61–70 of 200 posts
I hate bad chatbots but when done right its a nice middleground between support and waiting in a huge queue. What many here on HN don't realize is some significant portion of call center activity is people asking things like "Whats my balance?".
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It's rather simple. If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it. Especially if you pay nothing and the product business model is ad-based. If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well. Humans cost a lot. And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them…
Is this thread comprised from bots or just plain ignorance? AI Chatbots have been outperforming human agents in every category imaginable. Why wouldn't you want to talk to an AI agent until it can't help you and routes you to a human? Human wait times have always been insane, upwards of 30 minutes for any service i've used, why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online?
> why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online? There is no difference between talking to an AI and getting nothing accomplished and just waiting on hold and getting nothing accomplished.
Is this thread comprised from bots or just plain ignorance? AI Chatbots have been outperforming human agents in every category imaginable. Why wouldn't you want to talk to an AI agent until it can't help you and routes you to a human? Human wait times have always been insane, upwards of 30 minutes for any service i've used, why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online?
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Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well. Humans cost a lot. And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them…
The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service so people don't have to talk to customer support (pit of success, yada yada). This is an iterative process and requires people who form a cross-functional team willing to speak up. I don't see how it is possible in an assembly line kind of environment but for small teams, I am sure it is doable?
Sure, but that's not really the topic, and without discussing the exact details we wouldn't be able to evaluate how easy it exactly is, because there's always things that could go wrong.
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Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well. Humans cost a lot. And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them…
Isn't the issue that even the scripts aren't up to scratch. A chatbot that had the nuances correctly distinguished would not be a concern but it's because the script is not well put together and most likely poorly applied with a bot that it's so painful.
You can't really get much further with this type of thing. LLM can potentially get you further.
The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers. I ow…
If you are selling ANY product, customer experience is part of what you are selling. Apple gets this better than practically anyone else.
BUT, as a small business owner you are forced to make decisions about where to allocate your limited resources. In your case (and in mine) customer service likely created word of mouth referrals, retained customers, and future expansion opportunities.
I guarantee you that there are many businesses where folks somehow think customer service is merely a cost center to be eliminated. For the folks who are already in that boat, AI arguably will likely be better than their outsourced callcenters.
When will they swing back to seeing the bigger picture, and realize their business is only as valuable as the customer relationships they build?
But instead it was no knowledge of the course besides its description and can offer general information that may in fact be in opposition to the things covered in the lesson.
There would actually be a way to make this useful. Especially if the course were meatier then most masterclasses are. Just summaries and term definitions and such can sometimes be very useful. But no, it's just generic chat interface that has a course description.
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Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes. I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.
> Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. Has any business actually tried?