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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

#61

Post by JoshTriplett »

joe_the_user wrote: post #41
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…

I remember the pre-AI Geico chat bot that I liked. I could call it once every six months and pay my entire balance with a few words. But then the company started leaning harder on monthly payments and the "pay entire balance" option was removed and I now must either laboriously speak-out the entire dollars and cents due or talk to a person. What is to say that a lot of the functions that a customer service person doe…

> I remember the pre-AI Geico chat bot that I liked. I could call it once every six months and pay my entire balance with a few words.

That still sounds like a bot fulfilling a function that should be solved by making the product better. This could have been either 1) an autopay requiring zero interaction, or 2) if you don't want to autopay, a form you can click "pay" on.

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

#62

Post by adiabatichottub »

fullshark wrote: post #34
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.

That actually sounds like a good use case. I always wondered how support departments tracked frequent issues, beyond ye olde drop-down menu of previously categorized reasons for contact. I guess it's something people use RAGs for nowadays?

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

#63

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

marssaxman wrote: post #29
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 few times I've let a company sucker me into engaging with a chatbot, it was nothing but a worse interface to searching their support website. It was capable of nothing but directing me to pages which could not help me, because what I needed was not more information about the problem I already knew I had, but someone to fix the damn problem .

xfinity is absolutely lousy for this. at least with a human representative, i can let them know right out of the gate that, yes, i've power cycled my CPE, and yes, i've bypassed my own network to confirm the problem is not with my equipment. every single time i've had to go through this dance, they acknowledge that the problem is on their end and can fix it right away or put in a work order. every time i've had to interact with a chatbot, it wastes 15 minutes of my time before directing me to call (and deal with an audio chatbot until i convince it to let me talk to a person).

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

#64

Post by wvenable »

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…

My last experience with a chatbot wasn't terrible. It asked me all the relevant information about the problem, even follow up questions, and all required reference numbers, and then passed me off to a human support person.

A human would have done the same thing but it would be a waste of time for them.

It was actually nice that I wasn't stuck in chatbot hell, I didn't have to ask for human, it just did it at the right moment.

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

#65

Post by thierrydamiba »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #63
marssaxman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The few times I've let a company sucker me into engaging with a chatbot, it was nothing but a worse interface to searching their support website. It was capable of nothing but directing me to pages which could not help me, because what I needed was not more information about the problem I already knew I had, but someone to fix the damn problem .

xfinity is absolutely lousy for this. at least with a human representative, i can let them know right out of the gate that, yes, i've power cycled my CPE, and yes, i've bypassed my own network to confirm the problem is not with my equipment. every single time i've had to go through this dance, they acknowledge that the problem is on their end and can fix it right away or put in a work order. every time i've had to in…

Why should Xfinity make any changes if you still send them money every month?

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

#66

Post by IshKebab »

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…

Yeah definitely less than 5%. Probably more like 1%.

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

#67

Post by jaredhansen »

I don't begin to understand why the bank should have to "justify" its decision to replace workers with AI in the first place. Maybe it works better? Maybe it's worse? Who cares? Shareholders bear the risk of getting it wrong, and can fire management if they think they aren't doing a good job of getting it right.

If the humans are in fact more expensive than the chatbots, it's not like the shareholders just say "oh, ok, I guess we'll just take lower compensation for slightly more risk". Instead, they'll pressure management to pass the higher cost on to the customer.

If you want to "protect workers" by making sure they get paid x amount regardless of whether they're the most efficient way to achieve y goal, why not just do that through taxes? You're basically taxing bank shareholders and subsidizing employees, but with a lot of extra steps. Plus, the employees have to actually show up to work every day, which I understand can be kind of a drag.

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

#68

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

85%? I suppose most of the time I’m just seeking very specific information, so an RAG approach of it retrieving some document works fine for me.

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

#69

Post by sarchertech »

davidhariri wrote: post #59
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…

Success rate depends on many factors (risk of failure, your value to the business, complexity of the ask), but it's definitely on average much higher than 5% (I sell this technology and look at the results many times a day). > Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. This is bang on. But unfortunately many…

>but it's definitely on average much higher than 5% (I sell this technology and look at the results many times a day)

I think you'd have a very hard time accurately estimating a true success rate because of the number of people who will just bounce off and give up after a maybe successful response. There's no real way to know whether the response really solved their problem other than doing surveys. But survey responders aren't a random sample.

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