Editor's note: This brief was summarised by The Property AI Team from a report by Property Industry Eye. Read the original article for full details.
AI Is Changing How Consumers Complain, Says Property Redress
Property Redress's Sean Hooker says AI is changing the way consumers complain, with around 85% of the consumer complaints the scheme now sees involving some element of AI. Agents, he says, can end up spending more time unpicking arguments before getting to what has actually happened.
Writing for Property Industry Eye, Hooker says complaints that were once relatively straightforward emails may now arrive as lengthy, highly structured arguments, complete with technical terminology, legal references and a host of issues that may or may not be relevant.
He is not suggesting this is necessarily a bad thing, describing AI as a reality of the world we live in that can be incredibly useful when used properly. Consumers often turn to AI because they are trying to understand whether what has happened to them is normal or reasonable, what industry best practice looks like and whether something has gone wrong. That can be genuinely helpful, particularly for somebody who knows very little about the property industry and is struggling to articulate the problem they have experienced.
The difficulty is that AI can identify every conceivable issue and suddenly what might have been a relatively straightforward complaint becomes much bigger and more complicated. Hooker says AI does not necessarily understand which points really matter, what is reasonable in the circumstances or how expectations should be managed. At its best, AI can simplify a complex situation; at its worst, it can send somebody down a rabbit hole of issues that are not relevant to resolving their complaint.
When a complaint becomes a 10-page argument
Hooker says Property Redress is increasingly seeing complaints that are far more technical and complicated than they need to be. They may be very well structured, but that does not always mean everything in them is correct or necessary. These complaints can also lose some of the emotion and human element you would normally expect and, increasingly, they all start to sound quite similar.
He gives an example of somebody who complained that their agent had not provided the 'grantor's information'. Initially, it was not even clear what information they were asking for or why. Once queried, it turned out they were the freeholder and simply wanted certain information relating to payments. Somewhere along the line, they had come across a technical term, put the issue into AI, and it had built an argument around it.
Hooker says introducing technical terminology or legal references does not necessarily make a complaint stronger. In some cases, it can make it harder to establish what has happened and what the consumer wants the agent to do about it.
For agents receiving these sorts of complaints, his advice is not to get too distracted by the length of the submission or the legal terminology being used. Go back to the basics: what is the consumer actually complaining about, what happened, what evidence do you or they have, and what can reasonably be done to resolve it? He says he and his team increasingly find themselves wading through 10 pages of legal references and arguments before getting to those fundamental questions.
Source: Property Industry Eye