4 ms·

Chatbots are about as useful as phone trees. They can help solve the top 5 easy/common problems, but they are useless passed that. Anyone who has worked in a ca

by dexwiz 5y ago

Chatbots are about as useful as phone trees. They can help solve the top 5 easy/common problems, but they are useless passed that. Anyone who has worked in a call center knows that more than half the calls are about the same couple of issues: reset password, finding common help docs, etc. Since help desks are cost centers, it makes sense to half a robot handle as many of these as possible. I think most of the hate directed to chatbots are because they are really intrusive. You scroll through a page, and 15 seconds in your focus is disrupted as a fake chat window opens up. This is the digital equivalent to the annoying sales rep who asks you if you need help when you are clearly just browsing. The difference is a good sales rep has the intelligence to turn that conversation into a sale. A chatbot usually has to hand off the conversation to a real person to do this. So it has all of the annoyance without the benefit of a potential conversion. Chat bots as frontends for help desks make sense, but they are poor sales people. If companies learned the difference, I bet their perceived usefulness would change.

cptskippy 5y ago
> a good sales rep has the intelligence to turn that conversation into a sale. A good sales rep knows when to walk away.
tetha 5y ago
This is what our NLP teams are indeed working on. Sales prefers to describe it in more colorful ways, but practically, they are developing a more natural interface to an initial decision tree - you don't press 5 for a connectivity issue, you type "My fritzbox doesn't internet anymore" into a chatbox and it recognizes that as a connectivity issue. This goes on for 3-4 questions, until it either generates a case a human will look at, or until it can provide an FAQ entry fitting your problem. From a customers perspective, avoiding 5 - 10% support calls makes monetary sense, and from a (test-) user perspective, it's suprisingly decent if the knowledge base behind it is solid. And yes, "Fritzbox doesn't internet properly anymore" actually had helpful results.
- Teandw 5y ago
  Is the 5-10% savings on agents handling phone calls worth it when reputation damage is taken into consideration?
  - tetha 5y ago
    Most of our customers use these kinds of chat bots as an addition to their portfolio of support channels a user can use. If you don't like it, use another channel you prefer.
- petra 5y ago
  If creating a shallow question based decision tree is the goal, why Is NLP needed ? What's wrong with just creating it with intuitively phrased questions ? And if there's a difference in results between those 2 methods, how big it is ?
aidenn0 5y ago
Just please give me a DTMF tree as a fallback for voice recognition. I was trying to make a change to a rental-car reservation from a noisy airport, and I spent 15 minutes trying to get through the voice-recognition chatbot...
- Edman274 5y ago
  It is so fucking frustrating to explain to anyone who works as a manager in a call center that the only real thing you can count on being able to understand in your IVR system are actually just DTMF signals. For whatever reason, it seems to be impossible to explain that B, P and V all sound the same on a noisy connection when it's part of some account number. It's impossible to explain that no one knows what "alphanumeric" means and that fully half of Americans have reading comprehension below a 6th grade level. And that using terms of art, jargon, and acronyms will be extremely frustrating for users when encoded in an IVR system, since human call center workers will always clarify, but clarification in an IVR system can't happen in a natural way - you either have to anticipate that the person won't understand and waste the time of half your users, or find some impossibly elegant way to say "I'm going to use terms you don't understand, barge in by asking me to explain if you don't understand a term." The absolute zenith of an IVR system would require no human interaction with a robot and would correctly answer questions unprompted and route to human customer service without prompting or asking anything, and would never require a person to enter the same information in a call twice. What we get instead are systems that are primarily designed by non-experts whose sole metric is making the phone calls go away, but only pills can actually do that.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Heck, when transcribing a number from person-to-person over 2 cell phones, the LPC (or whatever voice compression in use) was reliably rendering one side's pronunciation of a digit (or maybe letter? this was like 10 years ago...) as a different one. We ended up spelling out the digits to communicate it.

by dexwiz 5y ago

cptskippy 5y ago

> a good sales rep has the intelligence to turn that conversation into a sale. A good sales rep knows when to walk away.

tetha 5y ago

This is what our NLP teams are indeed working on. Sales prefers to describe it in more colorful ways, but practically, they are developing a more natural interface to an initial decision tree - you don't press 5 for a connectivity issue, you type "My fritzbox doesn't internet anymore" into a chatbox and it recognizes that as a connectivity issue. This goes on for 3-4 questions, until it either generates a case a human will look at, or until it can provide an FAQ entry fitting your problem. From a customers perspective, avoiding 5 - 10% support calls makes monetary sense, and from a (test-) user perspective, it's suprisingly decent if the knowledge base behind it is solid. And yes, "Fritzbox doesn't internet properly anymore" actually had helpful results.

Teandw 5y ago
Is the 5-10% savings on agents handling phone calls worth it when reputation damage is taken into consideration?
- tetha 5y ago
  Most of our customers use these kinds of chat bots as an addition to their portfolio of support channels a user can use. If you don't like it, use another channel you prefer.
petra 5y ago
If creating a shallow question based decision tree is the goal, why Is NLP needed ? What's wrong with just creating it with intuitively phrased questions ? And if there's a difference in results between those 2 methods, how big it is ?

aidenn0 5y ago

Just please give me a DTMF tree as a fallback for voice recognition. I was trying to make a change to a rental-car reservation from a noisy airport, and I spent 15 minutes trying to get through the voice-recognition chatbot...

Edman274 5y ago
It is so fucking frustrating to explain to anyone who works as a manager in a call center that the only real thing you can count on being able to understand in your IVR system are actually just DTMF signals. For whatever reason, it seems to be impossible to explain that B, P and V all sound the same on a noisy connection when it's part of some account number. It's impossible to explain that no one knows what "alphanumeric" means and that fully half of Americans have reading comprehension below a 6th grade level. And that using terms of art, jargon, and acronyms will be extremely frustrating for users when encoded in an IVR system, since human call center workers will always clarify, but clarification in an IVR system can't happen in a natural way - you either have to anticipate that the person won't understand and waste the time of half your users, or find some impossibly elegant way to say "I'm going to use terms you don't understand, barge in by asking me to explain if you don't understand a term." The absolute zenith of an IVR system would require no human interaction with a robot and would correctly answer questions unprompted and route to human customer service without prompting or asking anything, and would never require a person to enter the same information in a call twice. What we get instead are systems that are primarily designed by non-experts whose sole metric is making the phone calls go away, but only pills can actually do that.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Heck, when transcribing a number from person-to-person over 2 cell phones, the LPC (or whatever voice compression in use) was reliably rendering one side's pronunciation of a digit (or maybe letter? this was like 10 years ago...) as a different one. We ended up spelling out the digits to communicate it.