Customers don't want chat bots • Hacker News Board

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#471

Post by hakfoo » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 2:07 AM UTC

LeafItAlone wrote: post #156

gwbas1c wrote: post #152

My internet went down, and I couldn't reach customer service. I could only reach (drumroll), a chatbot. The chatbot couldn't confirm that anyone knew about the problem and was working on it. (How do I know that it just doesn't always say "someone's working on it?") I submitted an FCC complaint. A few days later, a customer service rep called me. She told me that I could contact the chatbot. I told her I'd never submi…

Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot? Can you elaborate on why you didn’t trust the chat it but would trust a human?

The local power company (a psuedo-governmental co-op, I think) has a website with a big interactive outage map. When the power goes out, the icon is usually on the map by the time I've pulled up the site on my phone, describing the outage area, and the ETA is usually surprisingly accurate.

100% automated service, but as good if not better than anything I could get from a human.

Conversely, a weasel worded chatbot could say "we are responding to outages as noted" or something similar, and that doesn't actually provide any evidence the utility is aware of the outage or its scope in the actual monitoring and management systems; your report of a failure could go straight to /dev/null.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#472

Post by solardev » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 11:37 AM UTC

mduggles wrote: post #32

Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path. Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing…

I don't think they're meant to make end user lives easier, but to frustrate them into giving up.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#473

Post by gwbas1c » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

LeafItAlone wrote: post #222

gwbas1c wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot? It's a horrible case for a chatbot. Basically, when you have a bunch of hopping mad customers, you don't want to rub salt in their wounds. Refusing to answer the phone in such a situation is horrible customer service. Basically, if you refuse to answer the phone and stick out a chat bot, it looks like you're just hiding from your customers. (This should be obvious…

What’s obvious to me is that I’m not calling customer service to talk to or yell at a human. I am calling to get my problem solved. Perhaps you and I have different goals? > So, for all I know, they could have something that just says, "don't worry, we're working on it," if it detects that my internet is offline. (IE, I don't know if anyone is actually working on it.) Why would you trust this exact communication from…

> I am calling to get my problem solved

That is the only reason why I call customer support in internet outages. I usually wait awhile before I call. (In this case, I called a few hours after their posted ETA.)

> Why would you trust this exact communication from a person over a computer?

This response in this thread explains it very well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661196

> Conversely, a weasel worded chatbot could say "we are responding to outages as noted" or something similar, and that doesn't actually provide any evidence the utility is aware of the outage or its scope in the actual monitoring and management systems; your report of a failure could go straight to /dev/null.

Like I said, above, I called a few hours after their expected ETA. This is the situation where it's time to call a human who can call up the manager of a different department and say, "you said it was going to be done three hours ago, what's happening?"

It's basically a "Gall's Law" situation. The AI Chatbot is perfectly fine for a "normal" outage that's solved within the ETA; but once the published ETA has come and gone, we're in a corner case that's better handled by humans.

For a good explanation of this, see this recent article on Gall's Law that explains why it's better to let humans handle corner cases: https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/complex-project-galls-law/...