271–280 of 403 posts
I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service. I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free. But it's the only approach that gets anythin…
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>> Robots a a cruel joke on customers. My kid and I went 3 hours away for hew college orientation. She also booked 2 tours of apartments to look at while we were there. One of those was great, nice place, nice person helping. The other had kinda rude people in the office and had no actual units to show. "But I scheduled a tour!" turns out the chatbot "scheduled" a tour but was just making shit up. Had we not any othe…
Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. Th…
I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service. I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free. But it's the only approach that gets anythin…
The only thing that's worse then talking to a chatbot. Is talking to a human with absolutely no power to change anything. Most Airlines do this, customer support is only allowed to repeat info from the site, or ask to fill in a form. In that case just put a bot or GPT instead of humans suffering abuse from frustrated customers.
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Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. Th…
AI cannot consent to contractual agreements. A human employee can.
I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service. I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free. But it's the only approach that gets anythin…
Bits About Money [1] 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.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
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> Every chatbot I've worked ends up failing because I use some word or phrasing in my description that wasn't in their script This is an interesting insight I’ve experienced as well. It makes me wonder if the use of chatbots becoming more and more prevalent will eventually habitualize humans into specific speech patterns. Kinda like the homogenization of suburban America by capitalism, where most medium sized towns s…
So the chatbots are going to program us to work with them, since we can't program them to work with us? I for one do not welcome our new robot overlords.
There are lots of other reasons to hate chatbots, but if they can force people to speak the same language that would be good.
If you convince chatbot to sell you a car for $1, can you win in court if the manufacturer doesn't deliver?
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If a car dealership had a parrot in their showroom named Rupert, and Rupert learned to repeat "that's a deal!", no judge would entertain the idea that because someone heard Rupert repeat the phrase that it amounted to any legally binding promise. It's just a bird. It's a pet, a novelty, entertainment for the bored kids who are waiting on daddy to finish buying his mid-life crisis Corvette. It's not a company represen…
> If a car dealership had a parrot in their showroom named Rupert, and Rupert learned to repeat "that's a deal!", no judge would entertain the idea that because someone heard Rupert repeat the phrase that it amounted to any legally binding promise. It's just a bird. If the car dealership trained a parrot named Rupert and deployed it to the sales floor as a salesperson as a representative of itself, however, that's a…
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Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. Th…
AI cannot consent to contractual agreements. A human employee can.
This is about amusing, but just you saying "oh by the way this is legally binding on you" doesn't make it so.
(Even moreso if you're all over the internet talking about permanence in AI models...)
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>> Robots a a cruel joke on customers. My kid and I went 3 hours away for hew college orientation. She also booked 2 tours of apartments to look at while we were there. One of those was great, nice place, nice person helping. The other had kinda rude people in the office and had no actual units to show. "But I scheduled a tour!" turns out the chatbot "scheduled" a tour but was just making shit up. Had we not any othe…
Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. Th…
Most T&Cs: "only company officers are authorized to enter the company into agreements that differ from standard conditions of sale."