study carried out among 33,000 workers in the service sector. And 47% of respondents admitted that they had been attacked at least verbally by customers in the last two years. Many complain of the anxiety or discomfort created by this permanent tension.
A company thinks it has the solution to psychologically protect these suffering employees. The SoftBank group, which is one of the three major telecom operators in Japan, has just presented its solution against telephone harassment. This is an interface that changes the tone of voice of customers live. An artificial intelligence platform developed after being trained, for days, by actors and actresses who played the role of obnoxious customers. These read hundreds of sentences with different tones to help the software recognize the sounds of hostility. A voice that rises too high, suddenly accelerates, or conversely is extremely low, like someone uttering threats.
Now that it has been trained with more than 10,000 voice tracks, the program is able to adjust the voice of the unhappy customer, slowing it down, softening it. The words are not changed so the employee perfectly understands the nature of the problem but does not feel attacked by his interlocutor. The company speaks of a “mental shield”. This should provide some relief to employees who are increasingly reluctant to take this type of position. But SoftBank wonders if, in the long term, artificial intelligence could not take care of dissatisfied customers 100%. The group is working on the subject but its platform is not yet ready. Customers still want to feel like a human is listening to them!
