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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

#81

Post by thorin »

Customer service is seen as an overhead by most large businesses (and likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon are the worst at dealing with anything non standard). In my work with utilities businesses even though they've had great feedback previously for customer service it's still seen as something to cut to the max. Companies who have previously had local call centres with 1000s (or more) staff were gradually being moved to cheaper locations, not just to save cost, but also to save massive pension and benefits liabilities. Once all these people have gone service drops off dramatically, but then even the offshore people are being phased out. This is just not seen as a priority.

The only time I go to customer services is to get support for a non standard problem, I'm happy to go to online information to get the answer that I need so when I do need to contact someone it's usually something complicated to resolve. For older people though there really is no way for them to resolve even simple problems if they are not able to deal with technology.

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

#82

Post by sofixa »

xg15 wrote: post #39
uniclaude wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes. I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.

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

Google has Google One that includes support (including by phone) and Drive/Mail/etc storage. You can literally pay them to get support and other things if you want to.

I don't know how well it's selling, but going off Internet comments here and there, people seem offended they are asked to pay to get support for an otherwise free at the point of use service.

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

#83

Post by jenscow »

hobs wrote: post #75
Rinzler89 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I guess they will work out on the average wait time over a period, or the company's can just drop the calls to keep it down.

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

#84

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

gumbojuice wrote: post #26

My isp does not use "ai", but presents me with their decision tree, which is hooked up to some automation along the way to e.g. check my speed. It works well, indo not have to guess phrases, and I usually end up with the option to lodge a ticket, which will be resolved by a human. (Better the human is almost always a local technician).

> My isp does not use "ai", but presents me with their decision tree

Which, paradoxically, is something that would look a lot like classic AI, from the before-times.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

crngefest wrote: post #60
weinzierl wrote: post #18

I hate AI chatbots too and I have yet to encounter one that is remotely helpful, let alone an enjoyable experience. On the other hand I can very well image how such a positive exchange could look like. I am not convinced that it is not possible to create a chatbot that provides a satisfactory or even satisfying interaction, but I believe the incentives to do so are not there. Most of the time chatbots are just an add…

The issue is IMO that they have very bad / little / no internal documentation. The boys are usually as good as the documentation that powers them.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by huppeldepup »

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.

…so they’ll disconnect at the 9m59s mark?

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

#87

Post by beeboobaa3 »

sofixa wrote: post #76
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed.

Try contacting AliExpress support. You used to immediately get a human agent. Now you're trapped in LLM hell.

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

#88

Post by zamadatix »

worldsayshi wrote: post #34
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…

I admire your viewpoint but I also find that it's extremely seldom that I need customer support for the majority of services I use. If I need it it's usually because of a flaw with the service. Surely it's very hard to be aware of their flaws if they don't have customer service but if they have other ways to reliable gather that data isn't it better for the customer if the service provider spends that effort fixing t…

People on HN likely lean towards "If I need it it's usually a flaw with the service" more often (particularly regarding technical services) but the vast majority of customer support for the typical company is either "people who think it's a flaw with the service due to a misunderstanding or 3rd party problem" or "people that couldn't figure out how to pay the bill online because they don't use computers much" type things, not necessarily things that can be resolved for everyone in the next push to prod.

The difficulty in well focused support is it's two different sets of problems and the people finding honest to god flaws in your product or service are usually the extreme minority and so not the focus of customer support workflows.

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

#89

Post by Clubber »

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…

When I was a youngster, you could call a company and a person would answer. They'd ask what you wanted and route you to the appropriate person. It was nice.

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

#90

Post by throwacc11 »

mattpavelle wrote: post #27
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…

I remember in the early days of the web people said similar things about online shopping. The LL Bean catalog had more photos in higher resolution than their early e-commerce website, and you would call a phone number and talk to a person who knew the clothing in order to purchase from the catalog. No one would want to buy on a website… We are in the beginning days here. I expect chatbot advances to similarly start w…

HN is full of people who thought who needs Dropbox when we have rsync. AI is gonna replace everything.

Bubble or not it's gonna last for a decade (worst crypto bubble is still going on). Better all jump on the bandwagon before its too late

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