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"Deflection" in the customer service world means when you prevent a customer from talking to a human. It's a critical metric for CSR orgs. Often you improve def

"Deflection" in the customer service world means when you prevent a customer from talking to a human. It's a critical metric for CSR orgs. Often you improve deflection rates by putting hurdles between a customer and a rep. If you're being generous those hurdles are helpful because they consist of "Did you try this? Have you read these related articles?" and can solve people's basic problems without taking up valuable human time. I am highly skeptical of this article because it doesn't mention deflection at all. There are other GPT powered B2B2C companies (e.g. https://yellow.ai/ https://yellow.ai/) which are entirely focused on deflection. It's not a huge logical leap to ask, if you can use a chatbot to turn an unskilled worker into a skilled worker, what exactly is the human adding? In many cases the answer is 'not much' or 'nothing.' You can completely replace a low skilled worker with a chatbot some economically viable percentage of the time. Because of this the claim that "the less experienced and less skilled workers [will] benefit the most" is suspect.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago
I’m a little confused by your skepticism. The underlying research is studying what happens given that an interaction reaches a human. Whatever deflection happens before that is irrelevant to the interaction with people afterwards. The paper studies the latter and the results are specific to that set of interactions, which are presumably more complex or ill-suited to deflection.
- welshwelsh 3y ago
  Why does interaction need to reach a human though? I'm hoping that once the chatbots get good enough, we can give them all the powers of a human representative and get rid of the human.
- iandanforth 3y ago
  I'm saying that's a false premise. Scenario 1: Hire 100 new people, give them AI -> they do better with AI Scenario 2: Hire 10 new people (because AI has reduced demand for humans), give them AI -> they do better with AI Both of these scenarios are in-line with the research, but are dramatically different when evaluating the proposition that AI helps low skill workers in general.
sph 3y ago
TIL I learned about deflection. I must be some middle manager KPI's worst nightmare because the first thing I do when I get the usual idiotic chatbot is write "let me speak to a human". With the advent of the next generation of chat bots, being unable to speak to a human is reason enough for me to delete my account and go elsewhere. These systems optimise for the 80% of dumb questions, and if you have an honest-to-God problem, they just irritate you further. I thoroughly appreciate the other day when I contacted my ISP about having lost my IPv6 prefix, and I immediately got connected to someone that told me "sorry, we broke the Radius server configuration with a recent update. Try now." (Zen in the UK, if you're curious) None of that "have you tried turning it off and on again?" I get that it's helpful for grandma, but we're not all metaphorical grandmas.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago

I’m a little confused by your skepticism. The underlying research is studying what happens given that an interaction reaches a human. Whatever deflection happens before that is irrelevant to the interaction with people afterwards. The paper studies the latter and the results are specific to that set of interactions, which are presumably more complex or ill-suited to deflection.

welshwelsh 3y ago
Why does interaction need to reach a human though? I'm hoping that once the chatbots get good enough, we can give them all the powers of a human representative and get rid of the human.
iandanforth 3y ago
I'm saying that's a false premise. Scenario 1: Hire 100 new people, give them AI -> they do better with AI Scenario 2: Hire 10 new people (because AI has reduced demand for humans), give them AI -> they do better with AI Both of these scenarios are in-line with the research, but are dramatically different when evaluating the proposition that AI helps low skill workers in general.

sph 3y ago

TIL I learned about deflection. I must be some middle manager KPI's worst nightmare because the first thing I do when I get the usual idiotic chatbot is write "let me speak to a human". With the advent of the next generation of chat bots, being unable to speak to a human is reason enough for me to delete my account and go elsewhere. These systems optimise for the 80% of dumb questions, and if you have an honest-to-God problem, they just irritate you further. I thoroughly appreciate the other day when I contacted my ISP about having lost my IPv6 prefix, and I immediately got connected to someone that told me "sorry, we broke the Radius server configuration with a recent update. Try now." (Zen in the UK, if you're curious) None of that "have you tried turning it off and on again?" I get that it's helpful for grandma, but we're not all metaphorical grandmas.