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The problems plaguing customer support today are not technical in nature and AI will not fix them. > You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the b

The problems plaguing customer support today are not technical in nature and AI will not fix them. > You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot This has always been something I've never understood about customer support. In particular, chat support is bad about this, but I've had it happen on phone support too. Prior to getting connected to the human, the bot wants to take down a short description of your problem. That's fine, but the conversation often goes like this: > Bot: Please write a short description of your problem. > Me: Problem I am having. > Bot: One moment while I connect you. > (a small eternity later) > Support: Hi. How can I help you?" > Ctrl+C problem, Ctrl+V problem* > Support: I see you are <verbatim repeats problem; with no paraphrasing and no demonstration of understanding, I have no idea if the agent "gets it">. Is that correct? > Me: :shrug:^W Yes. … like, why did I ever type that description? Here, a computer (I don't even know if it qualifies as "AI" given how rudimentary of a task it is performing) appears to have failed at the simplest of tasks. And this happens all. the. time. Phone bots will often "authenticate" me with various credentials, and then connect me to a human who will immediately authenticate me with the same credentials. Whose time was saved?

causehealth101 6y ago
This reminds of a typical visit to the doctor. The nurse enters the room, asks me why I'm there and types the answers into EMR. She leaves... The doctor walks in and says "so, what brings you in today?" It's either a huge redundancy or a useful way of sending off your message to join millions of others, with the goal of training the system to improve and speed up the automated service.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
In the first use case, the original problem statement is probably used for routing and either the system is too poor to actually display that to the reps or they are chatting with many people and have SLAs on first contact/answer times so fire off a quick text question that they have saved.
admax88q 6y ago
A support agents time was saved because every annoying step like that causes x% of people to just give up.
pydry 6y ago
This kind of thing is why I remain deeply skeptical about any kind of "automation is eating the world" type story. The techno optimists (execs running these companies) often end up adding workloads because they screw up the human based systems that are already in place.
jabroni_salad 6y ago
Chat agents are A) handling many cases simultaneously and B) graded on their response times. Kicking the ball into your court no matter how trivial improves their scores. If they are ESL they may be trying to match what you wrote to their internal knowledge system and asking you to confirm.

causehealth101 6y ago

This reminds of a typical visit to the doctor. The nurse enters the room, asks me why I'm there and types the answers into EMR. She leaves... The doctor walks in and says "so, what brings you in today?" It's either a huge redundancy or a useful way of sending off your message to join millions of others, with the goal of training the system to improve and speed up the automated service.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

In the first use case, the original problem statement is probably used for routing and either the system is too poor to actually display that to the reps or they are chatting with many people and have SLAs on first contact/answer times so fire off a quick text question that they have saved.

admax88q 6y ago

A support agents time was saved because every annoying step like that causes x% of people to just give up.

pydry 6y ago

This kind of thing is why I remain deeply skeptical about any kind of "automation is eating the world" type story. The techno optimists (execs running these companies) often end up adding workloads because they screw up the human based systems that are already in place.

jabroni_salad 6y ago

Chat agents are A) handling many cases simultaneously and B) graded on their response times. Kicking the ball into your court no matter how trivial improves their scores. If they are ESL they may be trying to match what you wrote to their internal knowledge system and asking you to confirm.