Related: Please don't make me talk to your AI pretend-human complete with Asian accent and background call center sounds. That's even more insulting that a chat bot.
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Don't make me talk to your chatbot
41–50 of 221 posts
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#42Reading almost all the comments gives me the sad validation that people truly do not read the article before commenting...
This article is not about support chatbots. It's about clearing up your writing/thoughts and communicating clearly even if you used a chatbot to get there.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#43I view the issue of inefficient communication as a problem that will wane as LLMs progress, and a bit idealistic about the efficiency of most human-to-human communication. I feel strongly that we shouldn't be forced to interact with chatbots for a much simpler reason: it's rude. It's dismissive of the time and attention of the person on the other end; it demonstrates laziness or an inability to succeed without cuttin…
I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.
Yeah as long as the chatbot is empowered to fix a bunch of basic problems I'm okay with them as the first line of support. The way support is setup nowadays humans are basically forced to be robots anyway, given a set of canned responses for each scenario and almost no latitude of their own. At least the robot responds instantly.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#44People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
Curious, why was it $20? I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?
They need a place to be, they need to get hired, trained, managed and all the associated general costs of employment (hr, payroll, etc). They need equipment, there's monitoring, evaluations etc.
Then you also have to pay them regardless of whether someone calls.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#45People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.
my only experiences with chatbots so far have been as instruments for companies to avoid their contractual obligations and just not provide the options that I would have asked a person directly for
obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typos and EM-dashes are not just obvious. They are avoidable. Here's the kicker: Even if you remove those, other AI smells don't just exist. They are obvious.
Maybe, though maybe we're only noticing it when it's obvious? Sort of a survivorship bias thing? Who knows how much of the comments on any website are written by humans now; yeah there are plenty of tells so it can be obvious, but that might only be for the exceptionally bad posts.
Maybe. This type of obvious slop is extremely pervasive though, to the point there almost can't be that much undetectable AI writing.
Checked LinkedIn and found four posts in a row that had "here's the kicker".
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#47People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
Curious, why was it $20? I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?
While I agree with TFA's point that forcing a chatbot isn't a substitute for just having the info available, organized and searchable, the answer to your specific question is that the fully burdened cost of a trained support center human includes a lot more than their gross hourly wage. There's recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training plus space, desk, computer, phone, IT, HR, health care, vacation, sick days, insurance, employer's share of employment taxes.
A rough rule of thumb is the full burdened cost of an hourly office knowledge worker is two to three times the gross hourly wage.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#48People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different companies working in different directions. Maybe Microsoft customer support is a bad place to measure these things because of the size, but around here quite a few banks have tried outsourcing their phone support to everything available and have come back because it cost them customers. Even customers who never phoned them.
That being said. Your example of customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. Once (if?) AI voice chat is good enough to replace chatbots we may not even realize we're talking with an AI unless it tells us.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#49I don't know, occasionally there are some funny results. For instance, I have managed to get AWS' support bot to start smack talking their platform and criticising its often needlessly complex and sometimes incoherent design before cheekily offering to help me make my relative simple setup even more complex and enterprise-ready.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#50I find chatbot conversations to be incredibly similar to dreams.
It's human nature to want to share your dreams, because they are fascinating to you.
However, it's also human nature to want to punch someone in the face when they start talking about this crazy dream they had last night ... because it has nothing to do with you, and doesn't interest you at all.
Similarly, when an AI says something useful to you, in response to your prompts, it's very particular to you. When you try to share it with others ... you get the article.