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Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

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Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#61

Post by areoform »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #25

So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider. First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important doma…

As someone who has worked with companies in the space more than a decade ago, I'm glad that you're doing this! Genuinely love the "embedded not installed" approach.

I suspect that applying an aerospace approach of dissimilar redundancy and root cause analysis to this will yield a much better experience for everyone (i.e. you, the pharmacies and the patients) than what would have been possible with humans alone.

I've ranted about this before, but medicine as it stands isn't a serious field. And I can say that with a straight face, because medicine has until now, been the only field of modern scientific endeavor (or rather cloaked under modern scientific endeavor) that has fought tooth and nail against gathering more data points for improving understanding.

More detail here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762650

I'm glad that you're doing this!

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#62

Post by milkshakes »

jimberlage wrote: post #55
jonathan-adly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…

Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#63

Post by coffeefirst »

This doesn’t surprise me.

Set up whatever online portal or app you want. I’d prefer to just sign in and click a button.

If I’m picking up the phone or sending an email it’s because I have a weird problem and I need to talk to a person.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#64

Post by superb_dev »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #33
SalaevAl wrote: post #24

Pharmacy phone lines are a terrible first use case for voice AI. Older callers, drug names, insurance mess, zero patience. Automating "store hours" is fine. Automating refill exceptions is how you get this outcome.

Explain to me then why pharmacies have almost exclusively used IVR based phone systems for pharmacy refills and prescription management for the last decade? Like they don’t even say the full name of the prescription they just tell you the first three letters and they’ll say “for the patient born on…” Current pharmacy IT systems are currently almost 100% automated so how are you claiming it’s the first use?

Do you actually use these systems? They can’t at all handle my case where half the time the drug is on back order or there some insurance non sense in the way. I need to talk to a human every time

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#65

Post by swatcoder »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #53
dylan604 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready". This is such a great graph. Your company feels successful because your customer is happy yet the rest of the world would be just happy if your company died in a fire. This seems to also be just fine for companies like yours…

Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…

First, most tech companies of comparable size to your customers have negative margins and survive on investment cycles, and the tech companies that are bigger haven't offered human support to anyone in decades. (And indeed, everyone already resents this practice and those tech companies. Generally, sentiment is abyssmal.)

I know you're just trying to illustrate the real plight of your customers, but it's a bad illustration that confuses the discussion.

Second, out of sincere curiosity: what was the future of the industry -- and these particular pharmacies -- if AI hadn't arrived to offer salvation? The role they fill in society is non-optional, so how the market restructuring around these infeasibly narrow margins before?

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#66

Post by dqv »

jdw64 wrote: post #8

I think of this as the kiosk economy. It's like how businesses introduce kiosks even when having a human employee would be more convenient, just for the sake of greater profit. The biggest problem with AI customer service is that a human employee would've let a minor issue slide without escalating it. But a chatbot often inflames the situation, and by the time the customer reaches a human agent, they're already furio…

AI customer service doesn't fucking listen. A few years ago, I noticed that my bank had an old address on file for only one of my accounts. When I clicked edit next to the old address, it would bring me to a page that had the correct address.

At the time, they had a real person handling their support. The real person told me this was just a glitch and that my correct address was on file and everything is fine.

That wasn't actually true. A new debit card to replace my expiring one ended up being sent to the old address a couple of months ago.

So I go back to the website to try to edit it one last time. Same problem.

I call them and get their fucking stupid AI slopbot.

Still, I explain the whole situation:

> I'm trying to update my address on the website. When I click the edit link next to the old address, it shows my new address instead. I need to remove the old address.

What did the slopbot decide to say? Oh well, I should go on the website and edit my address of course! I gave it two more chances by trying to explain it a different way and how this didn't work.

Did it accept that and escalate the issue to a human? No. It kept telling me to go to the website.

I had to say

> Hey you fucking bitch, how many times do I have to tell you that doesn't fucking work? Escalate this to a fucking human before I get the attorney general involved.

to finally get a live person to fix it (I actually had to do this twice, the first set of fucks, the slopbot forgot what problem I was having and needed a refresher!). Suffice it to say, I will never trust any large amount of money with this bank again. I'm highly skeptical of any company using AI CS now, because this is one of my many experiences where the slopbot is incapable of recognizing a complex situation outside of its capabilities.

I mean look at this situation: their AI slopbot turned this one mistake into 5 mistakes instead of just allowing it to be one that another human corrects.

It's gotten to the point where whenever I see someone lauding AI customer support, I just assume they have an investment/job that hinges on people liking it and/or their only experiences are using it as a glorified refund button.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#67

Post by wolfi1 »

my experience with AI assistants has not been that great so far, they ask for customer id numbers which are long as ... with several digits and if you group them they don't understand, for example if the number begins with two 1s and you say eleven instead of one one they don't understand you, then they are usually not trained for the local pronunciation or dialect which makes it very hard communicating, my blood pressure rises into unhealthy ranges, but if I use expletives enough I get a human on the line

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#68

Post by Marsymars »

Oras wrote: post #50
jonathan-adly wrote: post #25

So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider. First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important doma…

Good for you and wishing you more success. You probably going to be down voted as sentiment here in HN is going against AI due to the pressure on jobs, which is completely understandable from emotional point. People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. How many errors happened due to human phone operators? In the last few days there was an article where humans scored 6…

> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans.

So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes.

I'm currently dealing with a months-long banking error where the bank has incorrectly linked my credit card account to my wife's account and/or an account of mine in a different region, so it variously doesn't show up in my online account, shows the wrong number, shows the purchases from the wrong account, etc.

Every time I call in in a 5-minute rigamarole of:

"Please describe what you're calling about."

"Representative."

"In order to connect to a representative, please describe what you're calling about."

"There's an error with my account."

"Would you like to know your account balance?"

"No, my credit card account is not correctly configured and isn't showing up in my online banking account."

"I didn't understand. Please describe what you're calling about."

Eventually the bot reaches some failure state and then allows me to wait on hold for an hour to talk to an actual rep.

When I eventually get to talk to a rep, I get "Yes, I see that your account isn't correctly configured, I'll submit a back-end ticket and it should get fixed within 5-10 business days."

The next week I check my online banking, my credit card still isn't showing up, and I call and repeat the entire process.

So yes, it's not AI that's directly causing this Kafkaesque nightmare, but it's AI that's empowered the leaders at every utility/retailer/bank/insurer/etc. that I deal with turn their support systems into this slop.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#69

Post by toss1 »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #25

So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider. First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important doma…

Good to see info on how critical domain expertise is for success.

I've seen AI used well in a few support situations, and it is great - faster to get to the answer vs a human (usually faster than even getting to a human, which is another issue)

When my case can be handled by the automated system, it is great, when it is not, it is usually misery, leading to anger at the customer and whatever company sold them that automated isht.

Especially for intelligent knowledgeable users of anything, by the time we call, it is an issue likely to need escalation.

So, the one absolutely critical factor for me and everyone I know is: how fast and easy is it to get to a human when we find the automated assistance does not work for our particular issue? It should be "I need to speak to a human now", and the immediate response should be "OK, let me get you one... Hello, this is [person], how can I help?" with the prior transcript already on the human's screen.

If this works, it is good because the humans are operating a level up, not having to deal with endless monotonous minutiae, and dealing with interesting issues all day, which means they get good at it and have a better attitude — a win for all.

How, and how well do you handle that situation — how close are you to the proper response I described?

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#70

Post by 43920 »

jimberlage wrote: post #55
jonathan-adly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…

Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.

Most pharmacies are having financial issues basically due to being stuck in the middle of the battle between insurers, drug manufacturers, and PBMs over reimbursement rates, and having the weakest negotiating position of all of the parties.

AI probably will save the pharmacies some money, but IMO this will probably cause reimbursement rates to decline further, leaving the pharmacies in the same position as before.

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