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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

#161

Post by marcosdumay »

Clubber wrote: post #89
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…

When I was a youngster, you could call a company and a person would answer. They'd ask what you wanted and route you to the appropriate person. It was nice.

You know, then they automated the routing with a menu, what was worse. Then people discovered how to make those menus work, and they became nicer.

Then people discover how to use the menus to make the customers go away, and business segmented into the ones that were nice to use and the ones that would clearly tell you they just want to scam you out of your money.

I'm not sure the problem here is rooted at the LLMs customer service.

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

#162

Post by iamleppert »

Rather than arguing with the support rep, show some humility and follow their instructions. Processes and protocols exist for a reason. People who think they deserve special treatment because they are technical are entitled, plain and simple. Follow the rules and the process and you'll eventually get your service fixed. Complain and argue and you're likely to have your modem accidentally deprovisioned.

If you don't like it, start your own ISP.

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

#163

Post by spywaregorilla »

geerlingguy wrote: post #117
spywaregorilla wrote: post #10

A few things stand out to me here. * Most notably, the ai bot is repeating itself and serving very standard looking messages. I don't think this is an "AI" chatbot in the sense of an LLM. It's just a dialogue tree with some parsing. * The author's communication is... bad. Don't say "connect to support rep". Say "talk to human". * It's very silly to state the following to a dumb chat bot: > Hello! I just received and…

That was the message I sent to the support agent after the chatbot finally got out of the way.

Can you elaborate on why you refer to this as an AI chatbot?

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

#164

Post by psychoslave »

JohnFen wrote: post #141
oliwarner wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism operates in a finite world with a brittle biological network that serves as a fundamental condition for sustaining life further, including capitalists agents.

It doesn’t mean capitalist overlords consider this vision as a perspective that should condition every moves they make, on the contrary it’s often like fully embracing unlimitism and echosystem mass destruction is the must have attitude.

That is, people are not absolutely bound to forge opinions and act in a way that matches the social norm of the day.

While hegemonic anthropological systems are hard to ignore for those living in their sphere of influence, it doesn’t mean every single human endorse wholly its axiological mindset.

Consider Jean Meslier the French Catholic priest who was discovered, upon his death in 1729, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism and materialism.

Being embedded in a system has nothing to do with with being intimately akin with this system.

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

#165

Post by jauntywundrkind »

> Unfortunately for me, the human support rep, like so many in the industry, promptly ignored the data I provided in my first chat message to him

AI chatbots may be awful. But wow: the % is high of number of phone tree systems where I've had to punch in or speak details and information on who I am or what problem I'm having, only for an agent to pick up & ask me all those questions afresh.

So so systems feel well architecture to make effective use of time. And technology & systems so regularly throw us into situations where there is nothing in our power to do, rigid systems where improvement is impossible.

If there is just a phone tree or chatnot, there should be a digital protocol for it. I should have the user agency to navigate the full breadth and width of your chat tree as I see fit, not be chained to your slow plodding process.

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

#166

Post by geerlingguy »

iamleppert wrote: post #162

Rather than arguing with the support rep, show some humility and follow their instructions. Processes and protocols exist for a reason. People who think they deserve special treatment because they are technical are entitled, plain and simple. Follow the rules and the process and you'll eventually get your service fixed. Complain and argue and you're likely to have your modem accidentally deprovisioned. If you don't l…

I didn't argue with the support rep—I understand they follow scripts and many of them are also probably dealing with at least a dozen entitled jerks per shift, so I try to be extra patient when I get to an actual human (though the chatbot tries everything in its power to rile up someone before they can get to the human!).

My response to his mentioning of switching WiFi channels was more or less "I am not using the WiFi on the router, but rather the wired Ethernet port, so is there any way you can check on the bandwidth through the device itself?" (knowing that another part of the script is to run the bandwidth test on the device remotely—the previous support rep did that as well, confirming the 8 Mbps result).

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

#167

Post by beeboobaa3 »

sofixa wrote: post #159
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed. Try contacting AliExpress support. You used to immediately get a human agent. Now you're trapped in LLM hell.

> You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed. Because much of the Internet has scaled up drastically? To your example of AliExpress, how many more users do you think they have now compared to a decade ago? How much do you think their support volume has increased? Therefore it's entirely natural that they've looked at avenues of cutting costs.

More users = more users buying stuff = more revenue = more support requests. Support costs scale roughly linearly with the amount of users you have.

The only reason they are looking to cutting cost is to increase profit/user.

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

#168

Post by heelix »

mattpavelle wrote: post #27
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 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…

In the early days of the web, that is exactly what we did. I was part of a home shopping network, prior to HTTPS being a thing. We were given enough budget to put together a pentium pro, a fractional T1, and coded up a website in C++ that allowed folks to use the same cable TV call center infrastructure. That original 5K generated 200k+ orders.

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

#169

Post by sofixa »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #167
sofixa wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed. Because much of the Internet has scaled up drastically? To your example of AliExpress, how many more users do you think they have now compared to a decade ago? How much do you think their support volume has increased? Therefore it's entirely natural that they've looked at avenues of cutting costs.

More users = more users buying stuff = more revenue = more support requests. Support costs scale roughly linearly with the amount of users you have. The only reason they are looking to cutting cost is to increase profit/user.

> Support costs scale roughly linearly with the amount of users you have

Yes, but when you're starting you're usually losing money in the short term and you need to leave a good impression while growing.

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

#170

Post by g00gler »

sabbaticaldev wrote: post #142
jerf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re both right! Nuance is important :).

This is an interesting thought, assuming a call center employee is paid $35k, total cost of employment being $70k, you could hire 14.25 employees for every million dollars.

If every Concast exec got paid a paltry $5M (lowest paid exec salary), they’d be able to hire around 975 more CS reps.

They have 13.6 million subscribers, so they’d increase the number of support reps by 0.000071691176471 per customer.

My thought was maybe they could reduce their marketing budget but it seems their business has shrunken by ~50% in the past 10 years.

https://www1.salary.com/COMCAST-CORP-Executive-Salaries.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/497279/comcast-number-vi...

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