Last month a customer rang our service line to dispute a charge for a Saturday delivery. Her AI assistant had told her Saturday delivery was free. It had been, until we changed our prices in 2023. The assistant had found an old page of frequently asked questions that we had never taken off our website, and summarised it accurately.
She was not the first. When our agents started recording it, about one call in sixty mentioned something the customer had been told by an AI assistant or read in a search summary. Most of it was close to right. A noticeable share was confidently out of date: old order cut off times, a branch office we closed two years ago, a returns policy from before our last revision. Many of these customers had never visited our site at all.
For twenty years we wrote the website for people who land on a page, glance at the date and the design, and judge whether it looks current. Software reading on their behalf does none of that. It reads everything we have published that it can reach, including pages we had forgotten, and an old price list in a PDF carries the same weight as the current one.
I do not think this will pass, and we have no say over which assistants people use. What we control is what we leave out there for them to read.
So we have started treating the public website as a data source rather than a brochure. My team made an inventory of everything reachable on our domains and found about two thousand pages and documents. Their owners removed or redirected eleven hundred of them. Facts that change, such as prices, cut off times, service areas and office addresses, now live in one place and are published from it, so there is only one version to find. Each page shows when it was last reviewed, and anything not reviewed for a year is flagged to its owner. Our agents have a short script for these calls that does not blame the customer, and the one in sixty figure now appears in our monthly service report.
More and more, our customers will meet us through something that has read about us first. It is worth knowing what it has been reading.
– Serguey Shinder
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