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

81–90 of 92 posts

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#81

Post by jkaptur »

mercer wrote: post #50
jkaptur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the pizza analogy is really useful. We've had intelligent voice-capable agents for pizza ordering for ages: calling the store. People hate it! They want a specialized UI for ordering pizza.

Chat API's usually offer inline keyboards and regular custom keyboards. At least in Telegram you can even replace inline keyboards based on interactions, meaning you could trivially construct a pretty elaborate UI specifically for stuff like ordering pizza's. And even better, the pizza joint can update the conversation with status updates, special deals if you so desire, and you automatically have a history of previo…

Right, I think that WeChat basically exemplifies this too. But at that point, is the user really interacting with a "bot", or is the chat platform just an app delivery mechanism like an OS or a web browser?

I'm honestly asking, and I think the pizza example is really illuminating - how DO people order somewhat-customizable food via these platforms?

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#82

Post by mercer »

jkaptur wrote: post #81
mercer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat API's usually offer inline keyboards and regular custom keyboards. At least in Telegram you can even replace inline keyboards based on interactions, meaning you could trivially construct a pretty elaborate UI specifically for stuff like ordering pizza's. And even better, the pizza joint can update the conversation with status updates, special deals if you so desire, and you automatically have a history of previo…

Right, I think that WeChat basically exemplifies this too. But at that point, is the user really interacting with a "bot", or is the chat platform just an app delivery mechanism like an OS or a web browser? I'm honestly asking, and I think the pizza example is really illuminating - how DO people order somewhat-customizable food via these platforms?

> Right, I think that WeChat basically exemplifies this too. But at that point, is the user really interacting with a "bot", or is the chat platform just an app delivery mechanism like an OS or a web browser?

I'm assuming the latter. I mostly avoided WeChat as an example because i haven't used it myself. But from what I understand WeChat goes much further than just chat interfaces, which kind of is out of the scope of what I'm really interested in for now (but still curious about).

EDIT: I'd add that many of the advantages that come with using chat-apps as a platform are still there even in apps that don't offer all of what WeChat does.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#83

Post by glitch003 »

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…

Frontier airlines absolutely does this. I think it's only during hours when there are not agents working, because I was able to reach an agent when I called again during more normal business hours.

But it did feel really weird hearing the automated system say "that is not a valid option. goodbye" and hang up on me. No indication that I could call back during certain hours to reach a human.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

jkaptur wrote: post #40
ronack wrote: post #14

These are pretty well-worn arguments against chatbots. There's an overuse of bots for tasks that do not benefit from a conversational interface (checking the weather, surveys, promotions, etc.). But if you stop thinking of bots as sentient beings and instead treat them as domain-specific command line interfaces, you may get more utility out of them. For instance, it's possible just typing/saying "Send me a pizza with…

I think that the pizza analogy is really useful. We've had intelligent voice-capable agents for pizza ordering for ages: calling the store. People hate it! They want a specialized UI for ordering pizza.

It's not like the voice channel was ever a good fit for the task...

- I'd like to order a pizza.

- Great! What kind would you want?

- I have no idea, what kinds are available?

(Silence while somebody asks themselves if they really want to dictate 100 different kinds of pizza for you)

- Do you have $POPULAR-KIND-THAT-IM-ALREADY-TIRED-OF-EATING?

- Yes! (Relief by not having to dictate all of them)

- How much is it?

- Oh, it's $$$.

- What?! $$$ for a single pizza?

- Yes, that's a MOST-EXPENSIVE-CATEGORY-OF-PIZZA, it's totally not the simple pizza you were expecting from the name.

And so it goes.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#86

Post by michaelmrose »

JadeNB wrote: post #75
michaelmrose wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

We were told to tell to customers that the feature was broken and that they had to do it themselves rather than pass it to team leads who in fact could do it in order to encourage users to do it themselves. Meanwhile we were providing support for the segment of customers the company considered most valuable. Most were paying $100-$250 a month.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#88

Post by gozur88 »

computator wrote: post #26

> When you're filling a signup form, you instantly know what information they'll need from you. You can decide if you're comfortable sharing them before you engage in filling it. If only that were true! The trend is to ask for a little bit info at a time, then take you to the next page where it asks for other info, and so on. You don't see at a glance the whole form anymore. I resort to filling in fake info on sign-u…

>I resort to filling in fake info on sign-up forms, order pages, employment applications, airline/hotel reservations, etc., just to find out what questions they'll ask so I can decide whether to refuse before I tell them anything.

That's a good strategy, particularly since there are websites that send everything you type, even if you erase it or don't submit.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#89

Post by gozur88 »

swiley wrote: post #34

If you can spend the time to write good documentation for your product then you don't need a chatbot, just good search and good formatting. If you can't be bothered to write good documentation then you won't be bothered to feed useful information into the chatbot, which is way more clumsy than a searchable manual anyway.

A great many people won't read your documentation and will become "stuck" until they have a person explain things. If they're customers you pretty much have to tolerate it unless you're willing to lose them as customers.

Re: Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service

#90

Post by d--b »

olavgg wrote: post #77
d--b wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah right. I think everybody's answer to that is: I'll believe it when I see it.

Pass the Turing test and maybe, just maybe a chat bit interface will make sense

Post reply on HN