Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
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Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
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Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#2> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI.
These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#3> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI. These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.
"A well-designed self-service GUI" doesn't exist once the company is optimizing for the opposite of what your are trying to do (cancel subscription, return item, file insurance claim, etc.)
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#4When I was 14 I went to live alone in a motel room in Vermont (long story). I had little money left for food, and one weekend had to go without food at all. But I had a bag of sugar, so I reasoned that I could live on sugar alone— it was calories after all.
I discovered that eating nothing but granulated sugar for 48 hours made me quite sick.
Watching companies force chat interfaces into everything is like watching a bunch of kids discover that you can’t live on a diet of sugar. They won’t listen until it makes them good and sick.
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#5Oh, do I agree…
Don’t trap me in a chat window https://austinhenley.com/blog/trappedchat.html
Natural language is the lazy interface https://austinhenley.com/blog/naturallanguageui.html
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#6> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI. These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.
I've been thinking for a while, that since these chatbots will be optimized for profit (if accounting and legal can be profit centers, why not customer service), we'll see all the same anti-patterns. You won't be able to cancel the monthly payment, or return the part, or fix the excess billing fee. Instead they will be highly trained in giving you the polite frustration and screaming anger without paying a human to absorb it. Likely, they will also gather any additional saleable personal information and legal justification for doing so.
Would you like to sign up for our new personalized support for only $4/mo? The first month is free with credit card - I mean the Nigerian scam works because of self-selection, amiright?
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#7> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI. These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.
A well designed chatbot is better than a well designed UI for this use case. A “well designed chatbot” could absolutely do something as common as claiming a return in an online shop.
We gotta compare apples to apples.
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#8When I was 14 I went to live alone in a motel room in Vermont (long story). I had little money left for food, and one weekend had to go without food at all. But I had a bag of sugar, so I reasoned that I could live on sugar alone— it was calories after all. I discovered that eating nothing but granulated sugar for 48 hours made me quite sick. Watching companies force chat interfaces into everything is like watching a…
This reminds me of the time I had a horrible ant infestation in my dorm room shared kitchen (also had a horrible room mate infestation, but separate story). Lines of ants everywhere through the kitchen, but I had a 5lb bag of sugar.
Went outside, found the ant hill right next to the building window and dumped the bag of sugar on the hill. Half of it was gone in a day! The next day a little more, but there were NO more ants in the house. The next day there was still sugar left and the day after that. The ants started stopped coming out of the hill much, and I think they had filled up their nest with so much sugar they weren't getting any other nutrients. After a week there was still sugar, but they didn't come back into the kitchen for the rest of the term, when I moved out.
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#9Chat is a terrible primary interface for working with people, too. It's fine for cursory stuff, but it doesn't suffice for anything that requires high information throughput. You can use it to follow up on a conversation that you had in person or in a video call, you can use it to check in about something that was fleshed out on a real doc, and you can occasionally use it to brainstorm a quick solution to something.
But at some point in real work, you always need to move up to a higher bandwidth medium. If that medium is going to be text then it's got to involve rigorous specification to avoid ambiguity. If it's going to be quick and casual then it has to have other channels to convey meaning than just the words used—real humans use body language, tone of voice, and back channeling to ensure the message is getting across with high fidelity. There's no such mechanism in chat, which makes it frustrating to use with people or with robots.
Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns
#10> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI. These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.
"A well-designed self-service GUI" doesn't exist once the company is optimizing for the opposite of what your are trying to do (cancel subscription, return item, file insurance claim, etc.)
Then use the regulatory pen and make them.
Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."