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Don't make me talk to your chatbot

raymyers.org

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Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#91

Post by lemoncookiechip »

I don't care if it's a human, a chatbot, or a dog if they fix my problem.

I don't want to contact customer support in the first place, if I'm forced to, it's because something is very wrong and in that case I don't want to be listening to elevator music and "your call is important to us, please hold" for an hour, and get my call disconnected forcing me to call again.

Issue is that I've yet to have a chatbot actually fix my issues, or most 1st contact human operators for that matter.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#92

Post by jibal »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17
tombert wrote: post #9

I guess part of the advantage of being an extremely long-winded writer who makes lots of typos is that people know that what I'm writing is probably written by a human. Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.

Typos and EM-dashes are not just obvious. They are avoidable. Here's the kicker: Even if you remove those, other AI smells don't just exist. They are obvious.

People who say such things constantly make incorrect claims about AI authorship.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#93

Post by leptons »

Quothling wrote: post #48
com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different c…

>customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support.

It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI companies are far from profitable, burning billions to insert themselves into customer support pipelines and everywhere else they can, and then the other foot will drop. Uber and Lyft are far more expensive today than when they started, and the price to run "AI" will also inflate when these companies have to pay off all the billions they've spent but didn't earn. I doubt it will end up costing much less if less at all than human support, with worse results.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#94

Post by hellotomyrars »

autoexec wrote: post #71
nickff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people are very rude to customer service representatives, so companies spend money training CSRs, who often quit after a short period of being abused by customers. Automated reception systems disallow people from reaching representatives for the same reason.

CSRs are abused by call center managers far more often than they are by the people on the other end of the phone line. The endless push for "better" metrics, the terrible pay, the dehumanizing scripts, bad (or zero) training, optimizing to make every employee interchangeable and expendable, unforgiving attendance policies, treating workers like children, etc. Call centers are brutal environments and the reason churn…

It can be both. It depends a lot on what kind product is being supported. Tech support usually doesn’t get abuse hurled at you by the callers but financial/medical it gets a lot dicier.

That said, I 100% left every call center job I had when I couldn’t put up with the bullshit middle manager crap anymore.

Nothing like having a “team leader” who knows literally nothing about the product who then has to come up with the most nitpicky garbage because they’re required to have criticism on call reviews. Meanwhile some other asshole starts yelling at him to yell at you for not being on the phones enough when the reason I’m not on the phone is because everyone on the team turns to me to ask questions to because, unlike our illustrious leader, I know what I’m doing.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#95

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.

My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live.

He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button.

And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password.

And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link".

I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible.

I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#96

Post by LorenPechtel »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #27
ericd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.

Have you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me. As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it. Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it…

Amazon's robot did replace the package that vanished. I don't believe it ever understood that I had a delivery photograph showing two packages but found only one on my porch. But I doubt a human would have cared, either--cheap item, nobody's going to worry about how it happened. (Although I would like to know--wind is remotely possible but the front porch has an eddy that brings stuff, it doesn't take stuff.)

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#97

Post by hatthew »

Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#98

Post by jibal »

com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

Why are you talking about support? The article has nothing to do with that.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#99

Post by davis »

ifokiedoke wrote: post #42

Reading almost all the comments gives me the sad validation that people truly do not read the article before commenting... This article is not about support chatbots. It's about clearing up your writing/thoughts and communicating clearly even if you used a chatbot to get there.

I can't believe I had to scroll this long to see this comment. Like what the heck is wrong with people on this site. I thought I clicked the wrong comment section.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#100

Post by wtallis »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #95
com2kid wrote: post #13

People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…

> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time ca…

> Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.

Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better.

By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.

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