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If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#31

Post by falcor84 »

Black616Angel wrote: post #8

I find an odd sort of comfort in the fact, that ISP-support seemingly is bad everywhere and has been for centuries. I remember that 20 years ago we had a problem with our self-bought router and a technician came, fixed the issue without telling us how (although it was our router, where he changed the config) and then just went off.

> ISP-support seemingly is bad everywhere and has been for centuries.

I assume you meant "decades", but it suddenly got me very interested in a steampunk story centered around the experiences of an ISP support technician in the early 1800's.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#32

Post by mewpmewp2 »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #28
FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

It's rather simple. If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it. Especially if you pay nothing and the product business model is ad-based. If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.

Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well. Humans cost a lot.

And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them a lot more, and likely they wouldn't last long at this job even then.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#33

Post by loudmax »

The problem here is bad customer support, not the use of chatbots. In this case, the chatbot is part of a badly designed system. Note that the human support rep didn't even have access to the chat history. AT&T is not making a real effort to provide good customer support.

If the incentive structure within AT&T isn't focused on providing customer support, then throwing an AI chatbot into the mix isn't going to fix anything. Doing that just means that you still have a bad customer support system, but now instead of waiting in a queue, your customers are arguing with an idiotic robot.

An AI chatbot can be a part of a well designed customer support system, but this isn't it.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#34

Post by worldsayshi »

FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

I admire your viewpoint but I also find that it's extremely seldom that I need customer support for the majority of services I use. If I need it it's usually because of a flaw with the service. Surely it's very hard to be aware of their flaws if they don't have customer service but if they have other ways to reliable gather that data isn't it better for the customer if the service provider spends that effort fixing the flaws?

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#35

Post by vmladenov »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #13

It was like that before chat bots. You always got some low-grade script-reading human support before being escalated to people who can fix things. The following actually happened to me in the early 1990s. I had my own phone line installed in a house where I was renting a room (to be able to use a dialup modem freely). It had crosstalk on it, probably due to a ground fault. But try to explain that to the support perso…

https://xkcd.com/806/

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#36

Post by uniclaude »

FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes.

I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#37

Post by rkuodys »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #23
FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.

Interesting. But I can already imagine how it's going to backfire - you will reach a person and plead to better speak with AI:)

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#38

Post by amelius »

FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

There should always be a button "let me speak to a human".

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#39

Post by xg15 »

uniclaude wrote: post #36
FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes. I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.

> Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful.

Has any business actually tried?

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