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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

#51

Post by aidenn0 »

taylodl wrote: 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…

It is consistently worse than a google search with a site: set to their website. My best interactions have been with ones that were slightly less annoying than a phone-tree to get to a CS rep.

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

#52

Post by trentnix »

taylodl wrote: 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…

"Success rate" is a tricky metric.

I had to use an Amazon chatbot a few weeks ago. It introduced itself as "Deepshikha". After that facepalm, I started down the path with its various preferred responses to get a refund on an item I bought that never arrived, had no tracking information, and was almost certainly a scam by a third-party seller. I eventually, after a few tries, selected the right combination of things to get the refund processed. But the chatbot wasn't helpful, it didn't make any decisions, and it simply served as a filter for scam refund requests.

I guarantee you that some middle-management PM and some VP at Amazon counted that interaction as a success. I'm sure that's how it ended up on their quarterly graphs and charts. After all, the customer (me) got what they wanted and the right decision was made. And, !bonus!, it used "AI", reduces cost, and had low latency. Raises and promotions are almost certainly incoming!

But the experience was abysmal and insulting, contibuting to the ongoing ensh*ttification of the Amazon experience.

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

#53

Post by blackguardx »

guywithahat wrote: post #43
blackguardx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the rust belt. I've never heard of anyone leaving to "escape unions" but rather there just being not many jobs, lots of historic pollution to deal with, and a poor future economic outlook. Why were unions specifically to blame for your family leaving?

> but rather there just being not many jobs, lots of historic pollution to deal with, and a poor future economic outlook I have never seen someone leave due to pollution, other than just wanting to leave the city. The poor economic outlook and lack of jobs is directly due to the unions. If there weren't unions, Detroit and Flint would still be the capital of the auto industry, and Erie PA would still be a major locam…

I lived in Erie and Cleveland for a while. There are non-union shops all around and the locomotive business in Erie was owned by a declining company (GE) that divested it in a fire sale along with many other parts of their business due to too much reliance on financial engineering and not real engineering.

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

#54

Post by mionhe »

IT4MD wrote: post #35
taylodl wrote: 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…

>Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of th…

Is there a place where it isn't dead in the world? It seems to be the attitude everywhere nowadays.

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

#55

Post by busymom0 »

taylodl wrote: 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 Amazon returns chatbot has always been successful for me at redirecting me to an actual human after several tries.

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

#56

Post by brobdingnagians »

taylodl wrote: 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 had a chatbot attempt to answer an issue I had with setting up a Shopify site yesterday. All of the information was correct, but I had already done it. A customer support rep was able to retrigger the TLS query. The chatbot knew that needed to be done, but couldn't actually do it. It suggested ways of doing it which didn't exist in the UI, which was even more frustrating

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

#57

Post by libraryatnight »

marssaxman wrote: post #29
taylodl wrote: 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 few times I've let a company sucker me into engaging with a chatbot, it was nothing but a worse interface to searching their support website. It was capable of nothing but directing me to pages which could not help me, because what I needed was not more information about the problem I already knew I had, but someone to fix the damn problem .

Sometimes there will be a loop that's tough to break out of where the "Contact us" tells you to talk to a chat bot before putting in a ticket or showing you a phone number, and the bot won't be able to help but will spit you out to the page that tells you to talk to the chat bot rather than give you info for actual support until you find the special event chain that leads it to let you talk to people, or attempt to.

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

#58

Post by ori_b »

StevenWaterman wrote: post #10
taylodl wrote: 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 b…

If you're not treating it as a cost cutting exercise, how much are you spending per query on the chatbot, and what is that $10 budget per query going towards?

Can you give some examples of complex queries that it's handled?

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

#59

Post by davidhariri »

taylodl wrote: 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…

Success rate depends on many factors (risk of failure, your value to the business, complexity of the ask), but it's definitely on average much higher than 5% (I sell this technology and look at the results many times a day).

> Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.

This is bang on. But unfortunately many companies have top down mandates to drive costs down (without backstops for LTV retention) and they look at top line growth as separate from OpEx. It's weird and broken, but it's a side effect of the common organizational structure of most enterprises. There are companies that do not look at themselves divisionally as CX, Sales, Product, Marketing etc. and the ones I can think of do have very high NPS (apple comes to mind).

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

#60

Post by throwawayben »

taylodl wrote: 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 had a joint account with an ex who now lives abroad and I no longer have contact with.

I talked to the bank and there was no way to close the account without both of us present.

Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me! That's the best success I've had with a CS bot.

Possibly the policy changed in the mean-time or the lack of activity in the account for several years allowed it to happen (though the humans never told me after x years of inactivity I'd be able to close it)

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