The company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.” Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness.


In my younger days, I worked for U-Haul. They had these preloaded speeches you were supposed to adhere to when someone called. I am sure they felt it maximized sales. One for trailer/truck rental, another for storage, etc. I never liked acting as a robot, so I free-formed the calls (I’m a people person!). I was/and am quite customer focused, so I was good at answering the phone. Up until I got fired for not following the canned company diatribe. They had a call center dedicated to calling around the country to test employees. I failed twice.
That sounds exactly the kind of ridiculous stuff companies would do. Let me guess, they did not check any recordings of your calls and how you actually handled customers. Just “you failed this pointless metric”.