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If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#131

Post by cs702 »

As I was reading the OP's, ahem, difficulties with customer-support AI chatbots, all I could think was, I've had the same experience too, and it sucks.

The movie "Elysium," from 11 years ago, depicts what it feels like to interact with one of today's AI chatbots:

https://youtu.be/flLoSxd2nNY

Naturally, in the movie, the conversation with the bot on the counter was mandated due to another bot's earlier lack of understanding:

https://youtu.be/vVhT4X6uLL4?t=99

Let us all hope that AI chatbots will get much better over time. We all need it.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#132

Post by oliwarner »

syncbehind wrote: post #110
oliwarner wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with normal people interfacing with a technical product . They're not asking the same questions you or I might, they're asking documented questions and they're doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves. ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It's not just a modem, there's a line, an internal n…

>Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week. This sentiment is, in essence, the problem. It's perfectly logical for this trend of distancing customers from their , as you put it, "all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language-meat-bags" when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpos…

It's not fair to think about this just in terms of capitalism. Even non-profits and charities have customer support systems. A customer who cannot or will not help themselves costs that organisation more to service than one who will. This is pretty universal.

If an automated system can handle 50% of the calls quickly and accurately, you're getting better value for your other user, who might be paying for the organisation's running fees.

It's only when it grates like this, when you're screaming "CONNECT ME TO A HUMAN!!1" at an AI where it's really a problem.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#133

Post by oliwarner »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #120
oliwarner wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with normal people interfacing with a technical product . They're not asking the same questions you or I might, they're asking documented questions and they're doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves. ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It's not just a modem, there's a line, an internal n…

Imagine something like a credit score but for technological adeptness. A high score and you can reliably get an on prem human and even sometimes an engineer. A low score and you just get endless bots. Average and you get the current system.

Indeed. A good service system will ask that. I've had that for technical equipment ("Are you a buyer, installer, operator, etc?").

And hey, it'd be nice if that translated into a lower price but I won't pretend that us geeks don't cause as many problems as we eventually fix.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#134

Post by GiveOver »

RationPhantoms wrote: post #101
Rinzler89 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.

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.

I prefer that feature massively. Being on hold sucks, you can't fully commit to doing another task because you need to listen out for the fuzzy elevator music to switch to a human voice. Even worse when the fuzzy music switches to a recorded human voice every 30 seconds to remind you you're still on hold.

Having a call back means I can forget about it and go on with my day until they call me.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#135

Post by jcalx »

Reposting my comment on "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1" [1]:

This comment and many of the replies seem to outright dismiss chatbots as universally useless, but there's selection bias at work. Of course the average HN commenter would (claim to) have a nuanced situation that can only be handled by a human representative, but the majority of customer service interactions can be handled much more routinely.

Bits About Money [2] has a thoughtful take on customer support tiers from the perspective of banking:

> Think of the person from your grade school classes who had the most difficulty at everything. The U.S. expects banks to service people much, much less intelligent than them. Some customers do not understand why a $45 charge and a $32 charge would overdraw an account with $70 in it. The bank will not be more effective at educating them on this than the public school system was given a budget of $100,000 and 12 years to try. This customer calls the bank much more frequently than you do. You can understand why, right? From their perspective, they were just going about their life, doing nothing wrong, and then for some bullshit reason the bank charged them $35.

It's frustrating to be put through a gauntlet of chatbots and phone menus when you absolutely know you need a human to help, but that's the economics of chatbots and tier 1/2 support versus specialists:

> The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise.

Yes, I agree that when I absolutely need to speak to a human, it's infuriating to no end. But everyone's collective "absolutely need to speak to a human" bar is higher than it may need to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681450

[2] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#136

Post by karmakaze »

danielbln wrote: post #55
pavinjoseph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a decent experience with a service recently that used a ChatGPT powered support agent, it couldn't deal with my situation but I was surprised by how quickly it knew its own limitations and handed me to an actual human who helped me out. Edit: The chatbot in question was not powered by ChatGPT a few months ago and it was pretty bad, a few canned QAs and really weird loops to get to a human agent. Before that the…

I feel that's the best case, a smart conversational system that knows its limit and can off-ramp you to a human if need be. In addition, I don't _want_ to talk to a human, via phone or otherwise. We all had horrendous CS experiences ("are the lights on you router blinking?" - "yes! I just told you that there is packet loss, arghhh" so I actually prefer a smart non-human system in the vast majority of cases.

This should become the normal case. With the automated chatbots handling all the common or known problems and solutions, fewer humans are needed and can then be better trained to handle the more complex cases (with an AI assistant at their disposal). This improvement in support could possibly be achieved at lower cost (to the company).

AI chatbots aren't the future, AI everything is. I'm far more concerned about some parts of the everything else, starting with automated warfare.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#137

Post by michaelt »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #129
michaelt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, paying a high price is no guarantee you'll get particularly good customer service. Obviously, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service. But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub…

It obviously depends on the category of the "thing" we're talking about - and you can only compare it ceteris paribus with other things. >But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports. But the premium seats at the ai…

If you buy a premium seat with free food and lounge access, you'll get free food and lounge access, yes. As I mentioned, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service in that sense.

But when something goes wrong - like they lose your bag - you'll find the customer service is pretty much the same. Possibly there's an ultra-ultra-premium tier where things are different?

The real way money makes travel easier, in my experience, isn't that you can buy flights where they don't lose your bags - it's that a few hundred bucks to replace some lost clothes is a trivial matter.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#138

Post by beshur »

rolandog wrote: post #74
Guvante wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T gigabit internet tends to be $1,200 a year and has incredible margins on profitability.

Agreed. They're just too big to care.

That's the question - how the companies get and stay that big if they don't care?

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#139

Post by JohnFen »

oliwarner wrote: post #102
FL410 wrote: post #12

The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…

I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with normal people interfacing with a technical product . They're not asking the same questions you or I might, they're asking documented questions and they're doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves. ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It's not just a modem, there's a line, an internal n…

If the first contact I can have with support is an LLM, that's the same as not providing support. Even talking to non-technical staff following scripts first, as obnoxious as that is, is preferable.

The only reason that I'm calling support in the first place is because web searching and their automated systems have failed me.

I may not be the standard customer, but that's not my problem. If that matters, all that's saying is that the company doesn't want me as a customer.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#140

Post by danaris »

GiveOver wrote: post #134
RationPhantoms wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I prefer that feature massively. Being on hold sucks, you can't fully commit to doing another task because you need to listen out for the fuzzy elevator music to switch to a human voice. Even worse when the fuzzy music switches to a recorded human voice every 30 seconds to remind you you're still on hold. Having a call back means I can forget about it and go on with my day until they call me.

While I 100% agree with this...

...I wonder if there's a meaningful way to prevent companies from saying they're going to do this, and then just "losing" 80% of the callbacks they're supposed to give. Or giving them at 1AM (hey, it's 10:30AM in Mumbai where the off-hours call center is!).

Waiting for a callback is unquestionably way better than waiting on hold, but I would still need to make sure I'm in a position to be taking that call and actually handling whatever it requires at any given time during the waiting period, so things like going shopping or being in a place with poor cell signal (like my office!) aren't good options—and what happens if I'm not available the moment they call? Can they just say "oh, well, couldn't reach customer" and force me to start the process again?

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