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Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

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Re: Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

#11

Post by kjellsbells »

Yes. Because, the incentives for companies are too big to ignore. The math being done right now is $10/hr for voice support in (say) the Phillipines is much more than $0.10/hr having an AI do it, even factoring in the cost of some customer churn. And the risk of the latter for some services can be discounted to zero if the user has no viable alternative.

Second, the best support line is one where no one calls in. So there are strong incentives to make it hard to do so, either positive (create good self service options) or bad (hide the number, hide emails, etc).

If you don't want this future then make sure you always ask for the human and constructively provide feedback that you will penalize any supplier that relies on it.

We are already in a K shaped economy wrt call centers. Being a very frequent Hilton hotel guest, say, gets you a separate call center number, US based live human support, people who can solve your problem, etc. Not being a Hilton member gets you the 45 minute wait and a bot.

Re: Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

#12

Post by TejashMKumar »

I think eventually you probably will not able to tell whether support is ai or human. models and agents will only continue to improve, and customer support is one of the clearest business use case. For companies, ai is cheaper, scalable and does not require the same onboarding process and training process. so in that sense, yes, it probably becomes the new normal. My guess is in the long term, we will have something like a hybrid model. Where ai answers repetitive questions and straightforward workflows, while humans can answers the nuance.

Re: Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

#16

Post by alopez3006 »

We better be prepared for armies of agents in companies... not only for customer support but everywhere. For now it may seem that they are not quite reliable, but with the right context and memories and the right number of humans behind to manage them (unmanaged agentic AI seems too optimistic for me), the quality will increase dramatically and we'll no longer have humans on the loop. Even ourselves we'll probably let our personal agents solve our own problems, so it'll be agent-to-agent calls and interaction.

Re: Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

#19

Post by absynth »

I asked Amazon for help with my account. They couldn't figure out the URL to get me where I needed to go. They said they needed to escalate. The question was definitely not complicated. They wanted to call me asking questions.

Meanwhile, Gemini gave me the url and explained what I needed to know in one reply. Problem solved. Same question to ChatGPT gave me the correct answer as well. I bet Claude or Grok would have also found the correct answer.

This is where things take a turn: Google.com/ddg/bing failed. amazon's own search failed. Its worth knowing that the good results from the chatbots pointed at Amazon's web.

Based on this one example, I could begin to think document style search engines are dead.

Presumably Amazon were trying to put me into their little Voice AI microcosm. They'd obviously (?) record my voice (yes) of me getting increasingly annoyed (likely) at some Voice Chat Bot (likely) and then they'd apologize (?) for not knowing (probably?).

Is that the goal? Waste 30 minutes of my time for what could have been answered by a chat bot but not a web search?

The underlying situation seems even weirder than simply trying to cut costs. I think Amazon has cut so many corners they have forgotten what shape they are trying to create.

I have only one answer so far: Their customer support has no idea how to navigate their own website and this is by design. This is NOT the customer support people at fault. Let that all sink in: Someone got a bonus for this service design. This is somehow optimal according to Amazon. Yet this style of service design will only get worse for paying customers. It will be much worse for non-customers.

Progress!

I don't think this is restricted to Amazon either. I think this is industry wide. The in-page chat bots are usually just as broken.

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