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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

#141

Post by JohnFen »

oliwarner wrote: post #132
syncbehind wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 organisa…

Nonprofits and charities operate in a capitalist system. They aren't apart from it.

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

#142

Post by sabbaticaldev »

jerf wrote: post #125
syncbehind wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit , not the revenue they get from you. Many of the companies you are asking to provide service are making a buck or two a month from you, even if you are nominally paying hundreds of dollars. So if you call up a real human, you can be draining away months, years, even the entire profit margin you will ever be worth, pretty quickly. Esp…

> Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you

this makes zero sense. Fat paychecks and bonuses are part of this calculation.

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

#143

Post by JohnFen »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #111
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…

My dad's ISP did exactly what you say is impossible. It was a small ISP in Salt Lake City (xmission, if anyone cares). They had actual humans answering the phone, and no bankruptcies.

Most of the companies I've worked for have been the same, and my personal companies as well. The financial reality that I've experienced is that customer service is a very expensive, and it doesn't take long for a call to use up your profit margin.

But good customer service pays dividends in the long run even if it appears to be a loss in the short. In cold money terms, it's not an expense, it's an investment.

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

#144

Post by gjtorikian »

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 completely agree that the prioritization of support is woefully lacking, but I think this is a consequence of the shoddy state of support tooling. If customer support professionals were given the right tools to do their jobs, instead of half-baked solutions from 15 years ago, we might see a new virtuous cycle between customers-support-product. That's why my friends and I started Yetto [0], a help desk for people, not cogs.

You can see an overview of the core support workflow in our recorded demo [1], and we have more videos showing off more of the features on the way soon.

Feel free to sign up for access [2] and we'd love to get your feedback on it while we're still in beta. Let me know what you think!

(As a small business owner I am sure you can appreciate the opportunity to pounce on opportunity. )

[0]: https://www.yetto.app/ [1]: https://youtu.be/jQ30Ce-J144 [2]: https://web.yetto.app/application

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

#145

Post by Tao3300 »

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…

> 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.

Nah, the C-suite fat cats just need to take a few million less for running a shitty business, and use the money to hire people who actually have to do stuff for customers.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

Lutzb wrote: post #17
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…

It's gotten so bad, that I have started to actively look for for products and services with known good customer support. E.g. I switched to an internet provider for SMEs. Costs around 20% more, but has dedicated IPv4/IPv6 IPs and offers a real human help desk.

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by JohnFen »

fvdessen wrote: post #70
xg15 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. Has any business actually tried?

The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve…

Just recently where I work, we dropped a major supplier of single board computers because their customer service was almost entirely unresponsive the one time we needed their support. We spent a million or two a year with them. Small potatoes in the big picture, but still significant money that is now going to one of their competitors.

That change was a significant cost to us as well, as it meant that the system we were using the boards in had to be redesigned to accommodate a different board.

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

#148

Post by JohnFen »

throwacc11 wrote: post #90
mattpavelle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in the early days of the web people said similar things about online shopping. The LL Bean catalog had more photos in higher resolution than their early e-commerce website, and you would call a phone number and talk to a person who knew the clothing in order to purchase from the catalog. No one would want to buy on a website… We are in the beginning days here. I expect chatbot advances to similarly start w…

HN is full of people who thought who needs Dropbox when we have rsync. AI is gonna replace everything. Bubble or not it's gonna last for a decade (worst crypto bubble is still going on). Better all jump on the bandwagon before its too late

> Better all jump on the bandwagon before its too late

Heh, my take is the opposite. Better to get out before it's too late.

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

#149

Post by JohnFen »

karmakaze wrote: post #136
danielbln wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This should become the normal case.

But it won't. I'd bet big on that prediction.

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

#150

Post by 542354234235 »

falcor84 wrote: post #31
Black616Angel wrote: post #8

I find an odd sort of comfort in the fact, that ISP-support seemingly is bad everywhere and has been for centuries. I remember that 20 years ago we had a problem with our self-bought router and a technician came, fixed the issue without telling us how (although it was our router, where he changed the config) and then just went off.

> ISP-support seemingly is bad everywhere and has been for centuries. I assume you meant "decades", but it suddenly got me very interested in a steampunk story centered around the experiences of an ISP support technician in the early 1800's.

I think it was hyperbole for comedic effect.
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