I recently received an email from the dealership company that services my car. It’s also the same company I purchased my latest car from a year or two ago and my relationship with them goes back to the 1990s (I’m a creature of habit, obviously).

Interestingly the Subject Line read “Apologies: Technical Issues with Recent Email” and the body of the email went on to apologise for the email using a placeholder instead of my name – “Hi [Customer Name]. It went on to apologise profusely, telling me how much they valued me as a customer (yeah right) and of course they blamed a ‘technical error’, which we all know is another name for a ‘human error’, but no one wants to put their hand up to take responsibility for being inept or incompetent.

Technical error or human incompetence?

Working for a tech company, I get a bit hot under the collar every time I see technology being blamed for human stupidity, such as this example. I’ve even written blogs about this. It’s so unfair on the hard-working techs who create robust processes which aren’t used properly. To quote an IBM Training Manual, 1979, “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” Seems a lot of people still don’t get this.

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used so much now (and in the future), I wonder if technology will still be blamed for human error, or, if instead of blaming technical errors, we’ll be blaming AI for any errors we make? Unlikely, given most people don’t like to own up to using AI to do their jobs (assuming they still have one, of course).

Wait a minute: what’s really going on here?

I was on the verge of sending off a grumpy email to the car dealership telling them not to blame technology when it clearly wasn’t a technical error, when I got to thinking more about what had happened.

My first realisation was that I hadn’t actually received a “Hi [customer name]” email from the company, and a quick search of my email folders confirmed this. There had been no email.

My second realisation was one of déjà vu. This wasn’t the first time I’d received a grovelly email from a company apologising for a mistake that I couldn’t recall happening. Over the years I’ve received them from supermarket chains, travel companies, clothing stores, service stations, garden centres, etc. The list goes on ad nauseum.

The penny finally dropped - I must have been having one of my ‘thick’ days – this was just another form of click bait. Draw attention to a mistake and you instantly have a captive audience because everyone loves bad news stories (as long as it’s about someone else). It’s a bit like recalling an email that you shouldn’t have sent – no better way to draw attention to it and almost a guarantee for the contents to be read!

Two wrongs don’t make a right

Using apologies to get attention is a pretty dishonest marketing strategy, and a pretty crappy one at that. It implies that they really don’t value you if they are prepared to lie to you. It also undermines genuine apologies when real mistakes are made – a bit like the boy who cried “Wolf”.

I’m waiting for the day that AI blames human error, just to get even. It’s already replacing heaps of marketing and comms roles, which is hardly surprising if my latest experience is anything to go by. Surely, we humans can do better than this?