This was kind of fascinating and sad at the same time when it comes to customer service. I recently bought some basic items on the shopping site Temu and I was aware the company was based in China. When the packaged was delivered there was an item missing and so I immediately contacted the customer service. What I immediately noticed was that their chat seemed to be fully automated by an AI agent as all the responses were instant and robotic in general. After going through the choices it said it would refund me for that missing unless they find something wrong.
Well, fast forward a few days later and they denied the refund because they claimed their system showed it was delivered. If I had further questions, I could contact the customer service. I did and not surprisingly it seemed like it was an AI agent again. At first it just kept denying me but I persisted. Then after it started to go into a negotiation mode of sort as it first offered to cover half of the item cost. No way I would accept that as I shouldn’t pay for something not delivered. Funny enough, there was also an option to say “other” and I typed in the exact amount of that one piece.
Almost instantly, it then accepted my refund request and I got an email saying the credit will appear in a few days. Sure enough it did. It was fascinating though as they trained this robot to be like as sales agent where they try and lowball people first as opposed to just correcting the situation.