171–180 of 473 posts
People don't want a useless chat bots, more often than not they seem deliberately programmed to be obstructive. If you told it you wanted a refund for order xyz, and it immediately gave you a refund, I'm sure people would like it.
We’d need to have access to the specific company’s call categorization to know this. Just last week I was chatting with someone in their mid-thirties who was telling me how they don’t have an ATM card or access their bank through the app or website. Everything is done in person at a physical branch. They need money? They go to the teller. And I know many older people who are the same way.
This is why many companies already have automated phone systems that walk customers through the easy to solve problems with mostly rote formulas. Add in a chatbot that can be better at handling slight exceptions and now the company can solve customer issues without having to pay a human to do the interaction.
From my time answering phones for an internal IT department for a large-ish company, it’s clear that some people called just to interact with and talk with a human. Even if they could have solved their problem through an app before a human answered the phone.
> Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human
I’d suspect most of these aren’t all that specific or gnarly, but just that it can’t be done through the customer facing app, yet. When switching from physical SIM to eSIM, Verizon’s website kept erroring and directing me to call. I looked online and many posts said it was quickly solved with a call. I called and they fixed it quickly. That could almost certainly have been handled in an automated way, just not yet. I don’t think they even asked any questions, other than confirmation style ones, which a chatbot could have done. I needed to waste time calling and waiting in a queue to talk to a human. The company needed to pay someone to be waiting to answer that call and spend a few minutes with me. Seems like a great spot for a chatbot.
My expectation from my limited experiences is that the number of calls that a sufficiently large business receives are not the specific or gnarly cases. I’d love to see real data.
People don't want a useless chat bots, more often than not they seem deliberately programmed to be obstructive. If you told it you wanted a refund for order xyz, and it immediately gave you a refund, I'm sure people would like it.
You can provide that with a simple HTML form though.
Typically I call customer service because I'm trying to tackle a problem that cannot be solved by using their normal interface. There is usually some subtlety or exception that requires an agent capable of understanding them at the other end, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered calling. Chatbots almost by definition cannot deal with that, at least I've never experienced one ever. And I imagine that if they can underst…
Typically I call customer service because I'm trying to tackle a problem that cannot be solved by using their normal interface. There is usually some subtlety or exception that requires an agent capable of understanding them at the other end, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered calling. Chatbots almost by definition cannot deal with that, at least I've never experienced one ever. And I imagine that if they can underst…
Sorry, who do you deal with these days who has a customer service line? The few that do, you have to go through like 3 minutes of robot "press 3 for this department," with the 0 shortcut to talk to somebody leading to an instant hangup ("goodbye") except on menu 27B where it works
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To add to that ... I want to call a human even if my question seems dumb for them and have it taken care of, because I don't even know if I get that one answer there might be 10 other questions hiding behind the corner.
A good chatbot could probably address it just as well as a human going through the motions trying to achieve target.
I dont want useless customer support. Wether that's a human or a bot. It's extremely frustrating to have a real issue, take for instance a plane cancelled or delayed when travelling with kids, and not being able to talk to a real person who can actually help. Let alone having to wait 30-60 minutes to get a hold of someone. Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversatio…
I dont want useless customer support. Wether that's a human or a bot. It's extremely frustrating to have a real issue, take for instance a plane cancelled or delayed when travelling with kids, and not being able to talk to a real person who can actually help. Let alone having to wait 30-60 minutes to get a hold of someone. Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversatio…
Same. Few years ago, I was stuck at Dulles due to a snow storm and had to resort to online customer chat support via the United app. I only used it because United was pushing people really hard to use the app for support. I was connected with a support rep who obviously did not live in the states because he tried to give me an impossible itinerary. Anyone living in DMV area knows taking an AA flight from DCA that's a…
I don’t think you need to live in the DMV area or even need to be a human to figure this out…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’ve had human customer service members tell me things that I knew to be false. At least computers should be able to calculate confidence levels, like Watson was doing for Jeopardy a decade ago.
> Customer service is one category where I expect a lot of these jobs, honestly, to just go away.
For long I have, and in normal conditions, I would have said hurray. Humanity invented a technology that automated some of its bothersome tasks, one thing less to do, we're collectively all for the better, freed to enjoy life or spend our time in a more productive way, whichever suits best.
But in this world, the fruit of this automation is always reaped by the same people, and they're not those whose job was automated. The latter are now in a shity situation, the former are now marginally richer and won't share with anyone else.