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

arstechnica.com

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

#121

Post by nunez »

libraryatnight wrote: post #57
marssaxman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Basically Uber support these days. Except theirs uses an LLM which gives you an even more useless layer of pretending to help.

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

#122

Post by nunez »

rtkwe wrote: post #38
no_wizard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think that's partially because Amazon returns are the most happy path support interaction I've ever seen. They basically always grant the refund/return (in my experience if it's soonish after purchase) and it's mostly about gathering the info to get it going rather than actually resolving an issue. The main decision on Amazon's side seems to be if they want you to bother sending the item back or not.

I wonder how long they will keep that up for. Those returns must be costing them a fortune every quarter.

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

#123

Post by nicbou »

yallpendantools wrote: post #76
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…

Preach. Shout out to the be/st bank in Germany, Commerzbank. They advertise being reachable 24h a day[1] but all day you gotta go through a chatbot first and beyond core hours there isn't a human at the end of the line. Worse, they don't tell you what their actual core hours are so if you are calling at, say, 9:00, you could be suckered into waiting on the line for the next hour for an actual human agent. You could c…

Commerzbank seems like a distillate of everything that is wrong with German bureaucracy and business culture. I have an account with them, but only because I can't figure out how to sell ~€500 of stock and shut it down.

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

#124

Post by p0w3n3d »

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 miss the times when companies were building their brands on trust and honor. I remember calling HP support because I bought a monitor that was probably lying in a warehouse somewhere, and it had some "stain" on the screen. It still had 9 of 36 months of warranty. HP sent a fedex WITH the new monitor and they replaced the old one. Best support ever!

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

#125

Post by MrMember »

nunez wrote: post #122
rtkwe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's partially because Amazon returns are the most happy path support interaction I've ever seen. They basically always grant the refund/return (in my experience if it's soonish after purchase) and it's mostly about gathering the info to get it going rather than actually resolving an issue. The main decision on Amazon's side seems to be if they want you to bother sending the item back or not.

I wonder how long they will keep that up for. Those returns must be costing them a fortune every quarter.

Every time I've returned something to Amazon it was because of their fuck up (sadly a lot more common lately). They send me the completely wrong item, the item arrives broken, etc.

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

#126

Post by taylodl »

crazygringo wrote: post #39
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…

Maybe 75%? I've gotten pointed to documentation I never would have found and I doubt a human would have found. I've had returns immediately processed rather than waiting 2 days for a RMA to show up in my email. I had a subscription rate lowered (my desired outcome) when I tried to cancel a service. And I've had a software bug escalated to the appropriate team within a couple of minutes. And all these interactions wer…

I'm curious - whose chatbots do you find useful? Clearly these are the bots us HNers should be looking at as an example for what we should be building.

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

#127

Post by rtkwe »

nunez wrote: post #122
rtkwe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's partially because Amazon returns are the most happy path support interaction I've ever seen. They basically always grant the refund/return (in my experience if it's soonish after purchase) and it's mostly about gathering the info to get it going rather than actually resolving an issue. The main decision on Amazon's side seems to be if they want you to bother sending the item back or not.

I wonder how long they will keep that up for. Those returns must be costing them a fortune every quarter.

They've kept it up for several decades and in cases where it's not shipping damage or error (wrong item sent by amazon) they mostly pass the cost off to the sellers afaik. They also have their second hand stores where they sell returns and can recoup a lot of that loss. The ease of returns is one of the main things that keep me from completely cutting off amazon purchases and they probably know that and accept the losses for the gains.

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

#128

Post by ori_b »

zdragnar wrote: post #78
ori_b wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not OP, but I think you're missing one aspect- senior engineer time doesn't scale well, because there's not just wage but also opportunity cost of context switching and taking them away from tasks that might contribute to increased sales or revenue. More sales also means needing to hire more people if the support load is constant per customer. If a chatbot can reasonably succeed at eliminating some of that workload w…

The parent poster was saying that it wasn't about cost savings, and yet all that you talked about was cost savings.

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

#129

Post by hinkley »

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…

How often has a chatbot spun you up even further and you just closed your account instead of trying to get a real human to talk to?

I'm pretty sure it's at least once for me, and I think I know a couple people where it's more like 3.

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

#130

Post by hinkley »

sc68cal wrote: post #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 ta…

The best the union can manage here probably is to be less conciliatory the next time contract negotiations come up.

Oh you want us to take it easy on you with the raise %? Remember that time you fired all of us for no good reason? Yeah our bank accounts still have a hole we're gonna fill up now. Nice try.

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