451–460 of 563 posts
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All things that would be more efficient if they just had a proper UI for them.
All of the examples I gave had a proper UI. Automated customer support doesn't have to be delivered via a chat or voice interface.
After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same…
Exactly. As far as I'm aware, the purpose is to prevent them from reaching the rest of the company- not to make them happy about it. Customer service is a layer of protection designed to dispel, annoy or exhaust people until they're no longer a threat.
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I have never successfully used automated voice support, even for getting information plainly available on the place's database. But I have tried to use it plenty of times.
automated voice support is a small subset of all automated customer support
People usually don't call the normal usable UI that solves problems "automated customer support", but if you refer to a navigable web site with real options to solving things, then well, you are offtopic but that one works.
At least their chatbots might be better than the ‘humans’ we spoke to a few years ago at Shopify. Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears. We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!)…
These are businesses at scale. They're not going to hold your hand. Be reasonable.
It’s not as if Shopify is some poor, sad, 3-person operation that’s barely scraping by.
Their last quarter net income was 83m on 1.6B revenue. They can afford less shitty customer support
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All of the examples I gave had a proper UI. Automated customer support doesn't have to be delivered via a chat or voice interface.
Just to clarify, when you said you used automated customer support to "cancel orders, cancel subscriptions, change a broadband package, arrange a return/refund for faulty goods", you're saying you used UI to do those things?
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automated voice support is a small subset of all automated customer support
Well, the same happens for chat text interfaces, but I have used those much fewer times. People usually don't call the normal usable UI that solves problems "automated customer support", but if you refer to a navigable web site with real options to solving things, then well, you are offtopic but that one works.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Anyone that has ever interacted with a customer service chat bot knows this is pretty stupid. I’m not sure why people (esp. those in the tech community) think we have evolved the technology in any meaningful enough way to replace people yet. How do we know this? Those same people would be against AI chatbots replacing their children’s teachers.
What this means is I still want to believe that crap customer experience is due to a disconnected CEO, when we all know it’s a feature, not a bug.
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> True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be. I disagree. Those agents are useless by design . They exist to do nothing in most cases, but none-the-less need to exist because of the regulatory + political + market backlash if they didn't. Chatbots don't fulfill the core requirement of being able to tell regulators and juries that you did, in fact, have an…
How do you know they're not just incompetent?
An entire staff is strategy.
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There's a pretty good trick to dealing with this (I've found): just call up the credit card company and tell them that you tried contacting the merchant, then ask them to bounce the charge
But what if it is the credit card company you are dealing with? For example I wanted to cancel one of my credit cards. There was nothing in their FAQ's that mentioned anything around "canceling". There was nothing under "Account options" or any logged in setting menu. There was no chat/support on their webpage. They only have a phone line you can call. The phone line is completely automated, and has 2 menus to go bac…
also I think some of the CC companies are less of a PITA in this, from my experience C1 is more of a PITA than Chase for example
At least their chatbots might be better than the ‘humans’ we spoke to a few years ago at Shopify. Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears. We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!)…
These are businesses at scale. They're not going to hold your hand. Be reasonable.
We should be holding organisations up to high standards, they won’t always meet them, but better to get them to at least try rather then throwing our hands up and letting them get away with testing people like dirt.