Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 200 posts

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

#91

Post by kasey_junk »

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.

AT&T's consumer wireline business had 4.9% margins in 2023.

https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financia...

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

#92

Post by goatlover »

UrineSqueegee wrote: post #21

Is this thread comprised from bots or just plain ignorance? AI Chatbots have been outperforming human agents in every category imaginable. Why wouldn't you want to talk to an AI agent until it can't help you and routes you to a human? Human wait times have always been insane, upwards of 30 minutes for any service i've used, why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online?

And yet your response sounds like a bot promoting AI chatbots. Outperforming human agents in every category? Not in my experience, some of which have been terrible.

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

#93

Post by zschuessler »

The exception I have found to poor AI chatbot experiences, oddly, was Carvana.com.

I needed to resolve a highly complicated title problem I was battling two separate state DMVs over (plus a defunct lender). It was starting to seem I needed to retain a lawyer.

So I was just compiling information at the time. I asked an esoteric question about one of the private LLC names Carvana have as their lending arm in a specific state. You would only know this name reviewing a stack of paperwork, it is not public.

The chatbot responded with detailed information on what I needed to do to resolve the problem. Plus information about the LLC. And then emailed me supporting documentation automatically.

My jaw dropped.

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

#94

Post by michaelt »

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.

In my experience, paying a high price is no guarantee you'll get particularly good customer service.

Obviously, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service.

But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports. The business class bags get lost just as often as the economy class bags. The low-volume, high end luxury car will be in the shop more often than the mass produced car. The PC vendor can't help with your Linux screen tearing, whether it's a $300 laptop or a $6000 workstation. Sports events with the highest demand will have the most expensive tickets - and also the most queues, the worst toilets, and the most expensive food.

I find getting good customer service far from simple :)

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

#95

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #24
spywaregorilla wrote: post #10

A few things stand out to me here. * Most notably, the ai bot is repeating itself and serving very standard looking messages. I don't think this is an "AI" chatbot in the sense of an LLM. It's just a dialogue tree with some parsing. * The author's communication is... bad. Don't say "connect to support rep". Say "talk to human". * It's very silly to state the following to a dumb chat bot: > Hello! I just received and…

Thought the same. It's kind of infuriating to see people bashing SoTA LLMs and AI while referring to chatbots from previous era using a completely different types of technology. And it's not like customer service of the same service providers without this tech was appreciated by people before these chatbots. I kind of imagine someone like OP bashing the human as well for incompetence if there wasn't a chatbot.

> And it's not like customer service of the same service providers without this tech was appreciated by people before these chatbots.

This is just "but humans also".

I wish our industry's collective standards didn't allow for just replacing one subpar experience with a very similar one that has less empathy and is lots cheaper.

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

#96

Post by fvdessen »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #79
fvdessen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's B2B, mostly small businesses

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

#97

Post by UrineSqueegee »

snakeyjake wrote: post #43
UrineSqueegee wrote: post #21

Is this thread comprised from bots or just plain ignorance? AI Chatbots have been outperforming human agents in every category imaginable. Why wouldn't you want to talk to an AI agent until it can't help you and routes you to a human? Human wait times have always been insane, upwards of 30 minutes for any service i've used, why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online?

> why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online? There is no difference between talking to an AI and getting nothing accomplished and just waiting on hold and getting nothing accomplished.

ignoring the logical leaps made here, there a huge number of steps in can tick off, like collecting information, common troubleshooting steps and all that being fed to the live agent at the end, it might seem like "nothing accomplished" to you because you're shallow minded, but in reality its extremely useful.

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

#98

Post by mewpmewp2 »

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #95
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought the same. It's kind of infuriating to see people bashing SoTA LLMs and AI while referring to chatbots from previous era using a completely different types of technology. And it's not like customer service of the same service providers without this tech was appreciated by people before these chatbots. I kind of imagine someone like OP bashing the human as well for incompetence if there wasn't a chatbot.

> And it's not like customer service of the same service providers without this tech was appreciated by people before these chatbots. This is just "but humans also". I wish our industry's collective standards didn't allow for just replacing one subpar experience with a very similar one that has less empathy and is lots cheaper.

What would your ideal proposed solution be like?

If you owned a telecom company that provided internet services and mobile plans for everyday people?

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

#99

Post by Ekaros »

I just want an expert systems... Preferably as proper pages and not as chatbots. My last example was changing speed of my internet connection after an offer ended. For one reason or an other I had to use chat instead doing it myself on their website where they showed other stuff...

No need to have LLM in loop, just cover these sort of basic cases with either clear pages or some flows...

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

#100

Post by hobs »

jenscow wrote: post #83
hobs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dropping calls is the worst case scenario for customer service - what they will probably do is just institute callbacks by default.
Post reply on HN