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

arstechnica.com

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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

zdragnar wrote: post #78
ori_b wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by Nextgrid »

marssaxman wrote: post #29
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…

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 .

This doesn’t work for technical people, but it works for the other 90% of people who’d rather call and waste not only support’s time, but their own time even if their problem can be resolved by common sense or the first page of the knowledge base.

Companies need to offer an “advanced support” option - a separate number with big scary warnings where every call whose resolution is due to your own fault or something findable on the docs ends up charging the user a fee. In exchange, it directly bypasses all chatbots and first-line support.

I’ve never heard an argument why companies don’t do that, it seems like it would be a win-win for everyone to get the customers to self-triage before reaching out.

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

#83

Post by Nextgrid »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #65
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why should Xfinity make any changes if you still send them money every month?

This is downvoted for some reason and yet it’s absolutely correct. There’s a reason telcos specifically are notorious for the shittiest customer service ever - because major telcos typically have a monopoly and/or long-term contracts the customer can’t easily leave. They could literally bill you and not provide any service, and most people would still pay at least a couple months while fighting to cancel or get it resolved to avoid getting their credit report dinged.

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

#84

Post by guywithahat »

jurking_hoff wrote: post #14
guywithahat wrote: post #11

[flagged]

[dead]

Every comment you've made is snarky. Don't you have something better to do?

Most people who grew up around unions don't like them, hence why union enrollment in the US has gone from ~35% of the working population to less than 10%.

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

#85

Post by mandevil »

Nextgrid wrote: post #82
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 .

This doesn’t work for technical people, but it works for the other 90% of people who’d rather call and waste not only support’s time, but their own time even if their problem can be resolved by common sense or the first page of the knowledge base. Companies need to offer an “advanced support” option - a separate number with big scary warnings where every call whose resolution is due to your own fault or something fin…

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/

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

#86

Post by andrew_lettuce »

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…

Most of the companies where I've had first hand experience test customer experience in the aggregate, ie NPS and similar. Part of this is scale, but a big part is also CS is viewed as a cost center and it's a rare individual who does what you're suggesting. There's also seldom any sorry if pay off for making that one customer incredibly happy, CS people are not usually tested very well by anyone

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

#87

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

I needed to cancel cable service recently. I lied about moving to another state to minimize the upsell and retention BS in their script but they still tried so desperately. After a human rep hung up on me, I threatened to sue when dealing with their interactive voice responder. That got me back to a human immediately.

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

#89

Post by Marsymars »

ryandrake wrote: post #8
no_wizard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions. I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.

I was about to say the same thing. Amazon pretty much nailed it, at least for simple, straightforward "happy path" returns and refunds. I was actually kind of shocked after the "chatbot" conversation, sitting there thinking "Really, that's it and we're done?" and sure enough the money was refunded!

But you don't need a chatbot for this. I just processed an amazon return yesterday without a chatbot - just a form with maybe 4 fields, I filled them in, hit submit, and it directed to a page with shipping instructions and labels. Easy peasy.

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

#90

Post by Marsymars »

potato3732842 wrote: post #24
Illniyar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mentioned a lot, but it's still true - people on HN are not representative of the majority of users for customer support. The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots.

>The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots. I think a large fraction of those repetitive requests are covering up gaps in the customer portal/whatever by doing data entry the customer could be doing. Like "if you need your address changed call support" type stuff.

I recently changed my email address on file for every account/service. Probably 80% were straightforward to do myself, but there was a long tail of probably 10% where customer support had to do it for me and 10% where I was told that changing email addresses was impossible and I'd have to create a new account and submit a request to have my old one deleted.
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