5 ms·

There’s a special little place in hell for whoever decided the whole world needed chat bots for every crappy website. Why would I want to try to articulate som

by harha 5y ago

There’s a special little place in hell for whoever decided the whole world needed chat bots for every crappy website. Why would I want to try to articulate something that could be found in a simple tree? Just give me direct access. I don’t know where to find it: search! The issue is not covered in the standard workflow? Get me a real person! Did anyone implementing ever end-to-end test this for speed and user friendliness? Did they just misinterpret wanting to talk to someone? I want to talk to someone because the process doesn’t cover my case, not because I actually want to have a conversation with the broken process.

anaganisk 5y ago
Worst part is, after answering 10 questions. Some websites offer a real agent, and they ask all the same questions or it tries to point to an article we already know everything about. We have a broadband provider in India, that asks 5 questions about internet outage and they says call 121 to talk to someone. Thomas had never seen such BS before.
- EGreg 5y ago
  Why do you think they do it? To take the edge off customer complaints elsewhere?
  - etripe 5y ago
    The same reason companies use byzantine IVR systems (phone menus). To save support costs by making people give up.
    - JamisonM 5y ago
      I worked with some folks that did IVR systems and they were mostly doing their best with the resources and constraints they had to make the thing useful. They were measured by dropped calls, they did not like them. The weaknesses were mostly just ordinary business stupidity. The marketing department demands that the first option allow the caller to express interest in buying a product.. nobody ever does that but then it takes up the primest real estate in the system #1 on the first level of the tree. Of course anyone with a billing enquiry needs to enter the account # so that the collections department has the opportunity to intercept.. but after the arrears lookup nobody in the call centre is willing to pony-up the resources to make the system retain the account number that was typed in so every customer has the then say the damn number after having just typed it in!
      - EGreg 5y ago
        At least #1 option is better than having to hear an announcement to press 1 to hear about how Bank of America supports the Military… when you call in for support (yes it is actually happening right now, try it). Whoever would want to hear that when they want assistance with their issue, unless they or their family is in the military?
      - etripe 5y ago
        To be clear, I wasn't putting the blame with IVRs or their designers. I was specifically speaking to the UX that results from businesses programming them and the menu options they set up. Like you say, those are constrained by what the business itself wants, which in turn is constrained by cost management philosophy.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    Because the average user doesnt want to look at faq. They want a person to answer their question. Now. Chatbots kind of feel like that and the vast majority of questions can be answered by a FAQ.
elforce002 5y ago
Facts. I hate chatbots with passion so much so that I prefer calling if I want to know something instead of using them.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  I'd rather email and wait several days, even if I need the answer NOW, compared to "talk" toa chatbot. Maybe even mail a letter.
- defanor 5y ago
  Unfortunately there seems to be a tendency to either remove phones altogether, or to man them with the same chat bots (coupled with speech recognition and synthesis, so even worse than text-based ones).
  - airstrike 5y ago
    I just call and repeat the word 'agent' until someone talks to me
    - kordlessagain 5y ago
      I push 0 over and over.
echelon 5y ago
I agree with you, but there's a lot going on here: - Customer support is expensive. If keeping customers happy and lowering churn is important, you spend a lot of money on it. - If you can't afford enough staff, the next best option is to put up a few barriers to slow down the incoming requests. Maybe automated means can solve a large percentage of problems. - Not everyone knows how to search or navigate a tree. Think about the non-tech folks. You have to offer them something different. It's hard to strike a balance. - Chat bots are being hyped and sold by new tech companies trying to build larger scale solutions. They want to build more, but they need to sell, grow cash flow, etc. Etc.
- fivre 5y ago
  I'd challenge the idea that customer support is _expensive_. Generic customer support requires no specialized expertise: you need knowledge your company's business processes, tooling related to third parties they worked with (redirecting a courier's shipment via the courier or whatever), and general customer service skills, and that's about it. _Specialized_ customer support, e.g. support for complicated software, is expensive, because it requires technical domain knowledge equivalent to or above many engineering employees, and employees that can perform it effectively could probably move to engineering and increase their salaries twofold because compensation isn't tied to expertise, it's tied to what the market will pay, and you can more easily get away with shit support than shit engineering, but ignore that--it's not the majority of customer support. Customer support _is_, in the simplest view, a cost center. Customers contact support when something has gone wrong that they can't resolve otherwise. If nothing goes wrong, you don't need it. If you, as support management, can reduce the time it takes to resolve things that go wrong (by any means) and reduce the number of staff needed to handle cases, you win: your department doesn't directly generate revenue, so your goal is to reduce expenses. Tying lost revenue to customers lost after poor support experiences is difficult and noisy: there are plenty of customers who have poor experiences because they're incompetent and wouldn't succeed with any amount of support, and because of this are more likely to request support, and the high-level categorization used to describe issues often obscures what actually went wrong (a generic "Account > Creation" category isn't going to capture issues like "users can't create an account if their address includes non-ASCII characters", but execs don't see anything more than the category). These issues (and others) combine to promote an environment where support is more a buffer to getting support with limited ability to fix issues, and a perverse incentive to _not_ fix issues since metrics are focused towards reducing time to resolution (easy to measure) versus quality of resolution (hard to measure!). Poor support is furthermore easy to ignore because you can either often focus more on new business first and foremost (hello, every startup ever!) or rest comfortably on a monopoly position where customers can't drop you even if you provide terrible support (hello, the US ISP market!). Cost is not strictly an disincentive to providing sufficient, capable, and effective support, but it's difficult to recognize the value it provides and there are more immediate cost savings from reducing support cost than long-term revenue from customer retention by providing good support. This compounds into even poorer service in more specialized environments because talented people will leave, because working in a cost center sucks. The flipside of support is essentially sales engineering, AKA support while trying to court a customer. The technical skills needed aren't any different, but one brings in revenue in an easily quantifiable way, so it gets more political clout and more organizational investment.
IgorPartola 5y ago
The Amazon chat bot has been pretty great for me. Instant replies and I most times I don’t have to type anything out. It’s really a decision tree with multiple choices but extensive and actually helpful. And if there is a bigger problem it instantly switches to a person who has all the context.
- harha 5y ago
  Sounds good - the menu based customer care is pretty good there too, and they tend to actually want to resolve issues unlike many other sites (though that might also depend on the cost benefit analysis) might be the basis many other sites are missing.
- hammock 5y ago
  +1 to this. A big part of it is that it's actually connected to your personal data (order history etc)
defanor 5y ago
> Why would I want to try to articulate something that could be found in a simple tree? Just give me direct access. Sometimes I feel that way about databases and dynamic websites. I suspect the reasons behind those may be similar: web UIs add branding, maybe make usage a bit more convenient to an average user, and so on. Animations are popular too, probably they are supposed to make the websites to look more fun and modern. I guess that people planning chat bots similarly view them as looking more futuristic and convenient, more advanced than boring old documentation.
browningstreet 5y ago
I think chat bots exist in our world because people would rather "ask a question on a forum" than search and have direct access to an answer. It drives me crazy too, but it's how we get "does anyone else ever..." memes in this world. People don't want information, they want the experience of asking the question and the discussion. The answer is not the primary force of their effort. It also seems to be the conversational model in use at parties.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by harha 5y ago

anaganisk 5y ago

Worst part is, after answering 10 questions. Some websites offer a real agent, and they ask all the same questions or it tries to point to an article we already know everything about. We have a broadband provider in India, that asks 5 questions about internet outage and they says call 121 to talk to someone. Thomas had never seen such BS before.

EGreg 5y ago
Why do you think they do it? To take the edge off customer complaints elsewhere?
- etripe 5y ago
  The same reason companies use byzantine IVR systems (phone menus). To save support costs by making people give up.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    I worked with some folks that did IVR systems and they were mostly doing their best with the resources and constraints they had to make the thing useful. They were measured by dropped calls, they did not like them. The weaknesses were mostly just ordinary business stupidity. The marketing department demands that the first option allow the caller to express interest in buying a product.. nobody ever does that but then it takes up the primest real estate in the system #1 on the first level of the tree. Of course anyone with a billing enquiry needs to enter the account # so that the collections department has the opportunity to intercept.. but after the arrears lookup nobody in the call centre is willing to pony-up the resources to make the system retain the account number that was typed in so every customer has the then say the damn number after having just typed it in!
    - EGreg 5y ago
      At least #1 option is better than having to hear an announcement to press 1 to hear about how Bank of America supports the Military… when you call in for support (yes it is actually happening right now, try it). Whoever would want to hear that when they want assistance with their issue, unless they or their family is in the military?
    - etripe 5y ago
      To be clear, I wasn't putting the blame with IVRs or their designers. I was specifically speaking to the UX that results from businesses programming them and the menu options they set up. Like you say, those are constrained by what the business itself wants, which in turn is constrained by cost management philosophy.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  Because the average user doesnt want to look at faq. They want a person to answer their question. Now. Chatbots kind of feel like that and the vast majority of questions can be answered by a FAQ.

elforce002 5y ago

Facts. I hate chatbots with passion so much so that I prefer calling if I want to know something instead of using them.

skeeter2020 5y ago
I'd rather email and wait several days, even if I need the answer NOW, compared to "talk" toa chatbot. Maybe even mail a letter.
defanor 5y ago
Unfortunately there seems to be a tendency to either remove phones altogether, or to man them with the same chat bots (coupled with speech recognition and synthesis, so even worse than text-based ones).
- airstrike 5y ago
  I just call and repeat the word 'agent' until someone talks to me
  - kordlessagain 5y ago
    I push 0 over and over.

echelon 5y ago

I agree with you, but there's a lot going on here: - Customer support is expensive. If keeping customers happy and lowering churn is important, you spend a lot of money on it. - If you can't afford enough staff, the next best option is to put up a few barriers to slow down the incoming requests. Maybe automated means can solve a large percentage of problems. - Not everyone knows how to search or navigate a tree. Think about the non-tech folks. You have to offer them something different. It's hard to strike a balance. - Chat bots are being hyped and sold by new tech companies trying to build larger scale solutions. They want to build more, but they need to sell, grow cash flow, etc. Etc.

fivre 5y ago
I'd challenge the idea that customer support is _expensive_. Generic customer support requires no specialized expertise: you need knowledge your company's business processes, tooling related to third parties they worked with (redirecting a courier's shipment via the courier or whatever), and general customer service skills, and that's about it. _Specialized_ customer support, e.g. support for complicated software, is expensive, because it requires technical domain knowledge equivalent to or above many engineering employees, and employees that can perform it effectively could probably move to engineering and increase their salaries twofold because compensation isn't tied to expertise, it's tied to what the market will pay, and you can more easily get away with shit support than shit engineering, but ignore that--it's not the majority of customer support. Customer support _is_, in the simplest view, a cost center. Customers contact support when something has gone wrong that they can't resolve otherwise. If nothing goes wrong, you don't need it. If you, as support management, can reduce the time it takes to resolve things that go wrong (by any means) and reduce the number of staff needed to handle cases, you win: your department doesn't directly generate revenue, so your goal is to reduce expenses. Tying lost revenue to customers lost after poor support experiences is difficult and noisy: there are plenty of customers who have poor experiences because they're incompetent and wouldn't succeed with any amount of support, and because of this are more likely to request support, and the high-level categorization used to describe issues often obscures what actually went wrong (a generic "Account > Creation" category isn't going to capture issues like "users can't create an account if their address includes non-ASCII characters", but execs don't see anything more than the category). These issues (and others) combine to promote an environment where support is more a buffer to getting support with limited ability to fix issues, and a perverse incentive to _not_ fix issues since metrics are focused towards reducing time to resolution (easy to measure) versus quality of resolution (hard to measure!). Poor support is furthermore easy to ignore because you can either often focus more on new business first and foremost (hello, every startup ever!) or rest comfortably on a monopoly position where customers can't drop you even if you provide terrible support (hello, the US ISP market!). Cost is not strictly an disincentive to providing sufficient, capable, and effective support, but it's difficult to recognize the value it provides and there are more immediate cost savings from reducing support cost than long-term revenue from customer retention by providing good support. This compounds into even poorer service in more specialized environments because talented people will leave, because working in a cost center sucks. The flipside of support is essentially sales engineering, AKA support while trying to court a customer. The technical skills needed aren't any different, but one brings in revenue in an easily quantifiable way, so it gets more political clout and more organizational investment.

IgorPartola 5y ago

The Amazon chat bot has been pretty great for me. Instant replies and I most times I don’t have to type anything out. It’s really a decision tree with multiple choices but extensive and actually helpful. And if there is a bigger problem it instantly switches to a person who has all the context.

harha 5y ago
Sounds good - the menu based customer care is pretty good there too, and they tend to actually want to resolve issues unlike many other sites (though that might also depend on the cost benefit analysis) might be the basis many other sites are missing.
hammock 5y ago
+1 to this. A big part of it is that it's actually connected to your personal data (order history etc)

defanor 5y ago

> Why would I want to try to articulate something that could be found in a simple tree? Just give me direct access. Sometimes I feel that way about databases and dynamic websites. I suspect the reasons behind those may be similar: web UIs add branding, maybe make usage a bit more convenient to an average user, and so on. Animations are popular too, probably they are supposed to make the websites to look more fun and modern. I guess that people planning chat bots similarly view them as looking more futuristic and convenient, more advanced than boring old documentation.

browningstreet 5y ago

I think chat bots exist in our world because people would rather "ask a question on a forum" than search and have direct access to an answer. It drives me crazy too, but it's how we get "does anyone else ever..." memes in this world. People don't want information, they want the experience of asking the question and the discussion. The answer is not the primary force of their effort. It also seems to be the conversational model in use at parties.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]