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Customers don't want chat bots

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Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#161

Post by JshWright »

pessimizer wrote: post #140
JshWright wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother? Because you are not the target user for the bot. For every user that proactively reads the FAQs, there's 10 more that don't and would happily open a support ticket to have someone copy/paste the FAQ answer to them. The bot is to there deflect those cases.

I don't think this is true, because if it were true, people would want chatbots. The last thing most people want to do is to call or open a chat with customer service, and they've usually looked through everything they can find to avoid it. One of the reasons some chatbots, like at Amazon, could be useful is because their FAQs are impossible to find.

"People" aren't the ones deploying chatbots, companies are, because they successfully deflect cases.

If you think most people have done everything to avoid reaching out to support, I can only imagine you haven't worked in a "Tier 1" support role.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#162

Post by cudgy »

pessimizer wrote: post #133
kristopolous wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. You contact a human because you want a guarded administrative action to be taken. For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things. It's hard to hold a computer program accountable in any nuanced way when it starts misbehaving other than kicking it to the curb

> For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things. They don't want a person to escalate you either, but you can pressure a person in ways that a chatbot cannot be pressured. At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with re…

“At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with reasons not to escalate, and their employer because they're paying for the time spent.”

Click. Disconnect. Easy. They just disconnect the call when a customer is frustrating them and oftentimes disconnects happen when first reaching a person after sitting on hold for a long time. The other tactic is to transfer the customer around the call center into oblivion.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#163

Post by nfriedly »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #91
nfriedly wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have my condolences. My brother and I ended up hiring a lawyer to handle our dad's estate, and I'd recommend it to anyone. She did things like send the hospital a letter that said in essence "give me a single bill with a total for all services provided at your hospital. If it's not on this bill I'm not going to pay it." (Although legal fees for estates are capped here in Ohio, not sure if that's true where you ar…

> She did things like send the hospital a letter that said in essence "give me a single bill with a total for all services provided at your hospital. If it's not on this bill I'm not going to pay it." That is a great thing to say, but does it actually hold any weight? Or is it like the construction trucks that have signs saying they are not responsible for damage from items blown off them?

Well, it worked in the case of my dad's estate.

I think the fact that it was from a lawyer made a difference. I had a different situation with Wells Fargo where I quoted their own document back to them and they still denied me. When I got a lawyer to send essentially the same letter, but with his letterhead, they suddenly bent over backwards to help me out, going above and beyond their obligations.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#164

Post by wolrah »

I think chatbots can and will replace the useless frontline "Tier 0" support agents that all too many companies have. The ones who are working from a script that they can not substantially deviate from where most of us here are just trying to get through to someone who can really help.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#165

Post by sandworm101 »

seanhunter wrote: post #69

A big part of the problem isn’t actually chat bots even though it may well seem to be. It’s that you can’t pop some system atop a teetering ziggurat of shitty data from mutually incompatible systems and think the fundamental problems are going to just disappear. Example: I am currently executor of my dad’s estate and trying to get various policies and pensions and whatnot transferred into my mother’s name. One compan…

>> and think the fundamental problems are going to just disappear.

Au contraire. If you implement things poorly enough then all those people on the phone asking for tech support really do just go away. They learn to solve their own problems. Make your problem-solving/help-line interface sufficiently horrible that it develops a reputation (Google) and they won't even make an attempt to contact you.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#166

Post by meroes »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #156
gwbas1c wrote: post #152

My internet went down, and I couldn't reach customer service. I could only reach (drumroll), a chatbot. The chatbot couldn't confirm that anyone knew about the problem and was working on it. (How do I know that it just doesn't always say "someone's working on it?") I submitted an FCC complaint. A few days later, a customer service rep called me. She told me that I could contact the chatbot. I told her I'd never submi…

Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot? Can you elaborate on why you didn’t trust the chat it but would trust a human?

Accountability for one. Another being hallucinations are still too common.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#167

Post by marcosdumay »

notpachet wrote: post #104
seanhunter wrote: post #69

A big part of the problem isn’t actually chat bots even though it may well seem to be. It’s that you can’t pop some system atop a teetering ziggurat of shitty data from mutually incompatible systems and think the fundamental problems are going to just disappear. Example: I am currently executor of my dad’s estate and trying to get various policies and pensions and whatnot transferred into my mother’s name. One compan…

> teetering ziggurat My next internal project codename

Are you working with web frameworks?

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#168

Post by kaibee »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #134
mduggles wrote: post #32

Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path. Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing…

Yeah this is my take too. Chat bots are usually transparently obviously something the CTO bought, then Support dumped some basic configuration into it, and now it's a glorified redirect-provider to poorly map english questions to help articles. There's 0 vertical integration and it's purely to try to shunt traffic down cheaper support channels. I've literally had 1 good experience with bot-based support. Exactly one.…

> And can you imagine my utter shock and disbelief when the bot offered to waive the late fee if I set up autopay? Holy shit! I'm still in awe. The chatbot waived my fee. It actually DID something. It genuinely saved them and me a support call that day instead of just feeling like they were trying to persuade me to give up by throwing friction into the process of getting to someone who could actually waive my fee.

I think I had a similar experience with the Amazon customer support bot just yesterday. It authorized a refund on a $20 item that I said arrived damaged.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#169

Post by stnmtn »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #134
mduggles wrote: post #32

Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path. Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing…

Yeah this is my take too. Chat bots are usually transparently obviously something the CTO bought, then Support dumped some basic configuration into it, and now it's a glorified redirect-provider to poorly map english questions to help articles. There's 0 vertical integration and it's purely to try to shunt traffic down cheaper support channels. I've literally had 1 good experience with bot-based support. Exactly one.…

That is incredibly impressive. To people who are not technical, I wonder if this is impressive to them.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#170

Post by djbusby »

seanhunter wrote: post #155
fragmede wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where AGI is still the realm of science fiction, I think an AGI could recognize that is a unique entity, and that CompanyName isn't the same from city to city.

That’s not the problem here unfortunately. The problem here is that there is no interconnection of any kind between any system that knows about city A and B and the systems which know about city C. So there’s literally no way to help a customer who has a problem described in those systems. An AGI chatbot couldn’t be any more helpful than the human was because it has no access to anything about city C. Now could that…

Right, after mashing the companies together one would need to integrate systems - but that costs money! Money that could be used for executive pay - which they "earned" because of the "successful" merger.
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