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If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#71

Post by actionfromafar »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #28
FL410 wrote: post #12

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…

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.

The problem is that it enables products of such low quality they arguably should not exist in that form. Try reporting something scammy or harmful on Facebook. The report will be ignored because it would take away too much profit. (Too much for what? We don't know. Maybe FB could not exist in its current form if there was not-horrible "customer" service. Well, maybe it should be a little different then.)

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#72

Post by beeboobaa3 »

creshal wrote: post #58
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM support bots have literally never been helpful, their only purpose is to save costs and to drive you away

Oh, one has been spectacularly useful to customers, by hallucinating a new, more customer friendly refund policy that courts held the company liable for: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-... We absolutely need more chatbots like that.

Oh that is just excellent. I love the pathetic excuses they came up with trying to weasel their way out of having to honor promises made by their agents.

> Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.

This is disappointing, though. Can I weasel out of contracts if I say that the information I'm providing may not be accurate before signing?

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#73

Post by fooqux »

planb wrote: post #11

The problem is that this is not an AI chatbot, at least not in the sense the term AI is thrown around right now. Chatbots like this have been wasting people's time for a few years now. A modern LLM should not have any problem to detect whether the user has a problem with the connection or their wifi. I'm still optimistic that support chats are a field that may actually see improvements through (otherise overhyped IMH…

True, and it should also be pointed out that after finally getting connected to a human, they fared no better than the bot. Probably because they were both droids reading from a script, but alas.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#74

Post by rolandog »

Guvante wrote: post #54
KptMarchewa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AT&T gigabit internet tends to be $1,200 a year and has incredible margins on profitability.

Agreed. They're just too big to care.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#75

Post by hobs »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #23
FL410 wrote: post #12

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…

>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.

That's going to be spicy - things like product launches often have 100-1000x the call volume than a typical day, so training up 100x workers temporarily is going to suck - I used to train apple's tech support.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#76

Post by sofixa »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #41
KptMarchewa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that's how it is now. Didn't used to be that way. But think of the shareholders, we must maximize profits at all costs!

Were there entirely ad-powered business models with customer facing support before the Internet?

I can think of magazines and radio, but by definition they had localised reach, and there was no actual "users" that might need support, unlike many Internet ad-funded freeware.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#77

Post by jimbokun »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #28
FL410 wrote: post #12

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…

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.

It’s often the case no product in a category offers good human to human customer support.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#78

Post by bluGill »

ale42 wrote: post #6
Mistletoe wrote: post #5

I will say recently my Fidelity chatbot was able to change the default core allocation of my cash management account to SPAXX money market account to get ~5% interest. I was impressed I could do that with a chat bot because finding how to do it on the website was difficult and it saved me a call with a live human. Other than that my experiences with AI chatbots has been pretty dismal. An expensive version of infuriat…

> it saved me a call with a live human Because you prefer interacting with a machine, or because you feel like the live human should do better things?

I assume that humans are in short supply and can only deal with one person at a time, while machines are cheap and can deal with hundreds of people at a time. Thus for simple things the machine is better for lack of wait.

I assume humans can understand English and translate from the words I know to the correct technical terms needed. When I'm in an area I'm not an expert in a human can guide me to the correct technical things much quicker than a machine which often uses words I don't know.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#79

Post by mewpmewp2 »

fvdessen wrote: post #70
xg15 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. Has any business actually tried?

The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve…

Who are your customers? Other businesses or average people?

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#80

Post by hobs »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #28
FL410 wrote: post #12

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…

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.

There's no guarantee that the money you pay will continue to be invested in customer service.

I have worked at a dozen startups, good customer service is an early market requirement, you hire good support staff, give them direct connections to the dev, you make their manager on equal footing.

Once things are humming along and the product isn't such a tire fire, it's "Oh we can promote the good ones to a services department and then export the rest off shore to a company that dgaf"

It's just a matter of time, not money.

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