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Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

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Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#2
A lot of the linkedIn style "we did X with AI and saved Y" stories seem exceptionally vague and maybe entirely made up.

It makes sense that some companies will be foolish enough to believe and to pull the trigger.

Everyone involved in that decision should be the ones fired. It seems entirely avoidable with some basic testing of the chatbot while still employing these people.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#3
How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%.

Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true measure of the person is what they do when things are not going well. It's the same for companies. When your customers are experiencing problems, that's the time to shine! It's not a problem, it's an opportunity.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#4
post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions.

I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#5
post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

I've had bad luck. Most of it very frustrating where the bot obviously doesn't understand anything.

My best luck with a chat bot was ironically only because of HN.

I was to complaining about amazon's chat bot (it would send me in an infinite loop of directions) and someone who worked at Amazon on HN told me that there were multiple chat bots, and they told me the right one use (I had to click a different link on the amazon webpage than I was clicking).

That one worked ... it took some engineer on HN to make me understand how to make it work.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#6
> Now, CBA has apologized to the fired workers. A spokesperson told Bloomberg that they can choose to come back to their prior roles, seek another position, or leave the firm with an exit payment.

So no real consequences to the Bank for these underhanded tactics, since this just returns everything back to status quo before the layoffs, perhaps with reduced overall headcount as some workers choose not to return and take the exit payment instead, but surely the numbers still worked well enough that they will do it again but be more crafty about it so they don't lose the appeal.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#7
post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

I bet chatbots are very successful when measuring how much the interaction costs, which seems to be what most companies are measuring when it comes to customer support. The problem is that it's very easy to measure cost (how many person-minutes did it take and what's your hourly cost for support agents, or how much API usage did it take for the bot?) and very hard to measure any outcome the customer actually cares about. Fix this misaligned incentive and the rest will follow naturally, but that requires treating support as a facilitator for the rest of the business rather than as a pure cost center that needs to be minimized.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#8
post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions. I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.

I was about to say the same thing. Amazon pretty much nailed it, at least for simple, straightforward "happy path" returns and refunds. I was actually kind of shocked after the "chatbot" conversation, sitting there thinking "Really, that's it and we're done?" and sure enough the money was refunded!

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#9
""a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week" means people aren't calling in as much. How many problems people have per day is roughly constant, so the only change in how many calls they get is entirely dependent on how much people expect calling in is going to fix their problems. So a reduction in call volume means they're not fixing as many problems which means customers are less satisfied

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#10
post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

I'm currently working on adding a bot to our support chat at TalkJS. And it's great, it has probably a 90% success rate at handling complex queries. But that's because we're throwing money at it. That chat is normally staffed by senior devs, meaning it's not unusual for a single response to cost $10 of labour.

If you approach it as a cost cutting exercise, you end up with crap. If you approach it as a way to make a better experience while you sleep, it's achievable.

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