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Don't make me talk to your chatbot

raymyers.org

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Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#51

Post by jongjong »

com2kid wrote: post #13

People 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…

The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them.

All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business.

Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#52

Post by hidelooktropic »

It matters less to me that the helper is an AI/human than the kind of help I'm getting.

The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#53

Post by autoexec »

com2kid wrote: post #13

People 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…

Microsoft is a company that has very little right to complain about support costs. They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software and updates that required support in the first place. Nobody wants to call Microsoft for support. They do it because they've been forced to, usually by Microsoft. This kind of support can hardly be called "free" because even when Microsoft isn't charging customers to speak with the person on the other end of the line the customer has already paid in time and suffering (and sometimes lost data)

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#57

Post by andrewaylett »

metalliqaz wrote: post #21
pizzathyme wrote: post #15

The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right…

No it isn't. I really do not care what the LLM has to say. If a person has taken the (substantial) time necessary to fill the context with enough information that something interesting comes out, I would much rather they simply give me the inputs. The middleman is just digested Internet text. I've already got one of those on my end.

That does somewhat depend on the size of the context.

LLMs won't add information to context, so if the output is larger than the input then it's slop. They're much better at picking information out of context. If I have a corpus of information and prompt an extraction, the result may well contain more information than the prompt. It's not necessarily feasible to transfer the entire context, and also I've curated that specific result as suitably conveying the message I intend to convey.

This does all take effort.

My take is also that I am interested in what people say: I have priors for how worthwhile I expect it to be to read stuff written by various people, and I will update my priors when they give me things to read. If they give me slop, that's going to affect what I think of them, and I expect the same in return. I'm willing to work quite hard to avoid asking my colleagues to read or review slop.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#58

Post by trollbridge »

daft_pink wrote: post #39

I just signed up with Gusto for one of my companies. They charged me for premium support automatically and when I tried to dispute it I had to talk in circles with their AI named Gus. Why am I paying through the nose for premium support just to chat with an AI?

Hence why I prefer a real CPA with a real person who answers the phone.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#59

Post by lurk2 »

wvenable wrote: post #19
com2kid wrote: post #13

People 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.

Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#60

Post by zahlman »

TimFogarty wrote: post #25

I have noticed that my writing ability has atrophied since I was writing essays in school. Now at work most of my writing is slack messages. Writing longer more thoughtful pieces about strategy or performance review has become a slog. I suspect that a lot of people have had a similar experience so offloading the pain of writing to an LLM is appealing. But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's un…

> I have noticed that my writing ability has atrophied since I was writing essays in school.

Seems to me like you're doing fine so far. (I hope I haven't just been letting my standards go down the drain...)

> It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!

Heh.

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