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I felt stupid, but I have fallen victim to this on dpd.com while tracking a package. A helpful chat popup has appeared where I could request assistance from a s

I felt stupid, but I have fallen victim to this on dpd.com while tracking a package. A helpful chat popup has appeared where I could request assistance from a support agent, but it was not disclosed that the agent is a bot. Needless to say I have spent a couple of minutes repeatedly asking a question, and even rephrasing it while being frustrated that this person does not seem to grasp my issue.

WalterBright 7y ago
Those are fairly easy to spot. One dead giveaway is their excessively chirpy voice. Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Currently they're fairly easy to spot -- if you work in tech, anyhow. A lot of money will be put into making them harder and harder to spot. I'm glad to see this law come at the beginning of that process, so there isn't an established industry that can put money into fighting it.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script. I don't know about that. Does Amazon's support use bots? Or are they just in a remote call center using auto translate to communicate with customers? Because in general, they appear like bots to me: they will parse for key words and reply to those, ignoring context and subtle differences that make their replies sound weird.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I doubt it would be better than their email reply bot, which is transparently inept. I wouldn't mind an email bot if it got me what I needed, but it was useless.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    > Does Amazon's support use bots? Depends on the section of Amazon. AWS enterprise support does not.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      I'm talking about retail / security.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    My support experience with Amazon Fulfillment involved several months of going back and forth with what I think were humans whose native language was not English, bound by a script, until I learnt that the shortcut to getting an actual human who is allowed to deviate from a script is sending an email to Bezos.
- lathiat 7y ago
  I guess you didn't watch the Google I/O presentation earlier this year (which is probably what this law is about I would guess): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    It was selected out of a large number of tests they made. So while it sounds good, I'll remain skeptical for now.
danieltillett 7y ago
Apparently the solution is just to swear at the bot and you get punted to a human, the downside is many of the humans are no better than a bot.
- kbenson 7y ago
  Or you get a human that assumes the customer they are helping is abusive or problematic based on the prior messages, in which case they may be very unmotivated to help you.
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    Just abuse the bot, not the human :)
burfog 7y ago
I've been assuming that it's a pre-determined initial message, but that a real human in a low-cost country would immediately be involved if I bothered to respond. What portion of the chat pop up windows do you think are purely bot? Might any of them be purely human?
- viraptor 7y ago
  It really depends on the site. Some go to bots, some to script-followers, some to good dedicated support (shout out to datadog here). Some vary by time of the day. But yes, some of them are contact boxes for real people.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
  Bot initiated. Human, assisted with menus of canned phrases. "Just one moment while I check that for you." Bot to wrap-up; survey, emails, etc That's my assumption and if I'm not in a rush, pretty ok with it.
- LostJourneyman 7y ago
  It depends build to build. The standard approach is one of 4: 1) The bot initiates the conversation and your initial message gets sent directly to an agent. This is the older model that's in most common use today. 2) The bot initiates contact and based on your responses does some simple keyword matching and delivers help article links where possible or asks for more information IVR style, then when it hits an "I don't know" point or if the agent option is selected, offloads to an agent. 3) This is my favorite style, honestly: The bot initiates the interaction, and does some machine learning backed AI chat, all the while the interaction is monitored by an agent who can take over at any time. Similar to #2, if the bot hits a sticking point, it'll just queue to an agent. This unfortunately is the least common of the implementations. 4) This is the most modern and is becoming the industry leader: Fully AI bot trained against a veritable Everest of chat conversations for that entity/industry, only offloads to a human when you shout "HUMAN" at it enough times or if it gets really stuck and confidence intervals start falling rapidly. NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I design and implement these systems for a living, and we don't often get much say in the customer-side UX, so I'm sorry if you've gotten stuck with an arguably bad build! (Edit: formatting)
luckylion 7y ago
AliExpress does this as well and in an annoying manner that I consider insulting. Support chat will start with a useless bot that just looks for keywords and then replies with FAQ links. "Escalate to a service agent" will make you wait for 30-45 seconds to then be greeted by "Anna" or some other human name. It's another bot, with typing-delay and will follow a simple script to keep you busy, low quality and no apparent option to actually get to a human support agent.
- dorgo 7y ago
  I'm curious. Are you complaining about support not beeing able to solve your issue, or about talking to bots instead of humans? Assume a strong AI with enough authority would handle support. Would you still prefer humans?
  - luckylion 7y ago
    If it could, I wouldn't mind. It didn't, and then went into a loop allowing me to "escalate" it to a real human which turned out to be the same bot, only with a different name.
  - tastroder 7y ago
    I'd have a problem with both in the support case. The alternative to a human contact is a natural language interface that just wastes my time and/or laziness in other parts of the business. If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. If handling my problem through a human requires more information prepend a form. Provide a clear path to skip/escalate. To be fair though, I'm annoyed by human first level support for similar reasons most of the time but at least escalation/problem solving with them is easier than a bot that explodes when you go off-script. I think, personally, that making me talk to your fancy answering machine is just devalueing. If a company wants my business they should have human support and pay them enough to work with the customer.
    - notahacker 7y ago
      > If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. This assumes that people who have a question they need answering will consider searching for an answer or getting to grips with the UI first, rather than heading straight to ask customer support. That's often not the case. Long before support chatbots became widespread, telephone trees made a point of telling every single user in the queue the help section of their website existed... Agree bots should often make it easier to escalate and should default to escalation rather than blowing up[1], but if a large proportion of your queries are actually answered by telling people the FAQ page is a thing, it's a bit difficult to justify paying humans to do it. [1]if escalation takes a couple of minutes for a response escalation and blowing up might be indistinguishable...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jonnydubowsky 7y ago
My recent experience with a credit card customer support agent might as well have been me conversing with a bot. It was actually more frustrating for both me and the agent, that they were so strictly bound to a script, with no room for their creative human brain to actually adapt their response to the unique context of my issue. When customer service is nothing more then an agent choosing from various scripted responses, what is the point? Escalating my issue up through 2 senior agents, i finally reached a human who was allowed by their employer to actively apply context to their support tasks. The use of programmed constraints on a system and how that system is sold to customers, this is a wicked problem of our times.
- amelius 7y ago
  I guess the point is that they still save on average. Most calls can probably be handled using a simple script.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    They may save on average, but that's just shifting the expense to the customer in terms of wasted time. If there is anything I've learned over 30 years of running businesses that being disrespectful towards your customers' time it is that you will end up losing those customers.
    - headsoup 7y ago
      The saving grace for these online services seems to basically just be that the potential customer base is so ridiculously huge that it still pays vs effort required. Same for the big social giants etc. No matter how many people know better, there are plenty more that don't.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Another way they save is by discouraging their use. Since people who've called with real issues have had to waste a whole lot of their time, they're more reluctant to do so the next time they have a problem.
progval 7y ago
I run an IRC bot using Markov chains to generate text. It's a very crude method, so usually it's pure nonsense. But sometimes it says a bunch of sentences that make sense in a row to a new user, who then thinks it's a human.

WalterBright 7y ago

Those are fairly easy to spot. One dead giveaway is their excessively chirpy voice. Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script.

wpietri 7y ago
Currently they're fairly easy to spot -- if you work in tech, anyhow. A lot of money will be put into making them harder and harder to spot. I'm glad to see this law come at the beginning of that process, so there isn't an established industry that can put money into fighting it.
luckylion 7y ago
> Or, as you did, just say something that puts them off script. I don't know about that. Does Amazon's support use bots? Or are they just in a remote call center using auto translate to communicate with customers? Because in general, they appear like bots to me: they will parse for key words and reply to those, ignoring context and subtle differences that make their replies sound weird.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I doubt it would be better than their email reply bot, which is transparently inept. I wouldn't mind an email bot if it got me what I needed, but it was useless.
- viraptor 7y ago
  > Does Amazon's support use bots? Depends on the section of Amazon. AWS enterprise support does not.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    I'm talking about retail / security.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  My support experience with Amazon Fulfillment involved several months of going back and forth with what I think were humans whose native language was not English, bound by a script, until I learnt that the shortcut to getting an actual human who is allowed to deviate from a script is sending an email to Bezos.
lathiat 7y ago
I guess you didn't watch the Google I/O presentation earlier this year (which is probably what this law is about I would guess): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM
- WalterBright 7y ago
  It was selected out of a large number of tests they made. So while it sounds good, I'll remain skeptical for now.

danieltillett 7y ago

Apparently the solution is just to swear at the bot and you get punted to a human, the downside is many of the humans are no better than a bot.

kbenson 7y ago
Or you get a human that assumes the customer they are helping is abusive or problematic based on the prior messages, in which case they may be very unmotivated to help you.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  Just abuse the bot, not the human :)

burfog 7y ago

I've been assuming that it's a pre-determined initial message, but that a real human in a low-cost country would immediately be involved if I bothered to respond. What portion of the chat pop up windows do you think are purely bot? Might any of them be purely human?

viraptor 7y ago
It really depends on the site. Some go to bots, some to script-followers, some to good dedicated support (shout out to datadog here). Some vary by time of the day. But yes, some of them are contact boxes for real people.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
Bot initiated. Human, assisted with menus of canned phrases. "Just one moment while I check that for you." Bot to wrap-up; survey, emails, etc That's my assumption and if I'm not in a rush, pretty ok with it.
LostJourneyman 7y ago
It depends build to build. The standard approach is one of 4: 1) The bot initiates the conversation and your initial message gets sent directly to an agent. This is the older model that's in most common use today. 2) The bot initiates contact and based on your responses does some simple keyword matching and delivers help article links where possible or asks for more information IVR style, then when it hits an "I don't know" point or if the agent option is selected, offloads to an agent. 3) This is my favorite style, honestly: The bot initiates the interaction, and does some machine learning backed AI chat, all the while the interaction is monitored by an agent who can take over at any time. Similar to #2, if the bot hits a sticking point, it'll just queue to an agent. This unfortunately is the least common of the implementations. 4) This is the most modern and is becoming the industry leader: Fully AI bot trained against a veritable Everest of chat conversations for that entity/industry, only offloads to a human when you shout "HUMAN" at it enough times or if it gets really stuck and confidence intervals start falling rapidly. NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I design and implement these systems for a living, and we don't often get much say in the customer-side UX, so I'm sorry if you've gotten stuck with an arguably bad build! (Edit: formatting)

luckylion 7y ago

AliExpress does this as well and in an annoying manner that I consider insulting. Support chat will start with a useless bot that just looks for keywords and then replies with FAQ links. "Escalate to a service agent" will make you wait for 30-45 seconds to then be greeted by "Anna" or some other human name. It's another bot, with typing-delay and will follow a simple script to keep you busy, low quality and no apparent option to actually get to a human support agent.

dorgo 7y ago
I'm curious. Are you complaining about support not beeing able to solve your issue, or about talking to bots instead of humans? Assume a strong AI with enough authority would handle support. Would you still prefer humans?
- luckylion 7y ago
  If it could, I wouldn't mind. It didn't, and then went into a loop allowing me to "escalate" it to a real human which turned out to be the same bot, only with a different name.
- tastroder 7y ago
  I'd have a problem with both in the support case. The alternative to a human contact is a natural language interface that just wastes my time and/or laziness in other parts of the business. If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. If handling my problem through a human requires more information prepend a form. Provide a clear path to skip/escalate. To be fair though, I'm annoyed by human first level support for similar reasons most of the time but at least escalation/problem solving with them is easier than a bot that explodes when you go off-script. I think, personally, that making me talk to your fancy answering machine is just devalueing. If a company wants my business they should have human support and pay them enough to work with the customer.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    > If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. This assumes that people who have a question they need answering will consider searching for an answer or getting to grips with the UI first, rather than heading straight to ask customer support. That's often not the case. Long before support chatbots became widespread, telephone trees made a point of telling every single user in the queue the help section of their website existed... Agree bots should often make it easier to escalate and should default to escalation rather than blowing up[1], but if a large proportion of your queries are actually answered by telling people the FAQ page is a thing, it's a bit difficult to justify paying humans to do it. [1]if escalation takes a couple of minutes for a response escalation and blowing up might be indistinguishable...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jonnydubowsky 7y ago

My recent experience with a credit card customer support agent might as well have been me conversing with a bot. It was actually more frustrating for both me and the agent, that they were so strictly bound to a script, with no room for their creative human brain to actually adapt their response to the unique context of my issue. When customer service is nothing more then an agent choosing from various scripted responses, what is the point? Escalating my issue up through 2 senior agents, i finally reached a human who was allowed by their employer to actively apply context to their support tasks. The use of programmed constraints on a system and how that system is sold to customers, this is a wicked problem of our times.

amelius 7y ago
I guess the point is that they still save on average. Most calls can probably be handled using a simple script.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  They may save on average, but that's just shifting the expense to the customer in terms of wasted time. If there is anything I've learned over 30 years of running businesses that being disrespectful towards your customers' time it is that you will end up losing those customers.
  - headsoup 7y ago
    The saving grace for these online services seems to basically just be that the potential customer base is so ridiculously huge that it still pays vs effort required. Same for the big social giants etc. No matter how many people know better, there are plenty more that don't.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Another way they save is by discouraging their use. Since people who've called with real issues have had to waste a whole lot of their time, they're more reluctant to do so the next time they have a problem.

progval 7y ago

I run an IRC bot using Markov chains to generate text. It's a very crude method, so usually it's pure nonsense. But sometimes it says a bunch of sentences that make sense in a row to a new user, who then thinks it's a human.