111–120 of 168 posts
I remember waiting for uber next to him in SF one night 10+ years ago. This dude must be the son of some mafia boss or some shit and have some crazy blackmail to raise billions for companies that are copies of products where he’s the 12th company doing the same thing.. never turning a profit or anything and yet raising ever more money. doesn’t make sense otherwise
So we're supposed to believe that removing humans from customer support will lead to better outcomes? > Ensure you only pay for the value Sierra delivers with outcome-based pricing. Yeah... that won't last.
AI customer support is trash and everyone hates it , but it makes the Wall St numbers go up, so it's a good thing.
This is sad. These jobs should go to someone in a poor town in the Midwest.
Why should they?
Their implementation is rather cumbersome, requiring implementation fees and AI configuration that is rather bespoke to Sierra. Anyone rolling off of Sierra will find there is nothing they can take with them.
In general, I think CX ought to disappear as a vertical in an AI world. If I'm talking to a product AI and need support, why should I switch to another AI to do that? Even if that second AI is invoked by the first as a tool, how much am I gaining?
Interestingly, the first and best implementers of AI support so far have been at companies that roll their own.
There is nothing unique to CX about AI, as far as I can tell. Sierra is still just the same AI infra people are putting in products. Granted, you can make good money positioning yourself this way, but I expect on some time horizon they will need to reposition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
adding some context as someone who works in this space 1. most people (average, non-tech people) reach for the phone to call in for easily solvable problems. Plus, if the agent is integrated deep enough & has tools to interact with crms, you can raise the ceiling on the types of problems it can solve. You're trying to avoid the bad customer experience of human 1 reading off their script, then they transfer you to som…
1 & 2 are totally dependent on the company being willing to let their agents do things that they haven’t traditionally let humans do. For example, issue refunds, or do things that cost money but generate good will. I am skeptical that companies will be OK with their agents doing those things on their own volition. 3. Cool so the user didn’t indicate if they were satisfied. What then? 4. You can’t use a SOTA model rig…
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> Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months For this to be true, the agent needs to actually be given the means to solve the problem, otherwise an "agent" is just a glorified help page that wastes your time. But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of f…
Voice agents have capabilities and policy to alter customer state. Just the other day I called into a CC company and the AI waived an interest charge.
If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder. > Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
The coauthor (and presumably cofounder) is Clay Bavor. He's a Google exec who was the face of their VR efforts when he was there.
We clearly do not live in the same universe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months For this to be true, the agent needs to actually be given the means to solve the problem, otherwise an "agent" is just a glorified help page that wastes your time. But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of f…
Voice agents have capabilities and policy to alter customer state. Just the other day I called into a CC company and the AI waived an interest charge.
There's a certain vendor that requires me to place same-day orders by a specific time. You can easily place an order from the website. If you need to cancel one, you have to ignore the grayed out cancel button and call their cancellation support line. There you'll talk to an agent that doesn't have access to cancel orders, so you have to convince it that it can't help you before you can transfer to a real employee with the ability to hit the "cancel" button.