10 ms·

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

benbristow 5y ago
It can be quite useful in a weird way. While everyone else is stuck on the chatbot going round in circles, usually typing something like "human" or "talk to human" will make the chatbot connect you with an actual human representative (or ask you a few basic questions first and then connect you). I've used the trick on various large company's websites when trying to get support and it seems to be quite 'universal'.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Reminds me of how I used to occasionally see people on the bus shouting into their phones "OP-ER-AY-TOR!" "REP-RE-SENT-UH-TIVE!" "HUE-MAN!"
- roughly 5y ago
  It will be universal until people start using it, and then it will be removed, because the point of these systems is to keep you away from humans.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Yep. Hitting "0" or "9" used to directly connect you to a human CS rep across many large companies' phone systems. Then one day they all moved to obscure it behind several levels of number tapping.
    - benbristow 5y ago
      Then https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/ was born
makeitdouble 5y ago
Except the alternative is rarely the actual person you need. Before chatbots it was endless phone trees. Before phone trees it was oversea operators rerouting you around departments. Before that it was unpaid interns putting you on hold until you get disconnected or give up. The game has always be to make it as hard as possible to reach the most costly level of support.
the_only_law 5y ago
Still doesn’t piss me off as much as automated phone support systems. 90% of the time they only offer options that I could easily go online to do. If I’m calling your phone number. It’s because I have a problem that’s not solved or clarified by your existing self-support systems.
- kapp_in_life 5y ago
  Unfortunately I think they've found that most people don't(won't?) do that self debugging. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/
  - pydry 5y ago
    They could do a better job of separating the two. Most companies would save their time and mine if they had a callback system which took as many details as possible up front & didnt have to ask my name and account details because Im already logged in. Even better if it could give me some warning about where I am in the queue and when the call might be coming (e.g. via push notification). I'd 1000x prefer that over any oversold AI hooked up to an FAQ. Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this.
    - zerkten 5y ago
      > They could do a better job of separating the two. When support is purely viewed as a cost, then this will never happen. 99% plus of your call volume may be for the obvious things. If you offer two options all of those people are going to be more confused than they already are and you will have some of them engaged by costly humans. > Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this. You are getting to the higher level point here. Costs need to be minimized so you go with the cheapest vendor available and then try to squeeze everything you can out of that. If you can send someone to an AI, again, after you've put them in the direct of a human, there is the possibility of deflecting further cost. Depending on the scenario these cost savings can rack up for both the company and the support vendor. All the time, the humans doing the support or creating the solutions forming the basis of the AI get treated pretty poorly. Support at a particular scale will start to skew this way unless there are strong forcing functions in the organization. For example, sales need to be able able to sell support which needs to be backed up by solid people, and keep getting renewed. If you offer predominantly free support then you don't have much wiggle room. When PMs and devs only focus on new features and not fixing real issues raised by customers, or more importantly in many ways, proactively identified by support people, then you lose support people and make toil for those remaining. Lastly, recognizing support people as an asset, will result in better behaviors and attracting more talent. Many times companies struggle badly with this and then decide to just outsource it. Promoting people from support into sales or deeper tech roles over the long-temr can also be pretty cost effective versus hiring outside. Many folks on HN will have done support at one point and felt they could have contributed much more in other roles.
codegeek 5y ago
We have a chatbot on our marketing site but it says something like "I am a Bot. Once I ask you a couple of questions, I can connect you to a human. Is that ok ?".
- reaperducer 5y ago
  What happens if someone responds with, "No?"
  - OJFord 5y ago
    'Ok, great! Let's get started! [Ten emojis]' (Probably)
- chasd00 5y ago
  i like that better than fighting with a bot to trigger an actual human getting online. However, a few short questions and connect to human sounds like a form and a submit button.
  - Zopieux 5y ago
    But forms are so 2008. We need innovation for its own sake -- how else are the leads and techbros gonna justify their paycheck?
- snapetom 5y ago
  If the end result is getting to chat with a human, that's fine. But so many of these are just a different interface to search the FAQs, and the end result is to link to the FAQs. That's useless.
silisili 5y ago
Same. But in fairness I like the latest AMZ chatbot. Not because it's smart, because it doesn't try to be. I wanted to return a package that for whatever reason claimed to not be able to be returned, despite being sold by Amazon and having the typical return policy. I clicked to get help, confirmed the item and it just said 'OK, I've refunded the amount of xx.xx'.
tobyjsullivan 5y ago
Kind of a weird tangent but I had a very interesting experience with one of these customer support chatbots recently. My ISP apparently now requires that all customers communicate with their chatbot as the only point of contact. So, naturally, I was pseudo-outraged because I know chatbots are just a money-saving gimmick that reduces workload by driving away 80% of support requests regardless of whether they actually solve someone's problem. And, being technical, my problem was obviously not going to be in the bank of stock answers or even understood by the bot. (I really wish I could remember the actual question) Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed. That was the day I realized I have a deep-seated prejudice against chatbots that blinded me to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they actually can help sometimes. And I haven't kept up with their technical advancement to be throwing around judgements on their abilities. To be clear: I'm not arguing in favour of chatbots; just sharing a story.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed. How do you know it did? I.e. that a human it was passed to didn't just pass your inverted Turing test!
  - acdha 5y ago
    This is one of the big confounds: a lot of the companies which brag about AI prowess are relying on a bunch of generally not well paid humans to cover the gaps.
  - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
    In my case, I inferred due to the speed of the response. (It was even formatted fancy). So while it's conceivable that a human could have intervened, they would have had to be reading the conversation in real-time and ready to click a one-button response immediately which seems like it would defeat the purpose. Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?
psyc 5y ago
But then the real person functions like a bot because they’re following a script.
mrweasel 5y ago
Bots do not serve ANY purpose in most interaction with people. They are capable of a limited set of tasks and should be used carefully. Mainly they piss people off, and if a bot could handle the interaction, so could a website. Previously I worked for a company that took pride in not being like the big players, doing this the right way, but apparently that has fallen completely apart. I know it's not the same thing exactly, but it made my a little angry to see some of their web pages having a text saying: "Blip Blop, I'm a tiny bot and I've translated this page. I don't always get it right, but I'm learning". Just leave the reasonable English version or do a proper translation, this automated crap, and don't try to excuse bad translation and messy language with "I'm learning". If you KNOW the bot makes enough mistakes that you have to let people know, then maybe it's not ready yet.
tombert 5y ago
I actually work on a chatbot for a big company [1], and I feel like chatbots are substantially better when they are more targeted and less conversational. For example, I'm perfectly happy to use a chatbot and type "return something", since that's relatively easy to parse correctly, and once you're in the right flow it works just fine. Where I feel like chatbots get bad is when they try super hard to fool you into thinking you're talking to a human. At that point, I totally agree, just give me a human. [1] It's probably not too hard to find out which company, but I do ask that you do not post it here if you do.
- voiper1 5y ago
  If it's something direct like "return something" then what benefit is there over using the website's interface? Is it just this interest in doing everything by whatsapp?
  - tombert 5y ago
    > If it's something direct like "return something" then what benefit is there over using the website's interface? There's no "benefit" exactly, the item gets returned the same way regardless, but it's kind of nice that it's consolidated. The chatbot works as a bit of a "one stop shop" for a lot of administrative stuff like "where's my order" or "return something" or "my order didn't go through", stuff like that. AFAIK we don't support doing anything through Whatsapp, just our site.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Honestly I've had plenty of real world support people who were just as bad, if not worse, than the AI bots. Recently had an experience with paid Microsoft support (for work) so bad that we just stopped even talking to them. It didn't used to be this way, it used to be that if we had a data corruption issue with SQL we'd talk to an engineer who worked on SQL server at Microsoft, now we talk to some third party company's imitation of an engineer who is vaguely aware that SQL exists.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  And this is why chat bots are very attractive to the executives who view support technicians as humans who exist simply apologize to a customer and follow a script.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
thrower123 5y ago
Chatbots are really hot in customer service and internal helpdesk applications, because there is that belief that they will offload interactions from hitting a real agent. I'm skeptical, because the chatbots built to do that are often so bad that people just spam "agent" or "operator" or whatever they have discovered is the magic word to shortcut the bot, the same way that they do with voice phone trees. You could probably build some decent chatbots if you had strong domain knowledge to draw on and skilled developers building them. But that's not usually the case; it's most often farmed out to a team attached to the Cognizant or TCS or Cap Gemini type outfit that is already handling that function, who are not terribly skilled, don't care, and are viewed as a cost center. So it is usually a poor result.
hffft 5y ago

benbristow 5y ago

It can be quite useful in a weird way. While everyone else is stuck on the chatbot going round in circles, usually typing something like "human" or "talk to human" will make the chatbot connect you with an actual human representative (or ask you a few basic questions first and then connect you). I've used the trick on various large company's websites when trying to get support and it seems to be quite 'universal'.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
reaperducer 5y ago
Reminds me of how I used to occasionally see people on the bus shouting into their phones "OP-ER-AY-TOR!" "REP-RE-SENT-UH-TIVE!" "HUE-MAN!"
roughly 5y ago
It will be universal until people start using it, and then it will be removed, because the point of these systems is to keep you away from humans.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Yep. Hitting "0" or "9" used to directly connect you to a human CS rep across many large companies' phone systems. Then one day they all moved to obscure it behind several levels of number tapping.
  - benbristow 5y ago
    Then https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/ was born

makeitdouble 5y ago

Except the alternative is rarely the actual person you need. Before chatbots it was endless phone trees. Before phone trees it was oversea operators rerouting you around departments. Before that it was unpaid interns putting you on hold until you get disconnected or give up. The game has always be to make it as hard as possible to reach the most costly level of support.

the_only_law 5y ago

Still doesn’t piss me off as much as automated phone support systems. 90% of the time they only offer options that I could easily go online to do. If I’m calling your phone number. It’s because I have a problem that’s not solved or clarified by your existing self-support systems.

kapp_in_life 5y ago
Unfortunately I think they've found that most people don't(won't?) do that self debugging. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/
- pydry 5y ago
  They could do a better job of separating the two. Most companies would save their time and mine if they had a callback system which took as many details as possible up front & didnt have to ask my name and account details because Im already logged in. Even better if it could give me some warning about where I am in the queue and when the call might be coming (e.g. via push notification). I'd 1000x prefer that over any oversold AI hooked up to an FAQ. Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this.
  - zerkten 5y ago
    > They could do a better job of separating the two. When support is purely viewed as a cost, then this will never happen. 99% plus of your call volume may be for the obvious things. If you offer two options all of those people are going to be more confused than they already are and you will have some of them engaged by costly humans. > Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this. You are getting to the higher level point here. Costs need to be minimized so you go with the cheapest vendor available and then try to squeeze everything you can out of that. If you can send someone to an AI, again, after you've put them in the direct of a human, there is the possibility of deflecting further cost. Depending on the scenario these cost savings can rack up for both the company and the support vendor. All the time, the humans doing the support or creating the solutions forming the basis of the AI get treated pretty poorly. Support at a particular scale will start to skew this way unless there are strong forcing functions in the organization. For example, sales need to be able able to sell support which needs to be backed up by solid people, and keep getting renewed. If you offer predominantly free support then you don't have much wiggle room. When PMs and devs only focus on new features and not fixing real issues raised by customers, or more importantly in many ways, proactively identified by support people, then you lose support people and make toil for those remaining. Lastly, recognizing support people as an asset, will result in better behaviors and attracting more talent. Many times companies struggle badly with this and then decide to just outsource it. Promoting people from support into sales or deeper tech roles over the long-temr can also be pretty cost effective versus hiring outside. Many folks on HN will have done support at one point and felt they could have contributed much more in other roles.

codegeek 5y ago

We have a chatbot on our marketing site but it says something like "I am a Bot. Once I ask you a couple of questions, I can connect you to a human. Is that ok ?".

reaperducer 5y ago
What happens if someone responds with, "No?"
- OJFord 5y ago
  'Ok, great! Let's get started! [Ten emojis]' (Probably)
chasd00 5y ago
i like that better than fighting with a bot to trigger an actual human getting online. However, a few short questions and connect to human sounds like a form and a submit button.
- Zopieux 5y ago
  But forms are so 2008. We need innovation for its own sake -- how else are the leads and techbros gonna justify their paycheck?
snapetom 5y ago
If the end result is getting to chat with a human, that's fine. But so many of these are just a different interface to search the FAQs, and the end result is to link to the FAQs. That's useless.

silisili 5y ago

Same. But in fairness I like the latest AMZ chatbot. Not because it's smart, because it doesn't try to be. I wanted to return a package that for whatever reason claimed to not be able to be returned, despite being sold by Amazon and having the typical return policy. I clicked to get help, confirmed the item and it just said 'OK, I've refunded the amount of xx.xx'.

tobyjsullivan 5y ago

Kind of a weird tangent but I had a very interesting experience with one of these customer support chatbots recently. My ISP apparently now requires that all customers communicate with their chatbot as the only point of contact. So, naturally, I was pseudo-outraged because I know chatbots are just a money-saving gimmick that reduces workload by driving away 80% of support requests regardless of whether they actually solve someone's problem. And, being technical, my problem was obviously not going to be in the bank of stock answers or even understood by the bot. (I really wish I could remember the actual question) Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed. That was the day I realized I have a deep-seated prejudice against chatbots that blinded me to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they actually can help sometimes. And I haven't kept up with their technical advancement to be throwing around judgements on their abilities. To be clear: I'm not arguing in favour of chatbots; just sharing a story.

OJFord 5y ago
> Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed. How do you know it did? I.e. that a human it was passed to didn't just pass your inverted Turing test!
- acdha 5y ago
  This is one of the big confounds: a lot of the companies which brag about AI prowess are relying on a bunch of generally not well paid humans to cover the gaps.
- tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  In my case, I inferred due to the speed of the response. (It was even formatted fancy). So while it's conceivable that a human could have intervened, they would have had to be reading the conversation in real-time and ready to click a one-button response immediately which seems like it would defeat the purpose. Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?

psyc 5y ago

But then the real person functions like a bot because they’re following a script.

mrweasel 5y ago

Bots do not serve ANY purpose in most interaction with people. They are capable of a limited set of tasks and should be used carefully. Mainly they piss people off, and if a bot could handle the interaction, so could a website. Previously I worked for a company that took pride in not being like the big players, doing this the right way, but apparently that has fallen completely apart. I know it's not the same thing exactly, but it made my a little angry to see some of their web pages having a text saying: "Blip Blop, I'm a tiny bot and I've translated this page. I don't always get it right, but I'm learning". Just leave the reasonable English version or do a proper translation, this automated crap, and don't try to excuse bad translation and messy language with "I'm learning". If you KNOW the bot makes enough mistakes that you have to let people know, then maybe it's not ready yet.

tombert 5y ago

I actually work on a chatbot for a big company [1], and I feel like chatbots are substantially better when they are more targeted and less conversational. For example, I'm perfectly happy to use a chatbot and type "return something", since that's relatively easy to parse correctly, and once you're in the right flow it works just fine. Where I feel like chatbots get bad is when they try super hard to fool you into thinking you're talking to a human. At that point, I totally agree, just give me a human. [1] It's probably not too hard to find out which company, but I do ask that you do not post it here if you do.

voiper1 5y ago
If it's something direct like "return something" then what benefit is there over using the website's interface? Is it just this interest in doing everything by whatsapp?
- tombert 5y ago
  > If it's something direct like "return something" then what benefit is there over using the website's interface? There's no "benefit" exactly, the item gets returned the same way regardless, but it's kind of nice that it's consolidated. The chatbot works as a bit of a "one stop shop" for a lot of administrative stuff like "where's my order" or "return something" or "my order didn't go through", stuff like that. AFAIK we don't support doing anything through Whatsapp, just our site.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Honestly I've had plenty of real world support people who were just as bad, if not worse, than the AI bots. Recently had an experience with paid Microsoft support (for work) so bad that we just stopped even talking to them. It didn't used to be this way, it used to be that if we had a data corruption issue with SQL we'd talk to an engineer who worked on SQL server at Microsoft, now we talk to some third party company's imitation of an engineer who is vaguely aware that SQL exists.

wildrhythms 5y ago
And this is why chat bots are very attractive to the executives who view support technicians as humans who exist simply apologize to a customer and follow a script.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

thrower123 5y ago

Chatbots are really hot in customer service and internal helpdesk applications, because there is that belief that they will offload interactions from hitting a real agent. I'm skeptical, because the chatbots built to do that are often so bad that people just spam "agent" or "operator" or whatever they have discovered is the magic word to shortcut the bot, the same way that they do with voice phone trees. You could probably build some decent chatbots if you had strong domain knowledge to draw on and skilled developers building them. But that's not usually the case; it's most often farmed out to a team attached to the Cognizant or TCS or Cap Gemini type outfit that is already handling that function, who are not terribly skilled, don't care, and are viewed as a cost center. So it is usually a poor result.

hffft 5y ago