Most AI is an annoyance. I'd complain.
Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
151–160 of 168 posts
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol at the title
probably works about as well as all the whitening products western cosmetic companies dump over there
I did not think the companies making them are western. India has plenty of its own, and has been making skin lightening cosmetics for literally millennia.
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#153Cases like this raise a question. As an engineer, the errors that coding AIs make are an annoyance, and reassuring in terms of my job prospect. As a consumer, the errors that AIs make are more than an annoyance. I have yet to meet an AI phone assistant that can do anything more than an explicitly programmed phone tree, and several, including the one for the pharmacy I use, that do far less. They are undoubtedly much…
All of these conversational AIs should either confidently detect a users intent or apologize and offer to forward call to a real person.
LLMs perform pretty poorly when you start try to restrict them too much (e.g. detect intents and control responses based on intent detection), the replies gets disjointed and weird feeling. An open ended prompt and chat completion gives a much better feeling most of the time but can go off the rails.
If you don't let LLMs handle the conversation entirely you get into insanely complex traditional engineering problem: (if user is complaining do x, if user asks a relevant question do y, if user asks an irrelevant question do z), which is an endless can of worms.
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…
Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. I have a lot of pharmacist relatives. This is news to them.
Store count seems to have peaked in 2018. Yes that data goes to 2021 but I doubt it got better after that.
https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/pharmacy-closures-united-...
The bigger thing is consolidation and independents being replaced by bigger fish because their leverage is very very low.
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s probably how their payor measures performance. But I thought the issue with customer surveys was how biased they could be toward negative experiences cuz nobody else is angry enough to respond.
They have so many possible biases that are hard to control for. They can be biased toward positive experiences too, if customers feel the job of the person that helped them is on the line.
What’s better for a manager/executive wanting insight into “how happy are my customers” other than their accounting numbers?
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know what NPS is? That's how the comment started. Patients like it. Because the alternative is to stay on hold for 20+ minutes, and then get it wrong. (Or have no pharmacies except Optum's and Express Scripts). Good for you - I want in the ICU delivering care during COVID as a frontline clinician. You don't get to pull this line.
I find it hard to believe that patients like it given how sales work for these sorts of services - customer satisfaction is often the lowest priority given it’s ultimately a cost cutting service. I live in a major metro and there are no pharmacies left except the largest ones. All my problems have to do with insurance not covering things, and insurance asks me to ask the pharmacy, pharmacy asks me to ask the insuranc…
Not to mention my insurer will only authorize >30 day scripts if you use their own wholly owned mail order service. Want/need to get in person, locally? 30 days or less.
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#157So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider. First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important doma…
Good for you and wishing you more success. You probably going to be down voted as sentiment here in HN is going against AI due to the pressure on jobs, which is completely understandable from emotional point. People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. How many errors happened due to human phone operators? In the last few days there was an article where humans scored 6…
> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans.
Yes, because humans have intrinsic value. Even if they make mistakes, they are still one of us and deserve to be given a chance. The same can't be said for clankers.
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready". This is such a great graph. Your company feels successful because your customer is happy yet the rest of the world would be just happy if your company died in a fire. This seems to also be just fine for companies like yours…
Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…
I wonder why? My pharmacy in Spain is owned by this older lady who's had this shop for life. Not too many customers but she manages and even has a few part time staff. It pays enough to make a living. And she always knows what I need and pings me on WhatsApp if something is ready for pickup. And there's 4 such neighborhood pharmacies within 200 metre walk. No kidding. All are viable.
I wonder, what changed in America? Why is the mom and pop pharmacy not viable anymore? This sounds like a much bigger problem than having to answer a couple of calls, really.
I don't really understand how everything turns into a mega corp with shareholders in the US. Sure we have some of those here too but why are small businesses not viable?
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have so many possible biases that are hard to control for. They can be biased toward positive experiences too, if customers feel the job of the person that helped them is on the line.
What’s better for a manager/executive wanting insight into “how happy are my customers” other than their accounting numbers?
Their accounting numbers, sure.
NPS is asking your customers "how likely are you recommend us to a friend or colleague?". That's definitely not an accounting number. If you care about this, you can instead ask your _new_ customers if someone recommended you. Or you could hire a third party to do an independent survey among your target demographic.
Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you actually use these systems? They can’t at all handle my case where half the time the drug is on back order or there some insurance non sense in the way. I need to talk to a human every time
Correct they fail in any out of boundary condition which is like 50% of cases in my experience Even worse is that the human is usually just as worthless because the problem is often upstream at the insurance provider or regulation This is something I’m finding with people complaining about AI systems the AI system in this case is not any worse than the previous IVR system was it just expanded the use cases and now pe…
I think the problem is that these AI systems usually think they can solve 100% of the cases and make it harder to get to the human operator