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

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

#91

Post by IT4MD »

antonymoose wrote: post #42
IT4MD wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of th…

While I generally agree with you on the consumer side, I have the opposite experience in selling Business-to-Business solutions. I’ve worked for small firms selling software to libraries (public and university systems), enterprise managed security services (think anti-Phishing operations), and now in managed medical claims for niche practices. In all cases, our firm has had the customer-first philosophy to make them…

I've spent a majority of my career managing helpdesks. I teach/maintain a customer service focus for my team, but that's me, not the industry and it gets harder every day.

I strongly believe in the long term benefits of customer service, but the world we live in, does not. It values profits RIGHT NOW, and tomorrow is tomorrow's problem.

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

#92

Post by IT4MD »

mionhe wrote: post #54
IT4MD wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of th…

Is there a place where it isn't dead in the world? It seems to be the attitude everywhere nowadays.

In very specific places. I manage technical helpdesks and I maintain Customer Service, but I'm a dying breed, based on my experience with the rest of the world.

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

#93

Post by dyauspitr »

I don’t believe a chatbot for customer support is the right place to use LLMs. That point is customers that are frustrated reaching out for help.

The right place would be in software engineering, reporting, accounting, product management, healthcare analysis, routine prescription refills (potentially) etc.

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

#94

Post by ryandrake »

Marsymars wrote: post #89
ryandrake wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally agree. If Amazon steered me towards the form, I would have just used that, but I couldn't find it and the USE THE CHATBOT messaging was relentless.

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

#95

Post by guywithahat »

blackguardx wrote: post #53
guywithahat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but rather there just being not many jobs, lots of historic pollution to deal with, and a poor future economic outlook I have never seen someone leave due to pollution, other than just wanting to leave the city. The poor economic outlook and lack of jobs is directly due to the unions. If there weren't unions, Detroit and Flint would still be the capital of the auto industry, and Erie PA would still be a major locam…

I lived in Erie and Cleveland for a while. There are non-union shops all around and the locomotive business in Erie was owned by a declining company (GE) that divested it in a fire sale along with many other parts of their business due to too much reliance on financial engineering and not real engineering.

Locomotives have generally been on the rise for the past few decades, and have generally been profitable. Erie also had a strong union presence in terms of locomotive production, particularly with the UE. What happened in Erie was protesters in one shop would walk over to the nearby building to protest and stop more work, so they had to move facilities away from each other to reduce the union impact. Engine production was moved to Grove city, and (now wabtec) built their new, larger facility in Forth Worth, where many of the suppliers moved.

Not only is US freight traffic up, but freight traffic around the world went up as nations industrialized and raw material demands went up in places like Australia. Erie should have had its second coming, but instead everyone has seen what the UE did to the industry and workers don't want to work in union shops, and so the cities population has almost halved since its peak.

I'm not as familiar with Cleveland so I can't really speak on it.

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

#96

Post by echelon_musk »

mandevil wrote: post #85
Nextgrid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7984350

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

#97

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

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?

i'll try to assume this isn't a snarky response! but it kinda sounds like it.

unfortunately, there are no "good" ISPs in my area. xfinity and the other big ones killed most of the competition via undercutting, lobbying and the legal system (ie, tying up municipal fiber/wifi initiatives in bureaucratic hell).

since i no longer work from home, it's mostly just a convenience to have internet service for personal use. i actually use it very little, and pay for the cheapest option available, so it's not much money.

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

#99

Post by Nextgrid »

echelon_musk wrote: post #96
mandevil wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7984350

Yep, very much aware of them and a happy customer!

In fact you don’t even need to say “shibboleet” - I don’t think they even have anyone on payroll that doesn’t know at least 2 programming languages.

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

#100

Post by Telaneo »

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 only positive experience I've had with a chatbot was functionally not a chatbot, but rather a form I needed to fill out, but which was done in a chat style, presumably to be more user friendly. It wasn't bad, per se, but a normal form would have been better, but it wouldn't surprise me if this style of form-filling does generate less tickets than the normal approach, since it doesn't dump 10 fields the user needs to fill in all at once, but rather staggers them and give you one at a time. Even if half the things you need to fill in are 'full name' and 'date of birth' and the like, many people have a very low tolerance for overload when it comes to these things, and I don't think there's a good solution to that.

It's a similar problem to how power users only get in touch with support when all other options have been exhausted, and then get annoyed when they have to go through the motions and try everything again, knowing it won't work, which it then doesn't, and only after half an hour of dicking about can support actually do what they need to do. The problem is that Average Joe almost certainly hasn't exhausted every option, and it's even fairly likely that they went to call as their first option over anything else. The only difference now is that a chatbot is now available as first line of defence that doesn't take up the time of an actual human, rather than that being the phone, which very often will need a human on the other end, at least at some point. The chatbot doesn't even need to be good to pay itself back, so long as it solves some problems that then prevent some support calls, since human time is expensive.

We need that XKCD shibboleth or something to fix that, but even that is open for abuse, so I don't think there's an actual solution to be had.

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