This submission might be an HN record for highest % of commenters who skipped reading the article. I'm sure it's always high but so far there are 125 comments and maybe 3 or 4 referencing what was in the actual article.
Don't make me talk to your chatbot
131–140 of 221 posts
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious, why was it $20? I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?
I edited my comment above and explained, that $20 is an amortized cost representing everything that goes into picking up that phone call.
In that case, wouldn't you be happy to get more calls, so that the up-front "training" cost is worth it? Naïvely I'd expect that every additional call would _decrease_ the amortized price per call.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#133I agree in principle, but, for me, it all comes down to execution.
I used a product that implemented a VERY good AI chatbot as part of their email support and it was better than human support. It was nearly instant in its response time and answered all of my questions perfectly.
In fact, it wasn't until after the interaction that I realized it was an AI bot! Pretty good IMO and I'd prefer that interaction over holding "...because your call IS important to us."
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#134People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.
Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years.
This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#135People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time ca…
I had a friend who worked for a company that built AI call centres. I naively thought that customers would use it to do "password reset" type workflows and have an escape hatch for customers to talk to a human if the AI couldnt handle what they needed.
Surprisingly few of them wanted that. If the AI couldnt handle their issue they mostly wanted customers to just fuck off.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I have, Amazon has an excellent one. I had a few exchanges with it, and it initiated a refund for me, it was much quicker than a normal customer service call. Outside of customer service, I'm working on a website that has a huge amount of complexity to it, and would require a much larger interface than normal people would have patience for. So instead, those complex facets are exposed to an LLM as tools it…
I'm happy that LLMs are encouraging people to add discoverable APIs to their products. Do you think you can make the endpoints public, so they can be used for automation without the LLM in the way? If you need an LLM spin to convince management, maybe you can say something about "bring your own agent" and "openclaw", or something else along those lines?
Yep, I’m developing the direct agent access api in parallel as a first class option, seems like the human ui isn’t going to be so necessary going forward, though a little curation/thought on how to use it is still helpful, rather than an agent having to come up with all the ideas itself. I’ve spun off one of the datasets I’ve pulled as an independent x402 api already, plan to do more of those.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#137People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.
Corporations have really hammered in the propaganda haven't they? They idea that a trillion dollar corporation can't have good support because they're just greedy and don't want to hire workers needs to be reinstated every moment.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you enjoy reading slop? I fail to see how this is a controversial take.
You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads. I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans. The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve. A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almos…
Being able to name especially egregious forums is the point. AI slop isn't worse than preceding slop, but it is more widespread, partly because it's more socially acceptable than racism, sexism, and ignorance, and partly because it's harder to identify.
Similarly, email spam that is easy to automatically categorize is not a problem.
Making slop less sloppy makes the problem worse, not better. You could claim that that's only up to a threshold, but there's a pretty strong information theoretic argument against that.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.
Yeah as long as the chatbot is empowered to fix a bunch of basic problems I'm okay with them as the first line of support. The way support is setup nowadays humans are basically forced to be robots anyway, given a set of canned responses for each scenario and almost no latitude of their own. At least the robot responds instantly.
Yep, exactly, the problem comes when chatbots are used to shield all the people who can do stuff from interacting with customers.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware. I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.
Giving the device enough RAM to survive memory leaks during heavy usage would also be a valid option, as is automatic rebooting to get the device back into a clean state before the user experiences a persistent loss of connectivity. There are a wealth of available workarounds when you control everything about the device's hardware and software and almost everything about the network environments it'll be operating in…
For a community full of engineers, I'm always surprised that people always take absolutionist views on minor technical decisions, rather than thinking of the tradeoffs made that got there.