Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by sarchertech » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:00 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #39

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…

Maybe 75%? I've gotten pointed to documentation I never would have found and I doubt a human would have found. I've had returns immediately processed rather than waiting 2 days for a RMA to show up in my email. I had a subscription rate lowered (my desired outcome) when I tried to cancel a service. And I've had a software bug escalated to the appropriate team within a couple of minutes. And all these interactions wer…

How often are you using chatbots, or contacting support for that matter. I maybe need to use something like this 2 times a year.

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

#72

Post by thisisit » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:00 PM UTC

Lot of companies want to do drive down costs. This often falls on departments which are not "bringing in revenue". That means in this era of AI lot of back office operations are the first on the chopping block. Executives often don't care for consequences of cutting back office operations.

Customer support has been the biggest target for a long time. Companies care only about revenue and people signing up. After that unless you are giving them more business they stop caring. They figure - best case they frustrate you enough that you leave them alone or bad case - they refund you and worst case - they give you a gift coupon.

With that mind, AI chatbots are the best solution. Intentionally make it difficult to solve the issue and then even if you reach human support - they have the old scripts. That means now companies ability to frustrate-out a customer is now supercharged.

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

#73

Post by Lionga » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #64

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 righ…

You what is even less of a waste of time for everyone? A simple form for that data.

Just good the company knows a chatbot can not actually handle anything beyond taking some data.

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

#74

Post by netcoyote » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

throwawayben wrote: post #60

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 had a joint account with an ex who now lives abroad and I no longer have contact with. I talked to the bank and there was no way to close the account without both of us present. Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me! That's the best success I've had with a CS bot. Possibly the policy changed in the mean-time or the lack of activity in the acc…

> Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me!

Have you filed a support ticket for that? It's clearly a bug. It should have forced you to call an agent so they could upsell you on a premium service. /s

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

#75

Post by yojo » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

rocmcd wrote: post #28

kjkjadksj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a downgrade to me considering the previous return flow was to just press the return link and answer one multiple choice question.

That's still how it is, at least for me in the US. I've never had to interact with a chat bot for anything, but maybe it depends on what you're returning.

I’ve run into this with “personal care items” that are non-returnable. E.g. I received a “two pack” of eye drops that had obviously popped open in the warehouse and contained only one bottle.

I couldn’t do the regular return flow because hygiene, but the chat bot immediately issued a refund.

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

#76

Post by yallpendantools » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

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…

Preach. Shout out to the be/st bank in Germany, Commerzbank. They advertise being reachable 24h a day[1] but all day you gotta go through a chatbot first and beyond core hours there isn't a human at the end of the line. Worse, they don't tell you what their actual core hours are so if you are calling at, say, 9:00, you could be suckered into waiting on the line for the next hour for an actual human agent. You could call 16:01 on a Friday not realizing that the next opportunity to talk to a human agent is at 10:00 the next Monday.

Okay, the last one is a stretch but people worried about their money are desperate. Not to go all radical all of a sudden here but fact of the matter is banks hold a lot of power over your average guy. The least that they could do is show some respect for your time.

[1] See: https://web.archive.org/web/20250617083138/https://www.comme... and even the actual page as of this writing.

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

#77

Post by mmh0000 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMcny_pixDw

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

#78

Post by zdragnar » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #58

StevenWaterman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently working on adding a bot to our support chat at TalkJS. And it's great, it has probably a 90% success rate at handling complex queries. But that's because we're throwing money at it. That chat is normally staffed by senior devs, meaning it's not unusual for a single response to cost $10 of labour. If you approach it as a cost cutting exercise, you end up with crap. If you approach it as a way to make a b…

If you're not treating it as a cost cutting exercise, how much are you spending per query on the chatbot, and what is that $10 budget per query going towards? Can you give some examples of complex queries that it's handled?

Not OP, but I think you're missing one aspect- senior engineer time doesn't scale well, because there's not just wage but also opportunity cost of context switching and taking them away from tasks that might contribute to increased sales or revenue. More sales also means needing to hire more people if the support load is constant per customer.

If a chatbot can reasonably succeed at eliminating some of that workload without also driving existing customers away, it's a net win even if the budget between senior salary time and chatbot query is identical.

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

#79

Post by franktankbank » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #64

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 righ…

Did that person make you repeat all the same information? If not I think we are heading for a golden era.

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

#80

Post by franktankbank » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

sc68cal wrote: post #6

> Now, CBA has apologized to the fired workers. A spokesperson told Bloomberg that they can choose to come back to their prior roles, seek another position, or leave the firm with an exit payment. So no real consequences to the Bank for these underhanded tactics, since this just returns everything back to status quo before the layoffs, perhaps with reduced overall headcount as some workers choose not to return and ta…

True, but the union protected its workers from those at the bank. That is the value in the union. In jurisdictions without a union or parity labor policy, these workers would have no recourse for this fraud and the lies.

Its an interesting microcosm of the tech job market.