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Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

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Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#91

Post by drdexebtjl »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #74
reaperducer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls with no hold is a massive win. You keep saying that reducing call time is the "win." It seems like that the only metric you're measuring. If so, your product is a failure, not a success. This is HEALTHCARE . You don't get to do "rough around the edges." You don't get to dismiss edge cases. I also work in heal…

Do you know what NPS is? That's how the comment started. Patients like it. Because the alternative is to stay on hold for 20+ minutes, and then get it wrong. (Or have no pharmacies except Optum's and Express Scripts). Good for you - I want in the ICU delivering care during COVID as a frontline clinician. You don't get to pull this line.

NPS is notoriously unreliable. When I’m frustrated with a stupid support clanker, I don’t wait for another different clanker to ask me how it did. I hang up.

If that’s how you’re measuring patient satisfaction, you’re completely clueless.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#92

Post by taurath »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #74
reaperducer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls with no hold is a massive win. You keep saying that reducing call time is the "win." It seems like that the only metric you're measuring. If so, your product is a failure, not a success. This is HEALTHCARE . You don't get to do "rough around the edges." You don't get to dismiss edge cases. I also work in heal…

Do you know what NPS is? That's how the comment started. Patients like it. Because the alternative is to stay on hold for 20+ minutes, and then get it wrong. (Or have no pharmacies except Optum's and Express Scripts). Good for you - I want in the ICU delivering care during COVID as a frontline clinician. You don't get to pull this line.

I find it hard to believe that patients like it given how sales work for these sorts of services - customer satisfaction is often the lowest priority given it’s ultimately a cost cutting service.

I live in a major metro and there are no pharmacies left except the largest ones. All my problems have to do with insurance not covering things, and insurance asks me to ask the pharmacy, pharmacy asks me to ask the insurance, and often insurance then asks me to ask my doctor to adjust the dosage cause they won’t cover that many days. Customers are batted around and I don’t see any AI that will solve this problem which is structural. The only value I see in AI is cost savings to replace humans, which is to say practically none as a customer over a website to check status and try to refill things.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#93

Post by watwut »

dcrazy wrote: post #90
swatcoder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, most tech companies of comparable size to your customers have negative margins and survive on investment cycles, and the tech companies that are bigger haven't offered human support to anyone in decades. (And indeed, everyone already resents this practice and those tech companies. Generally, sentiment is abyssmal.) I know you're just trying to illustrate the real plight of your customers, but it's a bad illust…

Microsoft offers human chat support for consumers, once you try their self-help tools: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus?ContactUsExper... Apple offers online, telephone, and of course in-person support for hardware and software: https://support.apple.com/?cid=mc-ols-general-homepage-marco... Amazon offers online and telephone customer support on your “my orders” page. Netflix offers phone and chat suppor…

NONE of those is comparable size.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#94

Post by neither_color »

Marsymars wrote: post #68
Oras wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you and wishing you more success. You probably going to be down voted as sentiment here in HN is going against AI due to the pressure on jobs, which is completely understandable from emotional point. People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. How many errors happened due to human phone operators? In the last few days there was an article where humans scored 6…

> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes. I'm currently dealing with a mont…

That's been my observation of AI customer support. They're pretty much all glorified FAQ reciters unable to handle any unusual or uncommon situation not in the FAQs.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#95

Post by Glyptodon »

Not Pharmacy, but I literally had Shopify checkout button clickjack me and then AI agent and human agents (chat, email, and phone) refuse to cancel the resulting order today. Despite contacting within 5 minutes. Given how hostile so many companies are, I question why they even bother appearing to have support.

But this doesn't seem likely to translate well to pharmacy, where there will be consequences for treating customers like vermin, as opposed to actual incentives to do it.

I wouldn't be shocked if the tech needed in places like pharmacy or other sectors where there's some level forced responsibility leads to the version that's actually palatable elsewhere.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#96

Post by SoftTalker »

swatcoder wrote: post #65
jonathan-adly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…

First, most tech companies of comparable size to your customers have negative margins and survive on investment cycles, and the tech companies that are bigger haven't offered human support to anyone in decades. (And indeed, everyone already resents this practice and those tech companies. Generally, sentiment is abyssmal.) I know you're just trying to illustrate the real plight of your customers, but it's a bad illust…

> what was the future of the industry

If my experience is common, most health plans are moving to mail-order for routine, generic, recurring prescriptions. They only want you to visit a retail pharmacy for stuff that is urgently needed or strictly controlled.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#97

Post by watwut »

Oras wrote: post #50
jonathan-adly wrote: post #25

So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider. First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important doma…

Good for you and wishing you more success. You probably going to be down voted as sentiment here in HN is going against AI due to the pressure on jobs, which is completely understandable from emotional point. People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. How many errors happened due to human phone operators? In the last few days there was an article where humans scored 6…

>;People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans.

Every single time AI or FSD tesla booster say these ... reality is that AI is given all benefits of the doubt that people are not.

It is always selling the thing way sooner then it is capable, maligning everyone else and then have everyone else deal with the fallout.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#98

Post by drdeca »

lagrange77 wrote: post #44
barbazoo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it so the parts that are done by AI are rock solid, until then, they shouldn't be near a customer and be done by humans. Resist the greed!

So you want him to make a piece of software that models a probability distribution rock solid.

Maybe “rock solid” could be understood as slightly hyperbolic (though it is metaphorical, so hard to say whether it is really hyperbole), but, it is possible to predict some things probabilistically with a high degree of accuracy. Depending on the task, a high enough degree of accuracy sounds doable, and if it offers a sufficiently convenient fallback to an actual human when it fails, that sounds like it could be quite a bit nicer than navigating a phone tree menu?

Classical voice to text combined with NN based voice to text, I would imagine can be highly accurate, and that’s probabilistic.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#99

Post by dkarl »

Cases like this raise a question. As an engineer, the errors that coding AIs make are an annoyance, and reassuring in terms of my job prospect.

As a consumer, the errors that AIs make are more than an annoyance. I have yet to meet an AI phone assistant that can do anything more than an explicitly programmed phone tree, and several, including the one for the pharmacy I use, that do far less. They are undoubtedly much more expensive to create and test.

Clearly there's a bubble going on, and unprincipled people chasing funding and promotions as usual, but why are companies like CVS paying more to get less?

I think it is literally to waste our time. It's one more layer of defense to stop you from talking to a person.

There are two big wins in health care. One is to increase the scope of health care that gets paid for. More and more expensive treatments, to bring the money in. The second big win is to stop people from getting treatment. Deny coverage, confuse them and wear them out with bureaucracy, and in this case stop them from talking to an expensively educated human pharmacist. That's what an AI does better than a phone tree, because it more effectively creates a sense of helplessness and valuelessness in the customer.

Expanding the scope of care you're entitled to and then fighting against your ability to get it isn't a contradiction any more than it's a contradiction when a person breathes in and breathes out. It's two synergistic parts of a system whose goal ultimately has nothing to do with health care.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#100

Post by asib »

karim79 wrote: post #22
eithed wrote: post #14

It's interesting that I had to close 3 popups just to read this article, two of them were for tracking cookies

Agreed. It's horrible and stupid. I actually run a service in the EU and I don't present that nonsense even with the risk of being sued.

What is your service and what data are you collecting?
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