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Cheerful chatbots don’t necessarily improve customer service

barbariangrunge 4y ago
Who would think that chatbots improve customer service? I hate chat bots personally. Am I missing something? Do some people like them?
lazide 4y ago
As someone who tends to have unconventional needs of support (because I already figure out anything that is a more normal request), I despite chat bots with a passion. They never have any idea about what is going on, and add excessive delay getting to someone who can actually look at and override or fix whatever broken thing in their system is causing the problem. Hard to say if they top voice call mazes though.
- jareklupinski 4y ago
  would be nice of those chatbot teams to put in a backdoor we can use to bypass the first-line support scripts, like mashing # 0 * on a phone pad "Please escalate" seems to work sometimes, but I'd be fine with "ENGAGE_LUCKY_MODE_777" or something
  - varjag 4y ago
    I always go with "bring me to your leader". Works quite often as it seems to confuse elizas enough.
- joelrunyon 4y ago
  This. When you have already troubleshot and gone through the help docs and are actually pointing out a flaw in their system - chatbots are completely useless.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "and are actually pointing out a flaw in their system - chatbots are completely useless" If you managed to find an actual flaw, then chances are that the next humans you will talk to, will be completely useless as well and only if you bring enough patience and have nothing else to do, eventually you will be escalated to someone with competence. At least that was my experience and usually I cut my losses and give up before making it that far.
- mmanfrin 4y ago
  The chat bots always just seem to be frontends for their knowledge bases, because a lot of people don't even try to self-help. But that's so frustrating for those of us who do; YES, I have tried resetting it, let me get past you chatbot.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    The chatbot is there to encourage abandonment.
    - 562949953421312 4y ago
      I work on a chatbot that provides support. I also do analytics for all of our support channels. Businesses do not want higher abandonment, and deploying automation reduces abandonment. When we deployed a chatbot on our phone support channel, abandonment went down 20% (this includes people that abandon inside the chatbot). The reason why chatbots exist and why they aren't going away is because they reduce support costs. Our chatbot resolves 40% of issues. That translates to millions of dollars in savings. I'm not trying to defend chatbots by saving they improve customer experience. In most cases they hurt customer experience. It's too tempting for corporations to resist though. Sooner or later someone is going to ask why support costs are so much higher than their competitors.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    It's a pity you can't opt for a short quiz to prove you've tried the usual approaches.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Or just put down a deposit that gets refunded only if the issue ends up being legitimate. A "I bet $100 that I'm not a dumbass" button.
      - echelon 4y ago
        Sounds like a very quick way to build a negative brand image.
- herbst 4y ago
  PayPals literally took me into the same canned question & response loop twice in the same session until the bot suggested that I could talk to a human which was available seconds after that suggestion. I tried to same loop before several times, always asking for a human. But obviously I didn't meet the character threeshold or whatever that it would be willing to forward me. Worst possible customer experience by far
  - dylan604 4y ago
    maybe you'd have had to start the loop over if the human wasn't available? kind of like having to circle the airport until the runway is clear?
    - herbst 4y ago
      No. I just write 'fuck this' about 20 times now until the bots directly refers me to a human.
  - sideshowb 4y ago
    So I had a text from a major uk phone provider (forget who now) that my phone number was being ported to them. It took 24 hours of chat to resolve. I kept being put in their chat queue. It would take them about 4 hours to respond each time, but if I didn't then respond within 10 minutes it was straight to the back again. Every time I got a human who failed to read the thread above and asked the same dumb questions (no I don't have an account number, I don't want to be your customer but you have told me you are stealing my number!). If I didn't respond within 10 minutes, back of the queue again.
- RajT88 4y ago
  > They never have any idea about what is going on, and add excessive delay getting to someone who can actually look at and override or fix whatever broken thing in their system is causing the problem. This is by design and replaces arguing with their clueless first level support staff who could be solving easy problems. I'm not saying it's right, just that it's intentional and likely cheaper. I don't actually mind the chat bots which are smart enough to successfully redirect the simple stuff to the appropriate KB's, and escalate to a human being (even if on chat) when they have run the gauntlet. These are rare, and almost certainly require a well-oiled machine to get right. Total junk without a huge KB, which is well maintained and indexed.
oidar 4y ago
It's become a huge selling point for me that I can walk into a store and talk to a human about a problem I am having with a product. Lately, this has meant that the Walmart online store gets more of my business than Amazon for items that aren't available at brick-and-mortar stores in my area. Because Walmart will take back items bought at the store and resolve problems right then and there. Amazon has started selling items that aren't returnable and I wish I could opt out of it. I got a laptop/phone bracket that was made with some crappy, brittle plastic, but Amazon didn't accept returns on that item. If Walmart sold ebooks, I don't think I'd use Amazon anymore. After dealing with expired food and medicine through Subscribe and Save, Amazon delivery just throwing things on the ground and damaging them, and unreturnable items like the phone accessory, I am done with them for physical items. Getting through to Amazon customer service is a huge pain in the butt, especially now that the customer service flow is self-help -> text chat -> telephone chatbot -> foreign call center. With Walmart, I just drive a half block away, go to customer service, wait in line for five minutes, and boom, it's done. It's a breath of fresh air honestly.
- delusional 4y ago
  It's so bad that I've started to disregard any customer support that happens as a chat. I'd rather drop and email or a support ticket than talk to some godforsaken chatbot or wait in line for 2 hours to talk to a human. It seems to me that the "chat support" craze has been used as an excuse to gut customer support teams.
  - johnea 4y ago
    This really shouldn't be a surprise. Even the outsourced Indian human support lines, where they are required to recite the corporate litany, and monitored to make sure they do, are really just human shields that protect the corporation from accountability...
    - miked85 4y ago
      Most of the outsourced support I've tried to get help from really might as well be chatbots. They will just keep repeating the same things which don't actually answer my question.
robotnikman 4y ago
Having worked customer support as one of my first jobs, I have a feeling a lot of people use it just to have an emotional punching bag to take out their frustration on others, or as a buffer for unpopular corporate policies which customers don't like. Corporation adds a policy that's unpopular with customers? No worries, customer support is there to take the anger and complaints
- cafard 4y ago
  Yes, I've been on the phones, and talked to one or two such customers. However, chatbots are just another unpopular (result of) policy on top of whatever else the customers are unhappy with.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  When talking to human customer support, I'm happy to be superficially pleasant even if I'm having a bad day with their company, and I like when they treat me the same. Just because one of us is having a bad day, doesn't mean we should go and ruin the day of another person. Even if I hate their employer, the discussion I'm having is person-to-person, not person-to-corporation. Being superficially pleasant is a genuine courtesy to the other person. But when the corporate representative is a bot, not a person, I know the superficial pleasantness cannot be explained by one person earnestly trying to be pleasant to another. No, in this case the pleasantness is wholly artificial and I don't appreciate it in the least.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > , the discussion I'm having is person-to-person, not person-to-corporation. The only way to have a person to corporation discussion is to file a lawsuit. At least that I know ofm
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  "I am really frustrated with your company and I know it is not your fault" "take your time" "thanks for doing what you can" "I hope your next call is easier" Being nice to the poor CS person is easy and sometimes results in better service. There is no reason to take your frustrations out on them as no one in the company that could make a difference will ever hear about it.
sideshowb 4y ago
s/necessarily//
chucksmash 4y ago
Even when actual human beings give scripted customer service responses, it's already hard enough to come across well. Makes sense that taking the human being out of the loop but leaving in obsequious corporate niceness rubs people the wrong way. The customers were responding positively to a person, not to the script in front of the person (imo).
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
If I'm talking to support, it's because I already have some sort of problem. If I'm shunted into talking to a chatbot, I've now got two problems and I'm not happy about it. Adding a chipper disposition to it is like rubbing salt in the wound and a hollow attempt to paper over the fact that the business is trying to cut support costs as much as possible.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  > If I'm talking to support, it's because I already have some sort of problem. You and I may wait until then, but plenty of customers don't bother, and will open the chatbot because they can't be bothered to read the navigation. Companies then realize their customers are idiots wasting employee's time and throw them behind a chatbot to attempt to filter them out. It's frustrating.
  - darkwizard42 4y ago
    Not GP, but this is a good point that I honestly hadn't thought of. There are a lot of people who at the first sign of difficulty IMMEDIATELY reach out to support. The end calculus might become how worth it applying human labor to a low-intent lead is from an ROI basis. You want to make sure customers with high intent have the most help in getting to the end state (buying a good, returning something successfully, etc.), but you also want to filter out the people who are very low intent / can get their issue solved on their own. Tough challenge as the chatbot helps them avoid chewing into their profitability but also hurts helping customers who need real help and are high value.
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joelrunyon 4y ago
How soon until someone lets you 1) create a series of help docs 2) trains an AI on those help docs 3) solves customer headaches using a chatgpt interface with that training 4) drops you into a human that can help as soon as you ask for it. My primary issues with "live chat" features are 1) They ask you for stupid stuff (email/name/etc) when you're logged in that are already in the system. This makes things worse somehow. 2) The sheer resistance to handing me over to a human when I've asked for it. If you don't have humans on live chat - that's fine, but at least send it to a help desk. 3) The fact they try to ask me to categorize the issue vs. semantically figuring it out via the request is extra annoying as they will often ask you this AGAIN if they can't initially place you in one of their pre-selected categories.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Issue #1 is likely because the "live chat" is a separate product that they bought and linked on the main website, but which is not integrated into the user database or authentication system at all. Therefore the bot needs to ask you for all this identifying information even though you are already logged in.
  - joelrunyon 4y ago
    I understand that - but they should be able to sync the databases or pass an auth token of some sort. The fact you have to re-enter it all makes the experience stupid and customers frustrated.
  - Meekro 4y ago
    I've worked with products like that on the backend, and they're all perfectly capable of receiving data from your website so that the live chat staffer has all your info automatically show up. Someone was lazy and just didn't do the work to hook it up right.
- m348e912 4y ago
  This is what I was going to say. Chatbots suck today but with integration of a trained ChatGPT instance they could get substantially better. In some cases it could even better than first-line human support. (I am looking at you AT&T)
karaterobot 4y ago
> The results across the studies show that using positive emotion in chatbots is challenging because businesses don’t know a customer’s biases and expectations going into the interaction. A happy chatbot could lead to an unhappy customer. I don't think chatbots count as customer service, and the idea of a "happy chatbot" is nonsense, since the bot isn't happy or sad, it's a script. It's an interface to a set of FAQs. That does not count as customer service any more than a searchable FAQ or documentation site is customer service. It's useful, but it's not customer service, it's a way to avoid paying people who can provide customer service.
daneel_w 4y ago
I believe we learned this lesson already with Clippy.
agilob 4y ago
Cheerful chatbots don’t necessarily improve customer service, but at least they are annoying and time wasting, so there's that.
charcircuit 4y ago
I feel the results of this study would be culture specific.
rickreynoldssf 4y ago
What infuriates me about support chat Me: My order wasn't delivered Support: Thank you for contacting support. I am sorry you are not having a delightful experience with our service. How can I help? Me: My order wasn't delivered Support: Thank you for that. I understand your order wasn't delivered. Is that correct? Me: Yes Support: Thank you for that. Please hold while I look it up. ...minutes pass... Support: What is the order number? Me: abc123 Support: Thank you for that. I understand your order number is abc123 and you have not received the delivery. Is that correct? Me: yes Support: Please wait while I look this up. ...minutes pass... Support: Thank you for waiting. I'm happy to tell you that your order was delivered on 12/29/22. Is there anything else I can help with? Me: I did not receive it. Support: Thank you for that. I understand that you did not receive your order. Is that correct? Me: Yes Support: Your order was delivered by UPS on 12/29/22 and was left on your porch. Did you look there? Me: Yes Support: Thank you for that. I understand you looked on your porch and did not see it. Is that correct? Me: Yes ...minutes pass... Support: Thank you for that. Can you tell me your order number?
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- marwis 4y ago
  You forgot the part where you have to fill in your name/email/contact information to open the chat but then a support person is going to ask you all of that again.
ilyt 4y ago
They were never made for that. Their purpose is to hire less tech support people. They don't care about your time wasted, and you bought the product already, better to pay people to sell product to more people than to deal with tiny % that has problems with it.
- ericd 4y ago
  If your company has a reputation of not standing behind its products, selling is going to become harder, and more expensive, and your margins will go down. This is hard to measure accurately (people try with NPS, but that’s fraught with bias), so it might be hard to argue for spending more on customer satisfaction and a good reputation, if your org is trying to be metrics driven rather than intuition/principles driven. So basically, blame the MBAs :-)
  - ilyt 4y ago
    That's for the next manager or CEO to worry, you get your bonus for saving corporate money then move in.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Wherever I encounter a chatbot, my user experience usually suffers a lot, especially if they give me a slow and hard to navigate tree menu instead of a well structured help index, and no way to contact actual support.
notyourwork 4y ago
Chat boys are never helpful.
qazxcvbnmlp 4y ago
Happy chatbots don’t improve customer service b/c being cheerful doesn’t necessarily improve customer service. It’s a nice bonus, but really what improves customer service is taking the time to make the customer feel like you understand whatever problem they are having. Being cheerful/happy/blah blah is a nice bonus, however really what makes you walk away feeling good is a feeling of being understood. A chat bot can answer questions, but it’s a lot harder to make it understand your individual situation. Source: rebooking passengers after delayed/canceled flights.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
The venn diagram of companies that use chatbots and that delight me does not intersect. I can count the number of companies that delight me in 2022 on half of one hand. The rise of monopolies and data brokers means that businesses don't have to care whether I am delighted or not.
lobstersammich 4y ago
I thought that people understood that this was the point of chat bots? Much like useless phone trees with awful automated speech recognition chatbot are - IMO as someone who has worked in NLP for over a decade - simply there to tire out the customer from tasks like: - getting a refund for an order - cancelling a service - anything else that would cost the company money Hostile design but in cutesy-wootsie 'Digital Assitant' form. Yuck. Thankfully some geographies require the option to be able to one-click cancel your service (California) and some other localities (the EU) prohibit deceptive or 'hostile' website design. Try using Amazon.fr or Amazon.de sometime and compare it to the user experience of Amazon.com. Amazon Prime will notify you in the EU several days before your month of 'Free Prime' is up, before your credit card is charged. Even then, you have up to 14 days after the charge to cancel your membership AND the cost of the Prime membership will be refunded in full.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  What's happened recently (meaning, since the pandemic) is that some companies have de-staffed their systems to the point where there really is no path to resolution. This happens in cases where the company is completely at fault: e.g., when you order something and they charge you, but don't provide the item because they're out of stock. It's a worrying trend, since it's hard to see what will reverse it. I imagine that every dimension of this must look profitable to management.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    > it's hard to see what will reverse it Legislation. Consumer protection laws need to be in place so that the calculus is shifted to a point where providing refunds etc is cheaper than (risk_of_getting_caught * penalty_of_getting_caught)
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > What's happened recently (meaning, since the pandemic) is that some companies have de-staffed their systems to the point where there really is no path to resolution. This happens in cases where the company is completely at fault: e.g., when you order something and they charge you, but don't provide the item because they're out of stock. This is a relevant and timely comment. I just filed a chargeback and dispute with my credit card company because a product I ordered was defective and could not be returned as the company didn’t have an address for returns and wouldn’t return phone calls. Of course, my credit rating went down 30 points after the chargeback and dispute. Seems like there’s no way to come out ahead here.
dredmorbius 4y ago
If I'm seeking out support, I'm already 1) unhappy and 2) dissatisfied with competence and capabilities of the service or product. "Cheerfulness" and apologetic behaviour (e.g., "I'm so sorry (Sir/Ma'am...)" repeated more than once in a call/session have become net negative signs. What I'm interested in is competence, usefulness, and empowerment, which are of course three expensive aspects of the customer-service experience. Cheerfulness can help in addition to those, but it is not necessary. The experience need not be Seinfeld Soup Nazi levels of brusqueness. But if you're putting a smile, and lipstick, on a customer-service pig, You're Doing It Wrong. First address competence and actual usefulness, as in "the problem was solved to the customer's satisfaction". Then worry about the charm school B.S.
mihaaly 4y ago
The founding premise of positive emotions from human service personel result it better client satisfaction is bogus. First: these humans are more like robots with heavily regulated and trained kind of interactions seemingly following predetermined scripts, not human-like at all. Robotic. More like carring out an excuse for ticking the 'have client support' on the cheklist of running a business, but without actually doing it. Two: inattentive incompetency and pushing company agenda down the throat of the client - which is the usual attitude - will not be neautralized with the words of 'excited', 'happy', 'glad', and other dishonesty, regardless if a human or AI does it. I seen a screenshot once, saved it: Support agent: How are you today? Client: Not good. Support agent: I am happy to hear that. How may I help you? With years of bitter disappointment I reached the point of rather discontinuing a service instead of attempting communications with the support department. Of the several dozens of communications about 80% ended up in wasted time and nothing wrapped in pretentious politenes. No resolution but robotic and empty words. Of these half of the cases did not attempt making an effort comprehending the problem before throwing at me the first prepared phrase came to mind just to rush closing the damn ticket on their side (several rushed me to declare closed case before outcome was even possible - e.g. dependent on something delivered later). And almost all have the audacity to send a followup survey about satisfaction with the support. No, polite words will make no difference, not at all. Only real help will. Be it grumpy or overflown with joy.
- malshe 4y ago
  This is a bizarre comment. Studies report average effects, not individual effects. Just because your experience doesn't match what they find on average, the study doesn't become bogus!
  - mihaaly 4y ago
    You should consider the high number of 'measures' and the negative objective outcomes (being unhelpful) coupled with not paying attention, pushing scripts over situation specific needs. Too much of coincidence over different organizations and broad type of areas to consider just one off experience, more like a trend. With rare exceptions. Of course calling bogus becuase of 'robots' provide the support where human interaction is expected part is a rhetoric here. : ) (not the unhelpfulness of pretty phrasing in place of efficiency though, that's fact)
medion 4y ago
Chat bots are a scourge and I can’t believe any company seriously puts them in front of customers.
GuB-42 4y ago
Cheerfulness works, it is one of the best way to make me a return customer. But that's not just cheerfulness, it is the idea that the service rep cares about me. Cheerfulness means "I am happy to be with you, I love my job, I will do my best for you to leave you satisfied". Of course as a customer I want that! But then, if like with most chatbots, I feel no intent to actually work on solving my problem, it goes straight down the uncanny valley. What are you? Happy to not help me? What's your problem? If it wasn't obvious from the start, that's typically a dead giveaway that I am dealing with a bot. Actual people who are good at their job will know to put the right emotion for the situation, including a lot of cheerfulness, but only when appropriate. Bots don't get that. If they can't play the human game, just let them be machines, no useless emotions, keep things factual, short and to the point.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Yes. A polite machine is just annoying. Having a computer program say "thank you" is meaningless. I've always wanted a navigator for my car that was rude. "Wake up! You should have turned back there, you fakking kahnt! A bleedin' monkey could drive better than that!" A library of a few thousand insults should keep it from getting too boring. This goes back to the game Empire I wrote long ago. It was the only game I'd heard of where you weren't liberating cities, you weren't the good guy. You were the bad guy - subjugating cities, putting them under iron control, crushing your enemies. Your underlings replied with "yes master". Your armies would march off the boat and drown if you ordered it.
  - SuperCuber 4y ago
    Factorio is about harvesting all the planet's resources, filling it with pollution, and killing any locals that attack you because of it
RajT88 4y ago
Brought to you by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Once again Douglas Adams is proven to have been ahead of his times. Now if that shipment of small lemon-soaked paper napkins would show up...
asah 4y ago
tl;dr: I want a human to be cheerful. I want a chatbot to be efficient.
sbaiddn 4y ago
Cheerfulness from a non sentient speaker is much much worse. It infuriates me. Recently I had to call a government agency that had one of these bots and... the bot threatened to hang up if I didn't take it seriously by trying to use its services. Well, fine Ill play ball. The bot gave up and hung up on me anyway.
- batch12 4y ago
  Yeah. Encountering a cheerful chat bot when experiencing a frustrating issue is maddening. It amplifies the lack of empathy the company seems to have to the situation because you know the bot has no feelings. Feigning sympathy would be just as bad because it's fake and therefore not.
hosh 4y ago
Whether it is a human or a chatbot, I think most people want to know the company behind the product will do right by them and keep promises made. It’s a about trust, not about cheer.
comte7092 4y ago
What drives me nuts is when I’m (possibly) talking to a chat bot and I have not way of knowing. Notify me that you are not a human.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  It's enraging when they add fake delays to the chat bot in order to try to trick me into thinking it's real. Double whammy of wasting more of my time than necessary and lying to me. Add to that the chatbox is often excessively verbose, putting a large reading burden onto me.
  - loa_in_ 4y ago
    In addition, should such a practice become normal, countless human beings entering the society will be damaged by being misled to believe that those entities are actually human, and would based their judgement of actual humans on what they learn right then
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mycall 4y ago
Customer Service is a form of continued sales. When it comes to money, people are more serious unless they are spending rounding error money. Being real is a better attitude than cheerful these days.
ck2 4y ago
I've been trying to find phrases that stop automated chat replies. Not every system seems to have escapes but "I find these automated replies insulting" sometimes seems to work, "insulted" or "insulting" might be the trigger But every once in awhile I will get "I am not using automated replies" lol
jgaa 4y ago
I don't care if I chat with a bot or a human. What's important is that I get access to support when I need it, and that the issue is resolved to my satisfaction. Waiting on the phone for a human to become available for a long time is not making me happy.
lerax 4y ago
actually, chatbots may reduce costs and time of support for companies, but in the user perspective it's a mess. bots usually can do what it's available easily in the platform, but if I am talking to support it's because the problem did go bad so hard that I need a HUMAN in support to solve my problem. so... chatbots are a shield which companies use to protect your support team for high demand while users like me try need to destroy the shield to get what I want. it's at least a conflict of interest.
monkeydust 4y ago
As much as I despise chatbots they are not going anywhere. So let's say you had the funding and intent, how would you build the next gen chat bot to avoid a lot of the pains we have with them ?
mianos 4y ago
I would think this is obvious, as, similarly, cheerful real live customer support people don’t necessarily improve customer service. If I have some issue I find it quite frustrating that the customer support can't do anything more than me. In the case of a local bank down here in Australia, the out of hours, remote, customer support people can't even look up any of your details. Their script seems to be based on the text on the web site. They are really friendly (being Philippino), but can't actually do anything at all.
xkcd1963 4y ago
That should be obvious. It doesn't matter if you smile while robbing me.
jasmer 4y ago
What matters is solving the issue. People don't need to talk to 'other people' or 'cheerful whatever'. The issue is the issue. That's where the focus should be. Fix the issue and everything else is going to be perceived as way in the background.

Who would think that chatbots improve customer service? I hate chat bots personally. Am I missing something? Do some people like them?

lazide 4y ago

As someone who tends to have unconventional needs of support (because I already figure out anything that is a more normal request), I despite chat bots with a passion. They never have any idea about what is going on, and add excessive delay getting to someone who can actually look at and override or fix whatever broken thing in their system is causing the problem. Hard to say if they top voice call mazes though.

jareklupinski 4y ago
would be nice of those chatbot teams to put in a backdoor we can use to bypass the first-line support scripts, like mashing # 0 * on a phone pad "Please escalate" seems to work sometimes, but I'd be fine with "ENGAGE_LUCKY_MODE_777" or something
- varjag 4y ago
  I always go with "bring me to your leader". Works quite often as it seems to confuse elizas enough.
joelrunyon 4y ago
This. When you have already troubleshot and gone through the help docs and are actually pointing out a flaw in their system - chatbots are completely useless.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "and are actually pointing out a flaw in their system - chatbots are completely useless" If you managed to find an actual flaw, then chances are that the next humans you will talk to, will be completely useless as well and only if you bring enough patience and have nothing else to do, eventually you will be escalated to someone with competence. At least that was my experience and usually I cut my losses and give up before making it that far.
mmanfrin 4y ago
The chat bots always just seem to be frontends for their knowledge bases, because a lot of people don't even try to self-help. But that's so frustrating for those of us who do; YES, I have tried resetting it, let me get past you chatbot.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  The chatbot is there to encourage abandonment.
  - 562949953421312 4y ago
    I work on a chatbot that provides support. I also do analytics for all of our support channels. Businesses do not want higher abandonment, and deploying automation reduces abandonment. When we deployed a chatbot on our phone support channel, abandonment went down 20% (this includes people that abandon inside the chatbot). The reason why chatbots exist and why they aren't going away is because they reduce support costs. Our chatbot resolves 40% of issues. That translates to millions of dollars in savings. I'm not trying to defend chatbots by saving they improve customer experience. In most cases they hurt customer experience. It's too tempting for corporations to resist though. Sooner or later someone is going to ask why support costs are so much higher than their competitors.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  It's a pity you can't opt for a short quiz to prove you've tried the usual approaches.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Or just put down a deposit that gets refunded only if the issue ends up being legitimate. A "I bet $100 that I'm not a dumbass" button.
    - echelon 4y ago
      Sounds like a very quick way to build a negative brand image.
herbst 4y ago
PayPals literally took me into the same canned question & response loop twice in the same session until the bot suggested that I could talk to a human which was available seconds after that suggestion. I tried to same loop before several times, always asking for a human. But obviously I didn't meet the character threeshold or whatever that it would be willing to forward me. Worst possible customer experience by far
- dylan604 4y ago
  maybe you'd have had to start the loop over if the human wasn't available? kind of like having to circle the airport until the runway is clear?
  - herbst 4y ago
    No. I just write 'fuck this' about 20 times now until the bots directly refers me to a human.
- sideshowb 4y ago
  So I had a text from a major uk phone provider (forget who now) that my phone number was being ported to them. It took 24 hours of chat to resolve. I kept being put in their chat queue. It would take them about 4 hours to respond each time, but if I didn't then respond within 10 minutes it was straight to the back again. Every time I got a human who failed to read the thread above and asked the same dumb questions (no I don't have an account number, I don't want to be your customer but you have told me you are stealing my number!). If I didn't respond within 10 minutes, back of the queue again.
RajT88 4y ago
> They never have any idea about what is going on, and add excessive delay getting to someone who can actually look at and override or fix whatever broken thing in their system is causing the problem. This is by design and replaces arguing with their clueless first level support staff who could be solving easy problems. I'm not saying it's right, just that it's intentional and likely cheaper. I don't actually mind the chat bots which are smart enough to successfully redirect the simple stuff to the appropriate KB's, and escalate to a human being (even if on chat) when they have run the gauntlet. These are rare, and almost certainly require a well-oiled machine to get right. Total junk without a huge KB, which is well maintained and indexed.

oidar 4y ago

It's become a huge selling point for me that I can walk into a store and talk to a human about a problem I am having with a product. Lately, this has meant that the Walmart online store gets more of my business than Amazon for items that aren't available at brick-and-mortar stores in my area. Because Walmart will take back items bought at the store and resolve problems right then and there. Amazon has started selling items that aren't returnable and I wish I could opt out of it. I got a laptop/phone bracket that was made with some crappy, brittle plastic, but Amazon didn't accept returns on that item. If Walmart sold ebooks, I don't think I'd use Amazon anymore. After dealing with expired food and medicine through Subscribe and Save, Amazon delivery just throwing things on the ground and damaging them, and unreturnable items like the phone accessory, I am done with them for physical items. Getting through to Amazon customer service is a huge pain in the butt, especially now that the customer service flow is self-help -> text chat -> telephone chatbot -> foreign call center. With Walmart, I just drive a half block away, go to customer service, wait in line for five minutes, and boom, it's done. It's a breath of fresh air honestly.

delusional 4y ago
It's so bad that I've started to disregard any customer support that happens as a chat. I'd rather drop and email or a support ticket than talk to some godforsaken chatbot or wait in line for 2 hours to talk to a human. It seems to me that the "chat support" craze has been used as an excuse to gut customer support teams.
- johnea 4y ago
  This really shouldn't be a surprise. Even the outsourced Indian human support lines, where they are required to recite the corporate litany, and monitored to make sure they do, are really just human shields that protect the corporation from accountability...
  - miked85 4y ago
    Most of the outsourced support I've tried to get help from really might as well be chatbots. They will just keep repeating the same things which don't actually answer my question.

robotnikman 4y ago

Having worked customer support as one of my first jobs, I have a feeling a lot of people use it just to have an emotional punching bag to take out their frustration on others, or as a buffer for unpopular corporate policies which customers don't like. Corporation adds a policy that's unpopular with customers? No worries, customer support is there to take the anger and complaints

cafard 4y ago
Yes, I've been on the phones, and talked to one or two such customers. However, chatbots are just another unpopular (result of) policy on top of whatever else the customers are unhappy with.
LarryMullins 4y ago
When talking to human customer support, I'm happy to be superficially pleasant even if I'm having a bad day with their company, and I like when they treat me the same. Just because one of us is having a bad day, doesn't mean we should go and ruin the day of another person. Even if I hate their employer, the discussion I'm having is person-to-person, not person-to-corporation. Being superficially pleasant is a genuine courtesy to the other person. But when the corporate representative is a bot, not a person, I know the superficial pleasantness cannot be explained by one person earnestly trying to be pleasant to another. No, in this case the pleasantness is wholly artificial and I don't appreciate it in the least.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > , the discussion I'm having is person-to-person, not person-to-corporation. The only way to have a person to corporation discussion is to file a lawsuit. At least that I know ofm
wintermutestwin 4y ago
"I am really frustrated with your company and I know it is not your fault" "take your time" "thanks for doing what you can" "I hope your next call is easier" Being nice to the poor CS person is easy and sometimes results in better service. There is no reason to take your frustrations out on them as no one in the company that could make a difference will ever hear about it.

sideshowb 4y ago

s/necessarily//

chucksmash 4y ago

Even when actual human beings give scripted customer service responses, it's already hard enough to come across well. Makes sense that taking the human being out of the loop but leaving in obsequious corporate niceness rubs people the wrong way. The customers were responding positively to a person, not to the script in front of the person (imo).

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

If I'm talking to support, it's because I already have some sort of problem. If I'm shunted into talking to a chatbot, I've now got two problems and I'm not happy about it. Adding a chipper disposition to it is like rubbing salt in the wound and a hollow attempt to paper over the fact that the business is trying to cut support costs as much as possible.

colejohnson66 4y ago
> If I'm talking to support, it's because I already have some sort of problem. You and I may wait until then, but plenty of customers don't bother, and will open the chatbot because they can't be bothered to read the navigation. Companies then realize their customers are idiots wasting employee's time and throw them behind a chatbot to attempt to filter them out. It's frustrating.
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  Not GP, but this is a good point that I honestly hadn't thought of. There are a lot of people who at the first sign of difficulty IMMEDIATELY reach out to support. The end calculus might become how worth it applying human labor to a low-intent lead is from an ROI basis. You want to make sure customers with high intent have the most help in getting to the end state (buying a good, returning something successfully, etc.), but you also want to filter out the people who are very low intent / can get their issue solved on their own. Tough challenge as the chatbot helps them avoid chewing into their profitability but also hurts helping customers who need real help and are high value.
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joelrunyon 4y ago

How soon until someone lets you 1) create a series of help docs 2) trains an AI on those help docs 3) solves customer headaches using a chatgpt interface with that training 4) drops you into a human that can help as soon as you ask for it. My primary issues with "live chat" features are 1) They ask you for stupid stuff (email/name/etc) when you're logged in that are already in the system. This makes things worse somehow. 2) The sheer resistance to handing me over to a human when I've asked for it. If you don't have humans on live chat - that's fine, but at least send it to a help desk. 3) The fact they try to ask me to categorize the issue vs. semantically figuring it out via the request is extra annoying as they will often ask you this AGAIN if they can't initially place you in one of their pre-selected categories.

SoftTalker 4y ago
Issue #1 is likely because the "live chat" is a separate product that they bought and linked on the main website, but which is not integrated into the user database or authentication system at all. Therefore the bot needs to ask you for all this identifying information even though you are already logged in.
- joelrunyon 4y ago
  I understand that - but they should be able to sync the databases or pass an auth token of some sort. The fact you have to re-enter it all makes the experience stupid and customers frustrated.
- Meekro 4y ago
  I've worked with products like that on the backend, and they're all perfectly capable of receiving data from your website so that the live chat staffer has all your info automatically show up. Someone was lazy and just didn't do the work to hook it up right.
m348e912 4y ago
This is what I was going to say. Chatbots suck today but with integration of a trained ChatGPT instance they could get substantially better. In some cases it could even better than first-line human support. (I am looking at you AT&T)

karaterobot 4y ago

> The results across the studies show that using positive emotion in chatbots is challenging because businesses don’t know a customer’s biases and expectations going into the interaction. A happy chatbot could lead to an unhappy customer. I don't think chatbots count as customer service, and the idea of a "happy chatbot" is nonsense, since the bot isn't happy or sad, it's a script. It's an interface to a set of FAQs. That does not count as customer service any more than a searchable FAQ or documentation site is customer service. It's useful, but it's not customer service, it's a way to avoid paying people who can provide customer service.

daneel_w 4y ago

I believe we learned this lesson already with Clippy.

agilob 4y ago

Cheerful chatbots don’t necessarily improve customer service, but at least they are annoying and time wasting, so there's that.

charcircuit 4y ago

I feel the results of this study would be culture specific.

rickreynoldssf 4y ago

What infuriates me about support chat Me: My order wasn't delivered Support: Thank you for contacting support. I am sorry you are not having a delightful experience with our service. How can I help? Me: My order wasn't delivered Support: Thank you for that. I understand your order wasn't delivered. Is that correct? Me: Yes Support: Thank you for that. Please hold while I look it up. ...minutes pass... Support: What is the order number? Me: abc123 Support: Thank you for that. I understand your order number is abc123 and you have not received the delivery. Is that correct? Me: yes Support: Please wait while I look this up. ...minutes pass... Support: Thank you for waiting. I'm happy to tell you that your order was delivered on 12/29/22. Is there anything else I can help with? Me: I did not receive it. Support: Thank you for that. I understand that you did not receive your order. Is that correct? Me: Yes Support: Your order was delivered by UPS on 12/29/22 and was left on your porch. Did you look there? Me: Yes Support: Thank you for that. I understand you looked on your porch and did not see it. Is that correct? Me: Yes ...minutes pass... Support: Thank you for that. Can you tell me your order number?

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marwis 4y ago
You forgot the part where you have to fill in your name/email/contact information to open the chat but then a support person is going to ask you all of that again.

ilyt 4y ago

They were never made for that. Their purpose is to hire less tech support people. They don't care about your time wasted, and you bought the product already, better to pay people to sell product to more people than to deal with tiny % that has problems with it.

ericd 4y ago
If your company has a reputation of not standing behind its products, selling is going to become harder, and more expensive, and your margins will go down. This is hard to measure accurately (people try with NPS, but that’s fraught with bias), so it might be hard to argue for spending more on customer satisfaction and a good reputation, if your org is trying to be metrics driven rather than intuition/principles driven. So basically, blame the MBAs :-)
- ilyt 4y ago
  That's for the next manager or CEO to worry, you get your bonus for saving corporate money then move in.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

Wherever I encounter a chatbot, my user experience usually suffers a lot, especially if they give me a slow and hard to navigate tree menu instead of a well structured help index, and no way to contact actual support.

notyourwork 4y ago

Chat boys are never helpful.

qazxcvbnmlp 4y ago

Happy chatbots don’t improve customer service b/c being cheerful doesn’t necessarily improve customer service. It’s a nice bonus, but really what improves customer service is taking the time to make the customer feel like you understand whatever problem they are having. Being cheerful/happy/blah blah is a nice bonus, however really what makes you walk away feeling good is a feeling of being understood. A chat bot can answer questions, but it’s a lot harder to make it understand your individual situation. Source: rebooking passengers after delayed/canceled flights.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

The venn diagram of companies that use chatbots and that delight me does not intersect. I can count the number of companies that delight me in 2022 on half of one hand. The rise of monopolies and data brokers means that businesses don't have to care whether I am delighted or not.

lobstersammich 4y ago

I thought that people understood that this was the point of chat bots? Much like useless phone trees with awful automated speech recognition chatbot are - IMO as someone who has worked in NLP for over a decade - simply there to tire out the customer from tasks like: - getting a refund for an order - cancelling a service - anything else that would cost the company money Hostile design but in cutesy-wootsie 'Digital Assitant' form. Yuck. Thankfully some geographies require the option to be able to one-click cancel your service (California) and some other localities (the EU) prohibit deceptive or 'hostile' website design. Try using Amazon.fr or Amazon.de sometime and compare it to the user experience of Amazon.com. Amazon Prime will notify you in the EU several days before your month of 'Free Prime' is up, before your credit card is charged. Even then, you have up to 14 days after the charge to cancel your membership AND the cost of the Prime membership will be refunded in full.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
What's happened recently (meaning, since the pandemic) is that some companies have de-staffed their systems to the point where there really is no path to resolution. This happens in cases where the company is completely at fault: e.g., when you order something and they charge you, but don't provide the item because they're out of stock. It's a worrying trend, since it's hard to see what will reverse it. I imagine that every dimension of this must look profitable to management.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  > it's hard to see what will reverse it Legislation. Consumer protection laws need to be in place so that the calculus is shifted to a point where providing refunds etc is cheaper than (risk_of_getting_caught * penalty_of_getting_caught)
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > What's happened recently (meaning, since the pandemic) is that some companies have de-staffed their systems to the point where there really is no path to resolution. This happens in cases where the company is completely at fault: e.g., when you order something and they charge you, but don't provide the item because they're out of stock. This is a relevant and timely comment. I just filed a chargeback and dispute with my credit card company because a product I ordered was defective and could not be returned as the company didn’t have an address for returns and wouldn’t return phone calls. Of course, my credit rating went down 30 points after the chargeback and dispute. Seems like there’s no way to come out ahead here.

dredmorbius 4y ago

If I'm seeking out support, I'm already 1) unhappy and 2) dissatisfied with competence and capabilities of the service or product. "Cheerfulness" and apologetic behaviour (e.g., "I'm so sorry (Sir/Ma'am...)" repeated more than once in a call/session have become net negative signs. What I'm interested in is competence, usefulness, and empowerment, which are of course three expensive aspects of the customer-service experience. Cheerfulness can help in addition to those, but it is not necessary. The experience need not be Seinfeld Soup Nazi levels of brusqueness. But if you're putting a smile, and lipstick, on a customer-service pig, You're Doing It Wrong. First address competence and actual usefulness, as in "the problem was solved to the customer's satisfaction". Then worry about the charm school B.S.

mihaaly 4y ago

The founding premise of positive emotions from human service personel result it better client satisfaction is bogus. First: these humans are more like robots with heavily regulated and trained kind of interactions seemingly following predetermined scripts, not human-like at all. Robotic. More like carring out an excuse for ticking the 'have client support' on the cheklist of running a business, but without actually doing it. Two: inattentive incompetency and pushing company agenda down the throat of the client - which is the usual attitude - will not be neautralized with the words of 'excited', 'happy', 'glad', and other dishonesty, regardless if a human or AI does it. I seen a screenshot once, saved it: Support agent: How are you today? Client: Not good. Support agent: I am happy to hear that. How may I help you? With years of bitter disappointment I reached the point of rather discontinuing a service instead of attempting communications with the support department. Of the several dozens of communications about 80% ended up in wasted time and nothing wrapped in pretentious politenes. No resolution but robotic and empty words. Of these half of the cases did not attempt making an effort comprehending the problem before throwing at me the first prepared phrase came to mind just to rush closing the damn ticket on their side (several rushed me to declare closed case before outcome was even possible - e.g. dependent on something delivered later). And almost all have the audacity to send a followup survey about satisfaction with the support. No, polite words will make no difference, not at all. Only real help will. Be it grumpy or overflown with joy.

malshe 4y ago
This is a bizarre comment. Studies report average effects, not individual effects. Just because your experience doesn't match what they find on average, the study doesn't become bogus!
- mihaaly 4y ago
  You should consider the high number of 'measures' and the negative objective outcomes (being unhelpful) coupled with not paying attention, pushing scripts over situation specific needs. Too much of coincidence over different organizations and broad type of areas to consider just one off experience, more like a trend. With rare exceptions. Of course calling bogus becuase of 'robots' provide the support where human interaction is expected part is a rhetoric here. : ) (not the unhelpfulness of pretty phrasing in place of efficiency though, that's fact)

medion 4y ago

Chat bots are a scourge and I can’t believe any company seriously puts them in front of customers.

GuB-42 4y ago

Cheerfulness works, it is one of the best way to make me a return customer. But that's not just cheerfulness, it is the idea that the service rep cares about me. Cheerfulness means "I am happy to be with you, I love my job, I will do my best for you to leave you satisfied". Of course as a customer I want that! But then, if like with most chatbots, I feel no intent to actually work on solving my problem, it goes straight down the uncanny valley. What are you? Happy to not help me? What's your problem? If it wasn't obvious from the start, that's typically a dead giveaway that I am dealing with a bot. Actual people who are good at their job will know to put the right emotion for the situation, including a lot of cheerfulness, but only when appropriate. Bots don't get that. If they can't play the human game, just let them be machines, no useless emotions, keep things factual, short and to the point.

WalterBright 4y ago
Yes. A polite machine is just annoying. Having a computer program say "thank you" is meaningless. I've always wanted a navigator for my car that was rude. "Wake up! You should have turned back there, you fakking kahnt! A bleedin' monkey could drive better than that!" A library of a few thousand insults should keep it from getting too boring. This goes back to the game Empire I wrote long ago. It was the only game I'd heard of where you weren't liberating cities, you weren't the good guy. You were the bad guy - subjugating cities, putting them under iron control, crushing your enemies. Your underlings replied with "yes master". Your armies would march off the boat and drown if you ordered it.
- SuperCuber 4y ago
  Factorio is about harvesting all the planet's resources, filling it with pollution, and killing any locals that attack you because of it

RajT88 4y ago

Brought to you by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Once again Douglas Adams is proven to have been ahead of his times. Now if that shipment of small lemon-soaked paper napkins would show up...

asah 4y ago

tl;dr: I want a human to be cheerful. I want a chatbot to be efficient.

sbaiddn 4y ago

Cheerfulness from a non sentient speaker is much much worse. It infuriates me. Recently I had to call a government agency that had one of these bots and... the bot threatened to hang up if I didn't take it seriously by trying to use its services. Well, fine Ill play ball. The bot gave up and hung up on me anyway.

batch12 4y ago
Yeah. Encountering a cheerful chat bot when experiencing a frustrating issue is maddening. It amplifies the lack of empathy the company seems to have to the situation because you know the bot has no feelings. Feigning sympathy would be just as bad because it's fake and therefore not.

hosh 4y ago

Whether it is a human or a chatbot, I think most people want to know the company behind the product will do right by them and keep promises made. It’s a about trust, not about cheer.

comte7092 4y ago

What drives me nuts is when I’m (possibly) talking to a chat bot and I have not way of knowing. Notify me that you are not a human.

hackerlight 4y ago
It's enraging when they add fake delays to the chat bot in order to try to trick me into thinking it's real. Double whammy of wasting more of my time than necessary and lying to me. Add to that the chatbox is often excessively verbose, putting a large reading burden onto me.
- loa_in_ 4y ago
  In addition, should such a practice become normal, countless human beings entering the society will be damaged by being misled to believe that those entities are actually human, and would based their judgement of actual humans on what they learn right then
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mycall 4y ago

Customer Service is a form of continued sales. When it comes to money, people are more serious unless they are spending rounding error money. Being real is a better attitude than cheerful these days.

ck2 4y ago

I've been trying to find phrases that stop automated chat replies. Not every system seems to have escapes but "I find these automated replies insulting" sometimes seems to work, "insulted" or "insulting" might be the trigger But every once in awhile I will get "I am not using automated replies" lol

jgaa 4y ago

I don't care if I chat with a bot or a human. What's important is that I get access to support when I need it, and that the issue is resolved to my satisfaction. Waiting on the phone for a human to become available for a long time is not making me happy.

lerax 4y ago

actually, chatbots may reduce costs and time of support for companies, but in the user perspective it's a mess. bots usually can do what it's available easily in the platform, but if I am talking to support it's because the problem did go bad so hard that I need a HUMAN in support to solve my problem. so... chatbots are a shield which companies use to protect your support team for high demand while users like me try need to destroy the shield to get what I want. it's at least a conflict of interest.

monkeydust 4y ago

As much as I despise chatbots they are not going anywhere. So let's say you had the funding and intent, how would you build the next gen chat bot to avoid a lot of the pains we have with them ?

mianos 4y ago

I would think this is obvious, as, similarly, cheerful real live customer support people don’t necessarily improve customer service. If I have some issue I find it quite frustrating that the customer support can't do anything more than me. In the case of a local bank down here in Australia, the out of hours, remote, customer support people can't even look up any of your details. Their script seems to be based on the text on the web site. They are really friendly (being Philippino), but can't actually do anything at all.

xkcd1963 4y ago

That should be obvious. It doesn't matter if you smile while robbing me.

jasmer 4y ago

What matters is solving the issue. People don't need to talk to 'other people' or 'cheerful whatever'. The issue is the issue. That's where the focus should be. Fix the issue and everything else is going to be perceived as way in the background.