from the for-MBAs-sometimes-you-need-to-document-the-obvious dept.
Customers prefer text over video to provide service feedback:
At a time when one viral video can damage a business, some companies are turning to their own commenting platforms rather than letting social media be the main outlet for customer feedback. Only one wrinkle: in this context, customers appear to prefer writing a message rather than leaving a video.
In a recent study, more participants indicated they would likely leave written compliments or complaints about service on a restaurant-provided tablet powered by artificial intelligence. A video message option appeared to discourage leaving feedback.
With more restaurants and hotels turning to AI to enhance their service, the findings indicate that methods that require "low self-disclosure" would work better, meaning ones that don't require customers to provide very much identifiable information.
"Some restaurants and hotels actually ask customers to create video testimonials that they can share, but for general customers, it seems they still feel more comfortable with low self-disclosure. This is probably because people still do not trust AI to that level," said lead author Ruiying Cai, a researcher in Washington State University's Carson College of Business.
With a lot of hype around AI technology, many people have misperceptions about what it can do, Cai pointed out, perhaps believing it is capable of a lot more than simply recording a message.
The study participants reported being concerned about what would be done with their information in all the scenarios, but this was heightened with the option to leave a video.
[...] The researchers found that the participants were more willing to give feedback using text, whether positive or negative.
Journal Reference:
Ruiying Cai, Yao-Chin Wang, Jie Sun. Customers' intention to compliment and complain via AI-enabled platforms: A self-disclosure perspective, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Volume 116, January 2024, 103628 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2023.103628
(Score: 5, Touché) by istartedi on Friday March 01 2024, @07:48PM (1 child)
Would you like to watch a 10 minute video about how text is better than video, or would you rather just read this comment?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by darkfeline on Friday March 01 2024, @09:54PM
I'd rather watch a video at 2-3x speed with subtitles. The additional audio and visual feedback allows me to absorb information more quickly and effectively. I can "read" subtitled video much faster than just the plain text. It is trivially true that reading subtitles is strictly not slower than reading regular text because it's reading regular text.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 01 2024, @08:16PM (7 children)
Video requires 1000x as much storage space as text.
I like being discrete and quiet, and the last thing I want is my computer audio disturbing coworkers (and embarrassing me.)
I can read way faster than people can talk. I can skim text even faster.
Text search is easy. Searching through a video is a lot more tedious.
Tech overkill of this sort marks a business as not savvy. Maybe restaurants can afford to look clueless about tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Friday March 01 2024, @09:46PM
They will just store it as a text prompt and have their AI render it into a video as and when needed, that said computing power will be fairly expensive to compared to storage.
Over all text is a lot better for most cases then everything else. It takes up little space. Requires few and little resources. It's efficient communication and there is if done right little room for interpretation and errors. Video chats audio whatever is just annoying. No I don't want to talk to you bot or have it speak to me or watch your video.
Why would I ever do that? A free commercial that they can run forever and you don't get any residual payments on usage or anything. Are people so horny for getting viewed and seen by others that they actually do this? For free? Is this when those poor slobs in advertisement are to expensive and just using normal people for free is good enough. After all nobody cares.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday March 01 2024, @10:00PM (4 children)
> Video requires 1000x as much storage space as text.
True but it is much more information dense
> I like being discrete and quiet, and the last thing I want is my computer audio disturbing coworkers (and embarrassing me.)
Buy some bluetooth earpods, they're mature enough to be fairly cheap and reliable.
> I can read way faster than people can talk. I can skim text even faster.
Videos can be played faster than people can talk. Blind people have figured this out ages ago.
> Text search is easy. Searching through a video is a lot more tedious.
Automatic transcription is ancient in the era of ChatGPT.
> Tech overkill of this sort marks a business as not savvy. Maybe restaurants can afford to look clueless about tech.
Did anyone here read TFS? This is about customers leaving voluntary feedback, and there's a very obvious and simple explanation. People don't like to be confrontational. Text is more impersonal so of course people are more comfortable leaving feedback in text than in video, just as it is easier to leave feedback (especially critical) for, e.g., co-workers in anonymous text than face to face.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 02 2024, @01:36AM
> Automatic transcription is ancient in the era of ChatGPT.
In which case, we're back to text.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by weirsbaski on Saturday March 02 2024, @06:25PM (2 children)
Yeah, but the density's usefulness depends on what extra information is presented. If all the video-ness adds is that we can see the speaker's enthusiasm about the topic, and the picture on their shirt, did the 1000x size really give us anything extra?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday March 02 2024, @10:00PM (1 child)
The same can be said for text, where a large majority of characters can be, and often are, devoted to useless fluff.
Video has the potential to be more effective. Of course you can cherry pick counter-examples, and I can do the same for text.
Also, my time is more valuable than storage space. If the 1000x size increases the effectiveness by even a tiny bit, it's very much worth it.
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(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Sunday March 03 2024, @11:36AM
The, uh... article is, like, about people, you know, leaving comments for, ummm... the company and all. A lot of people, well, most people, I mean people in general can't, um... talk really coherently when they're, like, being recorded an' shit.
The effectiveness would not be increased. Not even a tiny bit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2024, @05:38PM
Presumably, you meant "discreet" [merriam-webster.com]:
Rather than discrete [merriam-webster.com]:
Not trying to be a jerk, but discrete != discreet and the context seemed to imply the latter and not the former. Apologies if I'm mistaken.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2024, @09:21PM
It's got nothing to do with AI. Most people don't like leaving videos of themselves everywhere because most people are not narcissistic, exhibitionist, arseholes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday March 01 2024, @09:28PM
It has been that way long before "AI".
With a little piece of text, you know what you are giving someone. With a video, it could go viral for what you are wearing, how you say something, who you are with, or so on. Way back before "AI" a creative person could take your video and edit your words to make it sound like you are saying something else. Someone with a little more skill could still copy and pate your face in to some other video.
It also takes time to prepare for a video. Most would want to look and sound good for a video. Some random time on the way out of a business may not be the best. With text - well, for all you know, everyone on this site is posting while naked.
Most people can write a polite letter while they are angry. Or an angry letter when they aren't. Not possible with a video unless you are a good actor.
But lets just blame AI.
If AI is so great, just have it create video testimonials for everyone. Oh. right. They will.
Which switches to the question of why anyone would want to WATCH a video response. Some marketing idiot, the same one that put a dizzying full motion video background on the web site making it both unreadable and a seizure health risk, may think it "pops" or whatever bullshit. But if I'm looking through reviews, I probably want to find some specific detail that is a million times quicker to CTRL-F than slog through a thousand (fake?) videos.
Eh. Well. I'd better go put some clothes on.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday March 01 2024, @11:06PM
I don't make Youtube videos: I have enough good sense to know nobody wants to see my ugly mush or listen to me talk about boring stuff.
If I'm uncomfortable making Youtube videos, why on Earth would I be doing the exact same thing to plug a restaurant or a hotel?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snospar on Saturday March 02 2024, @12:13AM
Video killed the radio man... or something like that, my brain is now so flash-fried that I can't remember the details. For sheer entertainment (and pron) video won out ages ago. But some people who really appreciate good music still listen to audio with no video accompaniment. And they really enjoy their music. And some other people searching for an answer on Google really want the text response you got 10 years ago which was almost always "spookily" just the thing you were looking for. Now, Internet search is fucked and the next best thing are the youtube results of some moron speaking the text you want in an unwanted accent (the most unwanted being robo-generated).
Blame the advertisers as they have taken the internet and shat it down a long dark hole. Blame them again and again. You can't harm them because they are richer than your government and so, the internet is fucked. And so are we.
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