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Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

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Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#531

Post by MichaelZuo »

LoganDark wrote: post #452
dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

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…

> 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." 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…

This is too cynical. For serious B2B customer service, and higher end B2C businesses, they are genuinely there to make sure every last inquiry is resolved to satisfaction.

Of course that's because they don't charge a fixed rate, usually a pricier variable rate.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#532

Post by scrollaway »

dikaio wrote: post #471
johnnyworker wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked in a call center as tech support for an ISP that also did phone and TV. One day a women called about her continuing problems with the phone service crapping out. She had been in contact with us for months, and at some point she said she got the feeling people didn't take her seriously because she was a woman. She was a widow who was taking care of her 40 year old heavily disabled son, where any second t…

There’s so few people that would have done what you did. In my experience, most customer service reps want to complete their tickets as quickly as possible to meet the companies quotas. When you run into reps as yourself it’s so refreshing. 10 years ago this lack of customer service was rare, businesses tried to provide the best customer service as possible but now you get companies that seemingly chose to avoid prov…

It's bad incentives.

I'm not particularly in favour of replacing the humans with AIs, but honestly, between a human drone whose incentives are sapped, and an AI I can prompt engineer at least somewhat, I'm reasonably certain I can get more out of the AI than the drone.

What we should be looking at is strict requirements on human customer support. Not "in the AI age" but IN GENERAL. If a company fails customer compliance, it should be dead-easy to prove, report and get actioned. This is feasible.

I had billing issues with Ring a while back. Their CS phone line was broken, their email was auto-reply-only, they had no legal email point of contact. My only recourse was to go through a lengthy EU-wide mediation process (which I did, and resulted in fuck all).

There's a power imbalance that needs to be straight up fixed. Companies don't need to care about providing good service, complying with local laws, hearing their customers or really... anything. Once they have a good amount of customers they just have the inertia necessary to stop giving a fuck.

This is what we need to fix.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#533

Post by 650REDHAIR »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
ghaff wrote: post #2

There's been a pretty steady trend towards automation, chatbots, self-service, etc. replacing getting an empowered human on the line. Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more. Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred…

There is a billboard on the 101 southbound from SF I drove past last night that said “An AI bot trained on the entirety of human knowledge wants a job on your support team.” Amusingly, this is the sort of filter you want to push management through to determine levels of both competency and empathy (“what is the true practicality of this?” and “should we do this?”). Edit: found someone’s photo of it: https://old.reddi…

Intercom is the company behind the billboards.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#534

Post by err4nt »

chmod775 wrote: post #449
jiggawatts wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few people are "blown away" by the absolute skill level of ChatGPT. It's more that there exists an AI that can do this at all . This just wasn't a thing three years ago, and the first truly capable version (GPT 4) only become publicly accessible this year . Some things I've seen GPT 4 do is "as good as human", often better than average. For example, spotting bugs or reverse-engineering code and then writing doc comme…

You want to trust that thing to review your code? It will often give you eloquent explanations, trying to convince you that code has a certain bug, while completely missing the actual bug. You'll be gaslit into chasing down dead ends, distracted from actual issues. Example: "In JS, create a Promise that is resolved with some emitted value from an EventEmitter, or rejected if an 'error' event is emitted first. Write t…

You said, "You'll be gaslit into chasing down dead ends, distracted from actual issues."

When the ideal situation is that your Code-writing bot is attempting to gaslight your Project-management bot, and they go around in tireless circles, 24/7 arguing with each other, while their human masters are sleeping or not paying attention :)

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#535

Post by rainbowzootsuit »

martin8412 wrote: post #474
dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

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…

All you need to do is to speak the magic codeword, charge back.

I think you misspelled "shibboleet."

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#536

Post by mieubrisse »

sometimes_all wrote: post #493
dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

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…

When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could. Good customer service inspires loy…

I've had this experience with Ally bank. Their SMS-only 2FA, lack of international wire transfers, and compete failure to work with Plaid drive me insane, but I'm still using them because I get a kind, helpful human every time I call.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#537

Post by donmcronald »

jiggawatts wrote: post #517
donmcronald wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think of it as a "better linter". No way. A linter is deterministic. ChatGPT is all over the place and, for me, it’s wrong almost every time I ask it anything. I wouldn’t trust it to tell me the ingredients in a pepperoni pizza. I’m definitely not letting it give me programming advice.

Ironically, I had a lot of trouble with a particular recipe (pan-fried gyoza with a crispy bottom), and it was only GPT 4 that gave me a working recipe! The lack of determinism can be considered a type of strength. Run it multiple times! It might find different bugs each time. Humans are the same, by the way. If you show a random set of programmers random snippets of code, you'll get a non-deterministic result. They…

> The lack of determinism can be considered a type of strength. Run it multiple times! It might find different bugs each time.

I’ve only tried it with code a little bit, but what I find is that it gives me hallucinations that I need to spend time figuring out. I don’t know what it’s saying, because it’s gibberish, and then I have to spend my time figuring out it’s not accurate. I don’t want to run on that treadmill.

I’m guessing software will continue the trend of getting less reliable as more people are willing to generate it via an AI.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#538

Post by wjamesg »

jq-r wrote: post #528
LoganDark wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket. Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.

Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc. The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unkno…

Believe it or not, there are helpful support resources out there which are typically hard to come across, you’ve admittedly just had a shitty experience (not uncommon)

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#539

Post by nonstopdev »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

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…

I’ve been in the contact center consulting space for years and unfortunately, some industries just know there aren’t many alternatives or the effort to move somewhere is so high they really don’t need to strive to make the customer feel special or welcome.

Airlines, internet providers, larger companies like Amazon and Meta can run on such low quality support because face it, most people will continue to use them.

Coinbase even offers “24/7 priority support” if you subscribe to their monthly plan.

The industry is a mess but companies are starting to move the traditional contact center as you mentioned focused on just limiting the complaints and placing a bandaid on the problems to make them go away and turning into a fully personalized experience where calls and feedback help feed the entire customer experience. Metrics typically looked at such as higher hold times are not as highly weighted as the reasons and how often someone is calling and helping really drive a lot of companies in a positive way.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#540

Post by jq-r »

dh2022 wrote: post #529
jq-r wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc. The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unkno…

I don’t get it: how does AWS benefit if the TAM delays resolving the ticket/

TAM doesn't necessarily resolve the ticket nor that's their first priority. Their first priority is to be a contact person or a face of a faceless company. I don't believe they're paid by a resolved ticket (all tickets get resolved anyway), MTTR or something similar. Tickets are for some faceless support personnel. TAMs are supposed to help you, but unless it's something trivial they are a waste of time.
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