Generative AI, Nursing Home Scandals, and Southwest's plight
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Chat automation, a deterioration in patient care, and an airline that has to face the music. This week’s top stories in the customer engagement sector do not disappoint.
CMPs in house Meta-Expert, Phil Mandelbaum, analyzes what generative AI could mean for the future of the Meta-Verse. Mandelbaum writes, “About two months after ChatGPT ‘unleashed itself’ as a prototype, Google launched Bard and Microsoft followed quickly with a new, ’AI-powered’ version of Bing and Edge.”
Artificial Intelligence is inescapable as it finds its way into our everyday lives and the customer experience sector. While AI is capable of helping people, not all of us are leveraging it to its full potential: “What I’m telling you,” Mandelbaum states, “is that you could use AI to better understand your employees, enhance employee morale, and upgrade your recruitment marketing. And we all know employee experience is the new customer experience.”
Learn how to embrace tech and enhance your business productivity by up to 40% and more in this article from CEI.
A recent exposé from NPR revealed just a few of the mishaps that occur at private nursing homes. CMP Digital Analyst Christine Ducey takes a deep dive into what this means for the patient care experience.
“Multiple [New York based] homes have ongoing investigations involving fraud, money laundering, and neglect,” Ducey writes. “In one affidavit, Margarette Volkmar, whose spouse was being treated at The Villages of Orleans Health & Rehabilitation Center, located in western New York near Lake Ontario, reported that, ‘her husband was left in his bed with only a diaper on, was bruised by a fall, choked by another resident, given the wrong medication doses, dressed in other residents' clothes and covered in bruises that could not be explained.’”
The customer experience is important in every industry but seems exceptionally consequential when the customer’s life is on the line. “Why is it,” Ducey asks, “that when the care of the customer matters the most—when people are fully reliant on caregivers, when they are dying, when they are sick—that we fall so short?”
Read more on this and the future of the nursing home industry here.
After Southwest cancelled thousands of flights during the winter holiday season and disrupted travel for millions, they got all the wrong attention.
Less than two months later the airline must address its transgressions in front of the Senate. The New York Times reports: “Like other airlines, Southwest struggled with flight delays and cancellations in the days leading into Christmas in places with wet, windy and cold weather. Southwest’s operations in Denver and Chicago, which serve as the base for about a quarter of the airline’s flight crews, were hit particularly hard.”
Niraj Chokshi, a business reporter for the New York Times, continues, “As the bad weather moved east, communication between the airline’s central staff and its outposts deteriorated, resulting in more last-minute cancellations. That compounded the need to move displaced flight crews. By Dec. 26, the airline had grown so overwhelmed by the need to reassign crews and other challenges that it preemptively canceled about two-thirds of its flights for several days to reset its network. All told, Southwest canceled 16,700 flights in the last 11 days of December.”
Whether you call it a “meltdown,” a “major screw-up,” or a simple “mistake,” there is a lot to learn about the customer experience in this recent article.
Header Photo: Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash
Chat GPT image: Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
Woman's hands: Photo by Eduardo Barrios on Unsplash
Southwest airline: Photo by Owen Lystrup on Unsplash
