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Customers don't want chat bots

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Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#211

Post by Tagbert »

Our company, a travel provider, has a "chat bot" but it is just the first stage of a layers customer service experience. It is not an AI backed bot, though I'm sure that will come, eventually.

The bot can handle basic functions like information, change, and cancel but on more complex servicing, it brings in a human agent. The customer always has the option to request a human agent. This lets customers self service for the simple stuff but still get a helping hand when they need it.

In surveys our customers seem to like this approach with some indicating that they like being able to use something like this on their own rather than having to wait for an agent to be available. I think, as long as you give your customers options a structured first layer can be helpful as long as you give them a way out to more hands-on support.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#212

Post by lq9AJ8yrfs »

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?

In the US that sounds roughly consistent with part of the probate process, which is the way that estates are closed out.

More or less you publish a letter in a journal of record saying legal boilerplate to the effect of 'so and so has died, if they owed you money now is the time to bring it up'. Any claims on the estate not brought up timely will more or less be extinguished, the estate is eventually closed, and life goes on.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#213

Post by 93po »

lq9AJ8yrfs wrote: post #212
LeafItAlone wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

In the US that sounds roughly consistent with part of the probate process, which is the way that estates are closed out. More or less you publish a letter in a journal of record saying legal boilerplate to the effect of 'so and so has died, if they owed you money now is the time to bring it up'. Any claims on the estate not brought up timely will more or less be extinguished, the estate is eventually closed, and life…

It’s nice to know bankruptcy at least works when I die

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#214

Post by mrguyorama »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #20
blitzar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon. My personal best time for a full refund was slightly under 2 minutes. It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.

My experience with that is the opposite. Bought inks, one bottle arrived broken. Took me a few hours to get through to a place where I could put my complaint. Side note: after that they became even more useless. "Please mail the item back to us." Yeah no sure I'll mail you the shards of the broken bottle and a puddle of drying ink.

Meanwhile buying from the sketchiest possible "this official Arduino is 12 cents" sellers, I have lost $4 I spent on a bluetooth dongle that the "company" selling it disappeared a day after, but every other interaction, the sellers will jump over themselves to convince you to rate them higher than their competition. I had what I thought was a tiny drop shipper send me a double order because they were concerned I wouldn't get the product in time (like a day late on a 4 day shipping window, for free shipping) without me even complaining. Hell, they do this even though ebay probably lists me as a terrible buyer because I never add seller feedback.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#215

Post by xur17 »

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.…

I agree. In my head I group chatbots into: 1. bot that can regurgitate the faqs 2. bot that can perform actions

I've had good experiences with type 2 bots with Amazon, Uber, and Doordash, refunding orders that weren't delivered, etc. I assume they have a budget for refunds based on your purchase and refund volume, very similar to the agency a normal customer service agent would have.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#216

Post by donmcronald »

nehal3m wrote: post #103

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.

I never get anyone that understands the basics let alone the subtlety. Do you have some secret method to get people that are knowledgeable?

I find that calling support is worse than doing nothing in a lot of cases. They simply waste time that you could be spending finding a workaround or migrating. Migrating is becoming a problem though because everything is consolidated into a few shitty companies with terrible support (ex: Microsoft).

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#217

Post by NikolaNovak »

JAlexoid wrote: post #86
NikolaNovak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing. At work, I hated an hr bot for years. But in the last year it became good and useful and I now like it. If a bot gives me what I need I'll like it. If it only provides value for YOU though and makes MY life more difficult then I will not enjoy it very much. Big problem with most bots is they don't have authority and they refuse to turn you over to someone who does. If I'm engaging with your customer…

You should try talking to people who work in customer service call centers, most of their calls are arrogant opportunists that aren't calling to fix any issues... but to get something extra. "This item is scratched, so I want a 50% discount refunded" - comes to my mind. Most of customer service is dealing with Karens

Oh that's fair enough. Both sides suck! I never worked in call centre, but I worked 6 months in Future Shop as a teenager (it was a Canadian version of Best Buy in the 90s), and there's a reason why I stopped as soon as I could - both the sellers and the buyers had higher percentage of dishonest bums than I was comfortable with.

The story that made me quit:

We had an extremely clear policy of no returns or exchange on opened printer cartridges.

A customer came in to obtain a refund. He claimed it was the wrong cartridge.

Did anybody help him or instruct him to take that cartridge? Nope.

Did he notice that it's explicitly not for his printer? Before he opened it? Nope.

I pick up the cartridge and... it's empty. Dry. Nothing left in it.

Before I could even say anything he looks at me, and start yelling and slamming his hands on the counter and making a scene. Not because he was upset, there was nothing to be upset about yet. It was just a rational, calculated move to obtain a refund on a cartridge he fully used. 30 seconds later the store manager comes over and gives him the refund.

Store manager coached me and indicated, this is basically retail life and where he comes in to provides judgment - the disruption and bad image this person created FAR outweighed the $50 he gave away. It was nothing personal and I should not feel bad or betrayed that I was overruled after following clear rules.

I absolutely 100% agree with manager's perspective. He did the right thing. I could not blame him or wish that he did otherwise. The only way I could find for that scenario to have a different outcome was for me to not be there anymore, so I tendered my resignation the next day.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#218

Post by donmcronald »

melvinmelih wrote: post #181
nehal3m wrote: post #103

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…

In my experience, customer service are not that much more helpful than a chatbot (heavily undertrained or no privileges to do anything at all).

They’re untrained and untrusted by their employer, which means they can’t have privileges to do anything helpful. It’s super common and I don’t even understand why they have support at that point.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#220

Post by gwbas1c »

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?

> Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot?

It's a horrible case for a chatbot. Basically, when you have a bunch of hopping mad customers, you don't want to rub salt in their wounds. Refusing to answer the phone in such a situation is horrible customer service.

Basically, if you refuse to answer the phone and stick out a chat bot, it looks like you're just hiding from your customers.

(This should be obvious if you've ever seen post mortems on customer service disasters, like the Intel Pentium bug.)

> Can you elaborate on why you didn’t trust the chat it but would trust a human?

Two reasons:

Basically, I don't know what kinds of integrations, or lack of, are in the system. So, for all I know, they could have something that just says, "don't worry, we're working on it," if it detects that my internet is offline. (IE, I don't know if anyone is actually working on it.)

No context: The system would only respond with a short, canned answer. First it said that everything was going to be fixed at 1:00, then a few hours after it kept saying "fixed soon."

(Again, this should be obvious if you've ever dealt with automations, or ever seen an error message.)

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