Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

latenightcoding.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#71

Post by api »

Chatbots, home IoT, and to some extent VR all strike me as things Silicon Valley wants to be "the next big thing" but are not and likely will not be because few people want them.

I absolutely despise chat and voice for any kind of trivial task. I want a UI. Chat and chat bots are annoying. Voice in any form if infuriating. Having to actually call a number on the phone for any reason always sends me into a minor little rage. "Oh, you have to f'ing call for it... sigh." Why would I want more of this kind of experience? Maybe a few people do but I can't see it being a Big Thing(tm).

I really do not want an Internet-connected fridge, stove, light switch, or microwave. When I buy such things I look for non-IoT-encrusted versions since those are going to be more reliable and are not going to be conscripted into a botnet or spy on me. IoT features in these kinds of products deliver nothing of value to me. I also really do not want DRMed food. That includes newer Keurigs. There is a healthy vintage Keurig market on eBay for a reason.

VR still seems like a fad or a niche product for certain subsets of gamers. There's some market for it but it's no "E-Commerce," "Social," or "Mobile."

It's sort of funny to see the SV investment culture producing so many solutions in search of problems after hearing that same culture lecture against this practice for decades. "Do the market research first!" "MVP MVP!" etc. They're not following their own advice.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#72

Post by fenwick67 »

petilon wrote: post #58
olavgg wrote: post #13

Chatbots do work, those who say it doesn't work have just tried the really bad ones. Examples of chatbots that do work Nuance's Nina https://www.windstream.com/Support/ Jenn (unknown who is behind it) https://www.alaskaair.com/ Our James https://master.boost.ai/

Jenn failed my test. Me: what are some good tourist destinations? Jenn: I am not sure I understand your question. Me: where can I fly to cheaply? Jenn: I am not positive that I understand what you are asking. Me: do you have any package deals? Jenn: Takes me to deals page; but I was looking for package deals including hotel and car

Jenn also failed my questions. It doesn't really seem to chat with you, it just likes to direct you to which page it thinks yuo want to use.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#73

Post by discreditable »

jaclaz wrote: post #25

Going a little sideways it's not like at any Call Center you usually get to talk (without having first gone through all their standard "script" and possibly become upset and manage to escalate to a higher level of support) with someone that actually can provide you with assistance beyond what is already on the FAQ of the correspondent site. (provided the site FAQ's are actually frequently asked questions and not - as…

Many chatbots manage to be worse than tech support. For a while, my ISP hid support options behind a "chatbot" that was completely useless.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#74

Post by michaelmrose »

JadeNB wrote: post #69
varelse wrote: post #42

I suspect what's great about assistants like Siri, Alexa, and even Google Now is less that they have voice interfaces and more that they have well-funded support teams behind them to deliver exponentially more efficient routing of queries into appropriate knowledge-bases based on the best of contemporary research driven by their respective corporate thinktanks. Compare and contrast with data mining the logs of call c…

> Recently, I've noticed they hang up on this behavior I've definitely had them ignore any sensible operator prompts, but actually hanging up? That's a step beyond. Care to name and shame any offenders? (I've always enjoyed the claim, and once or twice believe I've observed the behaviour—though I am sceptical—that a lot of these systems scan for obscenity, and route to an agent. When I get a robocall while I'm out wa…

I've worked phone support for a major cell carrier. Among the things I was told there by a manager.

- That people that spam zero should be hung up.

- We could do a fake accent if we could maintain it through the whole call.

- After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new device as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper procedure to do it themselves on the web and tell them that feature was broken despite the fact that leads could still do this.

- To make up fake things we had in common to establish a relationship with the customer so they would give us better surveys.

Customer service is not their strong point.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#75

Post by JadeNB »

michaelmrose wrote: post #74
JadeNB wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently, I've noticed they hang up on this behavior I've definitely had them ignore any sensible operator prompts, but actually hanging up? That's a step beyond. Care to name and shame any offenders? (I've always enjoyed the claim, and once or twice believe I've observed the behaviour—though I am sceptical—that a lot of these systems scan for obscenity, and route to an agent. When I get a robocall while I'm out wa…

I've worked phone support for a major cell carrier. Among the things I was told there by a manager. - That people that spam zero should be hung up. - We could do a fake accent if we could maintain it through the whole call. - After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new device as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper procedure to do it themselves on the web and tell them th…

That sounds terrible, but I'm confused by this one:

> - After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new device as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper procedure to do it themselves on the web and tell them that feature was broken despite the fact that leads could still do this.

Does it mean that you were told to give instructions that you knew wouldn't work, or 'just' that you were told to direct users to the hard way of doing something even though there was an easier way of doing it?

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#77

Post by olavgg »

d--b wrote: post #49
olavgg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently our intents match banking and insurance questions related to the nordic market. This type of question needs training data that is specific to the US region. There is no problem supporting it technically, it is just lack of training data.

That's not the point. The UI is not appropriate. It makes me feel like I can ask this type of question, where in fact it cannot. I'm sure that if I asked the same question replacing France and US by Norway and Sweden, I'd get the same answer.

You right about that, you ask a difficult question that a even human could not answer correctly as it isn't precise enough.

All I actually do know from that question is that it is related to insurance cover abroad. But do you mean car insurance? Travel insurance? Health insurance? As we do not have an intent for "unknown insurance cover abroad" yet, we fail to help you further. This happen sometimes for many contexts, but we work hard to improve this. We do cover this kind of questions very well when people have login issues, as this is the most common inquiry we have in production. It can be a range of problems from token issues, cell phone issues, technical issues on the website or that the account is simply blocked. But we often manage to help people find the final solution without involving a human.

My point is, we can solve this today, we just need more training data. Chatbots are not perfect, but with more training data they will become better, and be a highly praised service. Finding information using natural language is the future. I'm confident that we will solve most of the edge case inquires soon.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#78

Post by iamleppert »

d--b wrote: post #49
olavgg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently our intents match banking and insurance questions related to the nordic market. This type of question needs training data that is specific to the US region. There is no problem supporting it technically, it is just lack of training data.

That's not the point. The UI is not appropriate. It makes me feel like I can ask this type of question, where in fact it cannot. I'm sure that if I asked the same question replacing France and US by Norway and Sweden, I'd get the same answer.

But....but....they shipped something? However awful it is, they ticked that box and have their awful POS UI live for the world to see. And backed by fancy technology and expensive devs.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#79

Post by mjevans »

varelse wrote: post #42

I suspect what's great about assistants like Siri, Alexa, and even Google Now is less that they have voice interfaces and more that they have well-funded support teams behind them to deliver exponentially more efficient routing of queries into appropriate knowledge-bases based on the best of contemporary research driven by their respective corporate thinktanks. Compare and contrast with data mining the logs of call c…

I really hate when they don't treat 0 (unlisted option) as what it actually is.

The user is telling the menu tree that those who programmed the tree didn't include this use case or that poor descriptions routed the user to the wrong area. Have a human cleanup pass.

Often I do end up pressing 0 when I have a strong suspicion that I'm going to need to speak to a human to get my actual problem fixed and am pretty sure nothing's going to change that.

Post reply on HN