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Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

arstechnica.com

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Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#31

Post by toomuchtodo »

sc68cal wrote: post #25
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the union protected its workers from those at the bank. That is the value in the union. In jurisdictions without a union or parity labor policy, these workers would have no recourse for this fraud and the lies.

Absolutely! The union did great. My comment is more about, what is stopping the Bank from doing this again? Because there doesn't really seem to be a downside to attempting it. When they lose, they just have to give everyone their job back, but probably end up ahead due to attrition

My only advice is to engage your government representation to strengthen labor regulation in this context.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#32

Post by diggan »

no_wizard wrote: post #4
taylodl wrote: post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions. I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.

> I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle

I've had success with just repeating "Agent please" or "I wanna talk to human" if I notice the chat bot isn't a traditional conditional-if-else-bot but an LLM, and it seems like most of them have some sort of escape-hatch they can trigger, but they're prompted to really avoid it. But if you continue sending "Agent please" over and over again, eventually it seems like the typical context-rot prevents them from avoiding the escape-hatch, and they send you along to a real human.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#33

Post by chankstein38 »

ranger207 wrote: post #9

""a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week" means people aren't calling in as much. How many problems people have per day is roughly constant, so the only change in how many calls they get is entirely dependent on how much people expect calling in is going to fix their problems. So a reduction in call volume means they're not fixing as many problems which means customers are less satisfied

This was my read of this as well! What a stupid metric. The first thing I thought when I read that was "Yeah, that's probably because people stopped calling and started looking for another bank."

That'll be what I'll do if my bank starts replacing people with AI. Take my money out and go somewhere that isn't trash.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#34

Post by fullshark »

taylodl wrote: post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

It has one major use case: Converting natural language into a logged and understood FAQ issue.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#35

Post by IT4MD »

taylodl wrote: post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

>Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.

As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of the US.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#36

Post by throwmeaway222 »

> redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.

Yeah it is reduced because as soon as someone calls they're trapped in a 30 minute "I'm sorry I didn't understand, what can I help you with" And people just give up and decide, maybe the $20 ATM fee isn't worth contesting...

Then again, this means the bank may be saving money too.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#37

Post by yndoendo »

Anyone else fuck around with chat bots? A few months ago I found out that UPS didn't have a character input limit and I could overload it and it would take 15 minutes or more to respond. Finally did it during the day and the chat developers patched it in real time.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#38

Post by rtkwe »

no_wizard wrote: post #4
taylodl wrote: post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions. I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.

I think that's partially because Amazon returns are the most happy path support interaction I've ever seen. They basically always grant the refund/return (in my experience if it's soonish after purchase) and it's mostly about gathering the info to get it going rather than actually resolving an issue. The main decision on Amazon's side seems to be if they want you to bother sending the item back or not.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#39

Post by crazygringo »

taylodl wrote: post #3

How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%. Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true me…

Maybe 75%?

I've gotten pointed to documentation I never would have found and I doubt a human would have found. I've had returns immediately processed rather than waiting 2 days for a RMA to show up in my email. I had a subscription rate lowered (my desired outcome) when I tried to cancel a service. And I've had a software bug escalated to the appropriate team within a couple of minutes. And all these interactions were probably 10x faster, at least, than they would have been with a human.

I love chatbots for customer service. Not because they save the company money, but because they seem to save me a ton of time (no more 20 minutes of hold, followed by being put on hold for 10 minutes multiple times), and they seem to follow policies more "objectively", and they escalate easily whenever they can't handle something. It just seems like more reliable and faster outcomes for "normal" support, and then you still get a real agent for more complicated situations.

Re: Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

#40

Post by silisili »

throwmeaway222 wrote: post #36

> redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said. Yeah it is reduced because as soon as someone calls they're trapped in a 30 minute "I'm sorry I didn't understand, what can I help you with" And people just give up and decide, maybe the $20 ATM fee isn't worth contesting... Then again, this means the bank may be saving money to…

Robinhood's support bot is basically like that. Completely useless LLM that marks cases resolved when you give up.

I'm sure in some board room some exec is bragging about its smashing success rate.

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