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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

#61

Post by tempest_ »

muyuu wrote: post #45
wvenable wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

I mean that is also the job of existing call handlers.

"We are experiencing an greater than usual call volume, please wait while an agent becomes available" only to be randomly disconnected has been a thing for most of my life.

Everyone seems to be hyping open claw at the moment soon its just going to be LLMs talking to LLMs.... I wonder if they will develop a short hand and start talking in wingdings.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#62

Post by padjo »

ifokiedoke wrote: post #42

Reading 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.

It's absolutely miserable isn't it. People see a headline, decide they have an important thing they must tell the world and just blurt it out. Imagine doing this in conversation. You'd overhear a fragment of conversation and just interject with some semi related bullshit that makes you feel smart and then leave.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#63

Post by com2kid »

jongjong wrote: post #51
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.

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

As I mentioned, due to high support costs we worked to improve the UX and we ended up dropping our support costs dramatically.

Doesn't change the fact that everyone who did call cost us more than our profit on the sale.

Customer support is expensive.

Microsoft used to charge for customer support back in the day (90s). The way it worked was that if it was your fault, you paid, if it was a product bug, there was no cost for support. While not a perfect system, it at least aligned everyone's incentives in the right direction. (The huge glaring flaw being it was MS that decided if they were going to charge you for the support call or not...)

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#64

Post by kazinator »

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…

People prefer a pricing model in which support appears free. Free support (that is good) creates the sense that the company stands behind the product and service, and leads to good reviews, so it is a win/win.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#65

Post by LorenPechtel »

crabmusket wrote: post #34
wvenable wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.

Yeah. I recently had to deal with Amazon's robot. Definitely bird-brained but close enough that the right objective was accomplished even though I don't think it ever understood what happened (but woe to the non-native speaker!) The problem is not chatbot customer support, the problem is bird-brained managers that think a system that solves 99% of issues doesn't need a fallback for that 1%.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#66

Post by jascha_eng »

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?

This is not really what the article is about

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#68

Post by lurk2 »

crabmusket wrote: post #34
wvenable wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.

This is the thing that drives me crazy. Most of these phone calls should just be emails; I can usually stand to wait a week or two for the company to get back to me. General support funnels like support@example.com have been dead for most consumer-facing technologies for close to a decade at this point. I’m not installing an app for every company I’m forced to interact with when there are already existing, universal technologies available that they could implement if they just priced their products appropriately.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#69

Post by tombert »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #46
tombert wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah, I've also see a lot of "Not X, not Y, just Z" style posts on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has always been a place full of low-effort posts for people trying to self-promote, so I guess it makes sense to have a robot actually do the thinking for something that is and always has been inherently mindless.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#70

Post by zahlman »

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.

Related: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

(I could have sworn there was a popular HN submission a while back of this or a similar blog post, but damned if I can find it now.)

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