If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

Already feels like they can work around that by having the "Don't wait on hold, we'll call you back when an agent is ready" feature.

Comcast “customer service” was already such an abysmal experience in 2006 that I find it hard to believe anyone longs for that again. I spent 3 hours on the phone trying to get a $50 correction to my bill that that summer when I was a broke grad student as I got railroaded around a call center in India.

That’s a system designed not to help you. Maybe they’re doing the same thing now, but framing AI as the problem lets these companies off the hook for what I’d consider “working as intended”.

Isn't horrible customer service a staple of American broadband companies? And the sole reason they get away with it is because they have very effectively lobbied in many state, town jurisdictions such that any alternative providers have no chance of making a competitive offer (either because there are no other competitors offering fiber or because getting connected would be very costly)? In that case customer service is a pure cost factor where companies are incentivized to provide the bare minimum that just retains the customer. If I were a shareholder of AT&T I'd say they are doing things by the book.

> What many here on HN don't realize is some significant portion of call center activity is people asking things like "Whats my balance?".

Exactly.

We all have some level of knowledge and experience with things we consider obvious and basic like password managers, self-service (apps, online logins), etc. Bank of America has 69 million customers. I'd love to see the internal stats on what their customer service interfaces handle but I'd venture to guess they have some unbelievable amount of interactions on a daily basis for things like balances, paying bills (really), password resets, etc.

Then consider services even more within our wheelhouse like ISPs - I'm sure we've all had that Tier 1 rep experience of laying on the couch while a rep goes through their script asking questions/diagnosing with things that anyone here would have gone well above and beyond before even calling. I know that whenever I have issues with anything I will do whatever I can within my own control and capability to AVOID the hoop-jumping, phone trees, queues, etc. All we're ever trying to do is navigate their script to get to Tier 2 or beyond.

Then, finally, when I get them to do a truck roll because it's some outside cable plant issue or whatever the tech sees I have 10 gbit ethernet everywhere they look at me wide-eyed and ask "So... What do you do?".

However, to your point from the perspective of the business it makes sense... Take Comcast as another example - they have over 32 million customers from all walks of life with an extremely wide range of ages, experience, capabilities, etc. Ideally you could call/chat/whatever and get a capable human right away but that's just not possible at the scale many of these entities operate.

My mother (73 years old) just fell victim to the classic "get an email, click a link, get a popup, call "Microsoft", install remote access software, and login to your bank account" scam. She was completely convinced she was talking to Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission (what?!?), her phones were tapped, and people were following/watching her. Next thing she knew she was at her bank taking out every cent she could get access to and driving around feeding hundred dollar bills into Bitcoin ATM machines. Really.

Watching her interact with customer service interfaces was eye opening (as was falling victim to this ridiculous scam in the first place). My takeaway was "Oh, she is why they have these things implemented the way they do".

I would have thought that was obvious from my comment.

I'm with Jeff on this one.

LLMs are an obviously terrible solution for any problem that actually has a complex but invariant solution.

Personally I prefer rigid, automated questionnaire filtering that gets you to a real person as soon as possible.

I also thoroughly believe in a) human support chats and b) believing the people answering them to be decent human beings who deserve my clarity, preparedness, politeness and empathy, and I think more should be done on chat interfaces to make them slightly less amenable to stupid unstructured queries. You help people ask the question right.