31 ms·

Customers don't want chat bots

• calvin982 3y ago
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• face789 3y ago
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• today9872 3y ago
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• SergeAx 3y ago
  As a customer, I have nothing against chat bots, if they solve my problems. Last December I had to engage into long chat sessions with airline rep to enquiry about my flight change. I kid you not, they changed my first leg from morning to evening flight, and I only found out when printed boarding pass an evening before. Then I had to change my flight back due to work requirements. It was not cheap flight: four legs with two connections from Europe to SE Asia business class, so I believe I received a good service. It took about three hours total. My website auth expired, I had to re-login several times. Fortunately, the dialogue kept going during re-logins. I had to wait a lot while call center employee checked everything, and once I found a mistake right before paying a new fare. I got transcripts to email. I would rate a tech behind this conversation as above avarage, but still the overall experience was painful. If some LLM chat agend could do the same, but quickier and with less errors - I would just be happy about it. I don't see it as an impossible feat, most of the responses are already scripted anyway.
• wnc3141 3y ago
  I think the calculus of a company deciding on an imperfect automation (such as self-checkout) is that it either won't prevent a purchase. in the case of chatbots, the purchase already happened, hiring a person to do this is just overhead.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > in the case of chatbots, the purchase already happened, hiring a person to do this is just overhead. But poor customer service may be costing the company future business. Not to mention just increasing the odds that people will hate the company and start badmouthing it to others.
• ygmelnikova 3y ago
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• gumballindie 3y ago
  AI customer support indicates low quality services. Simple as that.
• sejtnjir 3y ago
  Most customers don't want to pay for good customer support. This answers the question of the article. What customers want is offloading responsibility without paying for it. There are many concierge level services at the premium end. Chatbots are an attempt at offering this type of luxury to the masses. And it may succeed.
• idopmstuff 3y ago
  I don't think this article is correct - it's not right to say that customers don't want chatbots, it that customers don't want the chatbots of today. > Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human. This is the thrust of the whole thing, and the problem it's not looking quite deep enough at what people want. People don't want a human - people want their problem solved. A human is probably the best way to do that, but realistically, if you consider the role of a human in these situations, it's as an interface between the customer and an internal system. The human translates natural language into a series of actions in some computer program (or maybe multiple programs and also communication with other humans). This is something that LLMs will inevitably be better than humans at. I just called my new health insurance company to get my member number. I spoke to a woman who first had to open up my account and spend some time looking at information. An LLM will do this instantly, and the aggregate time savings of this across all customer service calls will be enormous. That's on top of the fact that no one will wait on hold because all agents are busy. She eventually realized she had to transfer me to another department. She gave me the direct phone number for that department then transferred me. Except instead of transferring me, she dropped the call. Then I called the direct number she gave me, and it was the department for cancer and complex medical claims. We've all had experiences like this. Humans are not anywhere near perfect at this job. LLMs may not ever be perfect either, but they'll be better. A human at a call center either needs to be trained, which is costly and time consuming, or they need to be given rote instructions for all possible tasks. Neither of these make them particularly well-equipped for questions "so specific, or complicated, or gnarly." Obviously this won't all happen overnight, but it's not tough to imagine that cases like Wendy's replacing their drive thru employees with chatbots can be successful in the immediate future. A Wendy's employee in that role just hears natural language and translates it to a series of button presses on a screen representing a very much finite number of possibilities. This is well within the capabilities of GPT-4. I think we'll see this more and more often for low-level customer service, with the chatbot passing the user off to a human for more complex things. The chatbot will move further and further up the stack of complexity until it's doing everything.
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• MikeRichardson 3y ago
  There was a chatbot I dealt with recently, where the only way to get a human being was to type in graphically vulgar language repeatedly. Unfortunately the human who does eventually join the chat is then usually subject to this language as they "review the chat log" :/
  • thelastparadise 3y ago
    I do this often, as well. I find the trick is to intersperse messages like "sorry human --the bot only responds to this aggressively-abusive language." So far, this has worked like a charm.
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• namegulf 3y ago
  100% no customers want to chat with a machine, they want to talk to people and be connected!
• jonplackett 3y ago
  Question: would you rather talk to a GPT-4 chatbot or a human? Answer: human. Question: would you rather talk to a GPT-4 chatbot RIGHT NOW or a human after holding for 30 minutes Answer: chatbot!
• pvaldes 3y ago
  Even more insulting are the telephone chatbots calling me to sell things while pretending to be government workers. A couple of cases lately.
• NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Today I needed to contact a government service office for a task that only a human could perform. Now unfortunately, the phone tree of this office is broad and deep, you need to authenticate with about 4 data points before continuing, and if you hit the wrong option after authenticating, they will hang up on you without a second thought. So I authenticated got through to the correct option on the first try, and it seemed like they were going to drop me into a queue to wait for a live operator. And then a recording informed me that "due to a high call volume, nobody is available to take your call." and dropped the call! Can you believe that. No option to leave a callback number or wait 4 hours in a queue, just terminate the connection. I called back and got the same thing. The website does have a chatbot, but of course it is not capable of connecting to a human being and only capable of relaying the simple FAQs they've programmed into it. I am pleased and impressed, for the most part, with the proliferation of Live Agent Chat for many services. I really prefer this over a telephone interaction (most of the time.) So it's good when I can easily break past the "virtual assistant" trying to FAQ me and get to a human. But in this case, today, I suppose there were no humans to be found. Tragic. They have good compensation packages there.
  • rahimnathwani 3y ago
    nobody is available to take your call." and dropped the call! Alternative endings for the last step: A) Nobody is available to take your call. Press 1 to leave a voicemail. Mailbox full. Click. B) A human answers. They're not the right person, but can transfer you to the right person. Click. C) Same as B, but after they transfer you you're told 'Mailbox full. Click.'. D) Same as B, but they transfer you to the top of the phone tree.
    • NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      E) all of the above. Yeah, when I sense that (B) or (C) is coming up, I stop the person cold and I demand to know the direct-dial number for wherever they are transferring me. And these days I also ask to know the department name as well, so I can figure it out if presented with a tree or org chart or something. It doesn't always help, but it helps me feel a little more secure.
• seeknotfind 3y ago
  ~"because the chatbots aren't good enough" Chat bots are annoying due to potential inconsistency, having to guess the types of things you ask for, due to their latency, but they've made major advancements recently, and we are only beginning to see what's possible. If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away. Why do we want to discourage them from exploring this new area? Experimentation is critical to understanding what will work and to the development of our society.
  • AstralStorm 3y ago
    Most importantly, the chatbot cannot actually solve anything, it is not plugged into any functionality.
    • Scarblac 3y ago
      That's my feeling too, but maybe it's outdated? There's no real reason why they can't be.
      • rcxdude 3y ago
        there is plenty of reason why it shouldn't be. Generally speaking functionality is gated behind support (as opposed to being something you can just click a button on a website to do) because it requires at least some level of human judgement on whether a given action should be done (and there's still a whole class of attacks which are aimed against this process). Chat-bots will be even worse, because there will be an extremely consistent script than can be used for any given purpose.
  • summerdown2 3y ago
    > If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away. The difficulty is, this is obscured to the customer. Let's say I have a broadband account in a country with competitors I can choose between (eg the UK, where I can have BT or Virgin). I've already chosen the best package for me. I'm ringing up after six months of good service to fix my intermittent line drop. The chat bot is terrible and I have to wait until the problem goes away on its own. Unfortunately for me, I can't just guarantee that switching to the other service will make a difference, because chat bots are not core service. I can compare broadband options and pick the best, and I'm already on that. Now I have to gamble that some combination of: (broadband option) + (customer service) is higher than the one I'm on. Unfortunately for me, I have no way of checking this. There's every chance that I'll end up on a worse broadband option and a worse customer service option.
• AllegedAlec 3y ago
  I have never met a chat bot that worked. I try the same question worded 6 different ways, I try asking it to connect me to an actual fucking human being. If it even does I still get stuck in a choice menu at first, which half of the time tells me that I can get help with this via their chat bots and disconnects. Fuck chat bots and the money-saving horse they rode in on.
  • vendiddy 3y ago
    This exactly. I want a solution to my problem. If an AI can help me, great. But it's not even close to a human level of service yet. So I'll always try to get to a human ASAP knowing the AI will just waste my time.
  • TylerE 3y ago
    They combine the charm and brevity of telephone voice recognition with the text parsing power of a knock-off early 90s adventure game.
    • benj111 3y ago
      Now you're just making it sound cooler than it actually is.
  • blitzar 3y ago
    Amazon. My personal best time for a full refund was slightly under 2 minutes. It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.
    • hifromLA 3y ago
      If I’m not mistaken Amazon basically has a reputation for customers that is intended to penalize bad actors (and conversely reward good actors).
      • blitzar 3y ago
• jsmith99 3y ago
  Even the Amazon chatbot is fairly useless, and like many chatbots it is slow too, seemingly to mimic a human typing speed which is really annoying when it's not even pretending to be human.
• mgaunard 3y ago
  As a customer you want someone to resolve your issue, which is mostly a matter of someone being responsible to file a ticket and ensure it gets solved. A chatbot has no responsibility, it is just a useless parrot of the documentation. It doesn't serve any useful purpose except worsening the experience for the customer.
  • mjevans 3y ago
    The worst are the bots that can't figure out what you're trying to ask about and _refuse_ to turn over to a human because you the end user clearly aren't in what they are good at.
    • AllegedAlec 3y ago
      Had this experience with Vodaphone when I tried to set up my account and add my fucking phone number so I had insight in my bills. Didn't work. Got directed to a bot, which continually misunderstood me and no amount of prompting from me made them direct me to a human person.
    • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      The WORST is when calling a specific department you in the generic queue and the bot wants a piece of information that you don't have (eg. demanding an ATM card number when you only have an investment account) and hangs up when you don't give to them.
  • sonar_un 3y ago
    The thing is, I wouldn't be asking for support if I was able to find a fix for my issue in the first place. ChatBots are unable to fix the initial problem because the system used to fix said issue doesn't already exist in the account tools. Human intervention is required to fix the problem, so therefore chatbots are completely useless in this context.
    • JshWright 3y ago
      > The thing is, I wouldn't be asking for support if I was able to find a fix for my issue in the first place. You are the exception though, the vast majority of people don't do that. Those are the users the chatbot is designed to help (because they represent a large portion of a typical support team's interactions).
• 0x2c8 3y ago
  I believe this is a clear example of the Moloch effect [1]. Companies race towards having the shiniest chatbot or _virtual assistant_, without fully understanding all the implications and customer needs. Everyone wants to have their brand name associated with being "the first" or "the best" in their segment for providing such technology, no matter how trivial it may seem -- e.g. as the article points out: just wrapping already available info in a dialogue. Given these incentives and high stakes, it's also hard to "exit" the bandwagon, due to various factors like reputation, costs, and the uncertainty around your competitor not doing the same. [1]: https://danielmiessler.com/p/moloch-the-most-dangerous-idea https://danielmiessler.com/p/moloch-the-most-dangerous-idea
  • jprete 3y ago
    How did [1] write an entire article on this and not reference Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch from 2014? https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
• orjandus 3y ago
  Honestly, I've heard that for a regular user chat bots are amazing. Tech people are just bunch of nerds who are used to going through documentation. For a regular grandma it's so much easiser to just write like she's used to.
  • smeej 3y ago
    This is an underrated comment. The overwhelming majority (like 98% or more) of support requests are from people who have not read the documentation and are asking about something that is well-covered within it. Chat bots can't (currently) eliminate the agents who exercise critical thought and report bugs, but for any company large enough to outsource "tier one" support to a call center overseas, the chat bot would actually be a big improvement.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > for any company large enough to outsource "tier one" support to a call center overseas, the chat bot would actually be a big improvement. More likely, a lateral move rather than a big improvement. But you're right -- companies that outsource the support to crappy call centers are companies that barely have customer support at all.
  • sgt101 3y ago
    I would qualify this. There is a distribution of users. Definitely some users are better off (no matter how good the chatbot is) using the FAQ or websites. Some people are not chat interface orientated. Some people would benefit from a very powerful and effective chatbot. The grandmother you cite for example! But the problem is that almost all chatbots are incompetent and really function to: 1) deflect users 2) bolster the innovation credentials of the organization or sponsors for the project.
• villgax 3y ago
  Customers & PMs want guarantees of boundaries for knowledge & QnA tasks
• fragmede 3y ago
  OpenAI's ChatGPT has over hundred million users. Customers want chatbots just fine, they just don't want a shitty broken useless chatbot that's a waste of time. If it's a bot then respect the user and give it enough CPU resources to answer quickly.
  • danparsonson 3y ago
    This: > OpenAI's ChatGPT has over hundred million users in no way validates this: > Customers want chatbots just fine
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Can you explain why? I'm not making the same logical connections as you are.
      • staticman2 3y ago
        Contextually the topic is "customer support chat bots". Openai's Chatgpt service isn't that sort of chat bot.
        • fragmede 3y ago
          thanks. my intuition is that the demand is, actually, there - customers don't want to read through an faq and a knowledge base. they want to go "I <their problem>, can you fix it?". whether that's to a human intelligence or artificial is besides the point, they want someone who's able to understand it first, empowered to fix it, second. where a bot can only regurgigate the docs, psh.
      • danparsonson 3y ago
        To expand on staticman2's reply, the size of the set of ChatGPT users says nothing about its composition, and it certainly includes AI researchers, representatives of companies looking to build their own bots, and no doubt many people exploring the thing just for fun. The number of users by itself therefore says nothing about whether or not people in general want to interact with bots for customer service queries, since it could be that, say, 95% of ChatGPT users are there because they want to learn more about ChatGPT, not because they generally enjoy fulfilling daily tasks with the help of a computer.
• thenoblesunfish 3y ago
  I don't think the argument is "customers want chat bots", but "customers will hate our chat bots, just like they hate our (poorly paid and trained) human customer service, and it'll cost less".
• DuckFeathers 3y ago
  I used to not want chat bots because they were bad. I can imagine situations where I would prefer a chat bots over humans. For example, if it's a niche problem that a human would be unaware of and would have to look up, read, and verify taking a long time to respond, I would definitely want a chat bot or a bot assisted human.
• RobotToaster 3y ago
  People don't want a useless chat bots, more often than not they seem deliberately programmed to be obstructive. If you told it you wanted a refund for order xyz, and it immediately gave you a refund, I'm sure people would like it.
  • NikolaNovak 3y ago
    That's the thing. At work, I hated an hr bot for years. But in the last year it became good and useful and I now like it. If a bot gives me what I need I'll like it. If it only provides value for YOU though and makes MY life more difficult then I will not enjoy it very much. Big problem with most bots is they don't have authority and they refuse to turn you over to someone who does. If I'm engaging with your customer service, it means I have an issue I need resolved. The worst bits are the equivalent of incessantly yet cheerfully asking me to restart my computer in an endless loop with no path out.
    • JAlexoid 3y ago
      You should try talking to people who work in customer service call centers, most of their calls are arrogant opportunists that aren't calling to fix any issues... but to get something extra. "This item is scratched, so I want a 50% discount refunded" - comes to my mind. Most of customer service is dealing with Karens
      • malfist 3y ago
        If you wouldn't buy a scratched item in store, why should you have to accept it from an online retailer? I wouldn't call a person wanting their new item to be in new condition a scammer.
        • runesofdoom 3y ago
          I think the idea is that the item isn't scratched. They're just claiming it is to try and get a refund/credit.
      • deleted 3y ago
• seagullriffic 3y ago
  In my experience they're useless because they're trained / limited to the FAQ and website you've already read to try to resolve your issue. The same with calling a helpline. Yes, I'm aware I can check your website for common questions. I'm calling you and need to speak to a human because the answer isn't there.
  • smeej 3y ago
    Please just understand you are part of the <2% of customers who have done your own legwork. The overwhelming majority of people are calling in about something in the FAQ because they can't be arsed to do their own search. The first layer of support at larger companies is usually restricted by their software from sending you anything but a pre-written response, just because you're such a rarity.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > Please just understand you are part of the <2% of customers who have done your own legwork. I understand this, but it changes nothing. Bad customer service is bad customer service.
    • ozim 3y ago
      To add to that ... I want to call a human even if my question seems dumb for them and have it taken care of, because I don't even know if I get that one answer there might be 10 other questions hiding behind the corner.
      • theonlybutlet 3y ago
        A good chatbot could probably address it just as well as a human going through the motions trying to achieve target.
        • marcosdumay 3y ago
          As soon as somebody creates a good chatbot, we can start deploying it then.
• carlosrdrz 3y ago
  > Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human. I can see the author probably hasn't done much customer service? I'd say maybe 1% of customer queries go in that direction. I agree dealing with a bot in that situation sucks, but a big chunk of customer questions can probably be answered without human intervation by LLMs, assuming they have enough data about the organization and its products.
  • smeej 3y ago
    You've nailed it. I've been a customer support specialist in tech startups for the last many years, and the HUGE and overwhelming majority of questions are about things that have been covered in detail in the support documentation by any even half-competent team. People do not normally search for their own answers. More than 90% of tickets are well-answered (according to the user's satisfaction score!) by a pre-written response explaining how an article in the support center addresses their specific question, and then linking to it. This is why large companies end up hiring thousands of low-wage workers who are prohibited by their software from sending anything but a pre-written response. The first-level agents can't even edit it. They can only send you something someone else wrote for the common situation. Chat bots could easily replace these workers, and the customer experience would be better for it. You will (probably) always still need the higher level agents who are really tech support, the ones who can identify when someone's report really is a bug and get it reported to engineers for fixing. Those aren't the low-level agents in these outsourced call centers, though. Even if those people do recognize an issue, they can't do anything until they've sent you some number of generic responses that haven't satisfied you. At least the bot could be trained to customize responses within a set of parameters and match the tone of the asker.
    • nottorp 3y ago
      But they're not replacing those agents with chatbots. They're replacing all agents with chatbots.
  • Kiro 3y ago
• TulliusCicero 3y ago
  The author is assuming a decently high level of technical competence here. I guarantee you there are people calling into customer service with basic queries already handled by an app or website.
• jacknews 3y ago
  Sure it's already dire, but who cares what customers want (especially the few 'difficult' ones)? We didn't want phone menu systems, or to wait minutes, tens of minutes listening to muzak on hold, or to have to decrypt heavy foreign accents and painful latency on calls, etc either. Customers will get what companies give them, which will be phrased as 'lower prices'.
• mduggles 3y ago
  Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path. Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother?
  • RamenJunkie_ 3y ago
    Support Chat: "Thank you for asking about [question], here is a [link to FAQ Page!" The FAQ Page: "Was this article helpful? If not, contact our support chat!" Endlessly. It's so stupid.
  • LorenPechtel 3y ago
    Yup. The chatbots are basically a friendly version of search, useful for the non-tech but anyone here will almost certainly not benefit. You want to cut down your customer service costs, actually provide answers online! I would say at least 80% of what I call companies about are things that perfectly well could have been done online if their website actually allowed it.
  • solardev 3y ago
    I don't think they're meant to make end user lives easier, but to frustrate them into giving up.
  • benj111 3y ago
    I had a savings account where the interface was basically a chat bot. It was basically guess the verb. And also not obvious when you're talking to a human through the exact same interface. It's a menu system but harder to use.
    • dontworryabout 3y ago
      Wow! “Guess the verb.” That is exactly how text based adventure games worked in 80s. The interface of the future is Zork.
• RamblingCTO 3y ago
  I despise most chatbots. Especially the ones bothering me while reading an article. I'm leaving these sites without reading. But I really dig airline chatbots. I rebooked flights quite easily in the past with that. It gave me clear options, I could scroll the list of flights etc., way better than by phone. And at inconvenient times as well, so no hotline anyway. That way I changed a very unpleasant being stranded for 2h in a hotel room in Geneva for a nice long stay in a five star hotel. Landing at 1, being in the hotel at 2 at night. Flight was scheduled for 6 something in the morning. This would've been gruelsome. So I rebooked my flight to Frankfurt for lunch and enjoyed the breakfast buffet.
• jurgenaut23 3y ago
  The reason why LLMs are truly revolutionary is that they suddenly allow to connect and interface systems that used to require a human in the loop because of their ambiguous interfaces. LLMs can (and will) do a lot more than providing chatbot-like interfaces. Instead, they will power agents that can manipulate a variety of tools and interface with extremely diverse systems, including end users, SMEs, etc.
  • candiodari 3y ago
    No they won't. You're right that LLMs can do this. Well, I guess you might be wrong about that too, but it doesn't matter. That's not the problem. Companies have very large callcenters with actual humans that can do this ... but they don't. They're not allowed to. The only thing callcenters are these days are a semi-human interface to a bad website. LLMs won't be anything more.
• wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  I dont want useless customer support. Wether that's a human or a bot. It's extremely frustrating to have a real issue, take for instance a plane cancelled or delayed when travelling with kids, and not being able to talk to a real person who can actually help. Let alone having to wait 30-60 minutes to get a hold of someone. Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversation with a human who actually has the power to make a decision. All they repeat is info that's found online and tell you to fill in a form or email. In that case a chatbot is probably better for both sides, mainly for the person behind the phone who doesn't get verbally abused on a regular basis. Sadly best way to get helped by corps nowadays is to tweet to them.
  • pknomad 3y ago
    Same. Few years ago, I was stuck at Dulles due to a snow storm and had to resort to online customer chat support via the United app. I only used it because United was pushing people really hard to use the app for support. I was connected with a support rep who obviously did not live in the states because he tried to give me an impossible itinerary. Anyone living in DMV area knows taking an AA flight from DCA that's about to take off in 40 minutes when you're currently located in terminal C/D in IAD is impossible. My current gig requires me to travel more and now I am able to enjoy the privileges of dedicated support line for 1K. The difference is night and day; you not only get connected to reps who are obviously American, but also reps who deal with frequent travelers so they have contextual information to get what you need.
    • Tempest1981 3y ago
      I figured out most of the airport acronyms... except DMV... Delaware-Maryland-Virginia? (Search focuses on motor vehicles, even with "-motor")
      • ajkjk 3y ago
        Yes, also known as Delmarva.
      • 3y ago
• jasmer 3y ago
  [dead]
• nathias 3y ago
  Generally I don't want ways to communicate with businesses that leave no trace and resolve them of all accountability.
  • criddell 3y ago
    A lot of chat bots will email a transcript of the interaction to you.
• omgmajk 3y ago
  Honestly most customers do not read anything on the website before they contact support and in these cases a chatbot, given that it is trained well is probably the best solution. I personally despise them because I don't want to interact with anyone if I can solve a problem myself so when I actually have a problem it's usually just in the way of getting an answer. But having worked technical support in the past I know that most customers don't do any sort of research at all and will (not happily exactly, but yeah) sit through two hours of phone que to ask the most basic of questions that is in the manual, on the website or anywhere on the internet really.
  • candiodari 3y ago
    Problem is that there are so many questions companies (and government) do not want to give answers to, or they want it split per market, or geographically, or only to citizens, or only to their own employees. Online you find a lot of information you're just not going to find in chatbots. This is why Google had such extreme value. Organizations, certainly governments, generally had search functionality, but it was purposefully sabotaged according to each organisation's capricious needs and therefore sucked. The problem is that the information available and searchable was definitely NOT accidentally sabotaged, they actively want to prevent people finding out. Chatbots are going to suck like company search fields suck. Not because the technology behind them sucks, but because their purpose is to change what you want, not give you what you want. And when this fails, and fails, and fails some more it becomes and endless horror of frustration. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36624294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36624294 This is what companies want. They want to use frustration and sabotage as a way to get what they want. Chatbots will rarely be anything but a new weapon to do so.
• ourmandave 3y ago
  They'll be hackers posting ways to defeat the AI restrictions so it will connect you to a human.
• technick 3y ago
  Every bot I've dealt with wasted more of my time to save the bot owners their time. Chat bots are a giant insult to users who are forced to use them.
• seanhunter 3y ago
  A big part of the problem isn’t actually chat bots even though it may well seem to be. It’s that you can’t pop some system atop a teetering ziggurat of shitty data from mutually incompatible systems and think the fundamental problems are going to just disappear. Example: I am currently executor of my dad’s estate and trying to get various policies and pensions and whatnot transferred into my mother’s name. One company seemed especially clueless when I emailed them so I called. Part of the voice prompt on the phone system was something like “if the statement we send you comes from city A, press 1, if it comes from city B press 2”. Well that’s a weird red flag right there also a teeny problem: my statement comes from city C. I eventually speak to a human but try as they might they can’t find anything about my dad. Eventually I write to the company at city C and they’re super helpful. Basically this company is formed from the corpses of various pension funds which just get welded together. There is no underlying integration at all between the systems. They are separate companies in all but name. You could have an agi chatbot and its still going to be lobotomised by this level of disfunction. In my experience the data landscape at many enterprises is like this.
  • nfriedly 3y ago
    You have my condolences. My brother and I ended up hiring a lawyer to handle our dad's estate, and I'd recommend it to anyone. She did things like send the hospital a letter that said in essence "give me a single bill with a total for all services provided at your hospital. If it's not on this bill I'm not going to pay it." (Although legal fees for estates are capped here in Ohio, not sure if that's true where you are.)
    • LeafItAlone 3y ago
      > She did things like send the hospital a letter that said in essence "give me a single bill with a total for all services provided at your hospital. If it's not on this bill I'm not going to pay it." That is a great thing to say, but does it actually hold any weight? Or is it like the construction trucks that have signs saying they are not responsible for damage from items blown off them?
      • 3y ago
• nobodyandproud 3y ago
  It’s not just the tech industry and this article is spot on. Every support call without exception I hear the excuse “due to higher than normal/expected call volume your wait time….”
• theonlybutlet 3y ago
  I think the author overestimates the technical level of most requests fielded by call centre agents. They also underestimate the potential a well-designed chatbot could have given recent technology developments. Speaking with colleagues in private banking call centres (wealthy clients who you'd assume are more clued up). Many calls are basically comfort calls, holding their hand while they login into the bank account, they complete all the steps themselves with no input other than reassuring comments like "yes". Some probably see it as making sure the bank is liable if they "break something".
• RajT88 3y ago
  > Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human Frankly, such situations are pretty crap even with a human. Support systems are not set up to handle the high effort corner cases and usually you have to go through a couple rounds of escalation.
• nobodyandproud 3y ago
  There must be a usecase here, allowing telephony and chatbot to filter unknown numbers. My regular contacts? Straight to human. An unknown number? Suspicious chatbot verifying who they are.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    Why would you need a chatbot for this? When I get an unknown caller, they get my voicemail where they can tell me who they are, what they want, and how I can call them back.
• sfn42 3y ago
  Yeah, Facebook removed their CS. So when my FB account was compromised and they blocked the trusted contacts recovery method (I was told I was trying too often, the first time I tried it and so it went for months. Guess they had a bot to basically dos the trusted contacts system for stolen accounts), there was nobody who could help me. There just wasn't anyone I could contact. I searched for days. I filled out and submitted multiple large support forms, none of which I ever received an answer to. Eventually I contacted a local Norwegian organization named Slett Meg (Delete me) and asked them to either get my account back or have it deleted. They had it back to me in like two days.
• jgalt212 3y ago
  As soon as you put a chatbot in front of customer, it's a strong signal how little you value their business.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Chat bots built as Eliza clones are worse than useless. However a more concise ChatGPT hooked up to APIs to achieve customer service goals would be great. It operates in an abstract abductive semantic space that’s considerably more deep than most first level support can, especially those poor souls working from a different country with a different native language. I would assume most if not all companies would maintain second level and third level human support for the truly mindbendingly challenging inquiries, but those are a very small percentage of the total volume. For that 90%+ of the case volume a well contextualized, fine tuned, and vectordb’ed chatbot LLM of at least GPT4 capability is likely going to our perform almost all situations in almost all dimensions, including identifying situations for escalation to next level support.
• wiz21c 3y ago
  Nobody cares about customers. If you can replace the support department with a chat bot, then it'll be done.
  • agloe_dreams 3y ago
    The critical problem with chatbots is that companies don't trust them to do things. I generally am reaching out to support because I want something done, not because I want advice. This may not be true of everyone but for many, they have a real need. I need X price matched, I need to get my bill corrected, etc. Users know the chatbot won't do it.
  • pif 3y ago
    > Nobody cares about customers. Not even customers care about themselves! Customers say they want a good support, but nobody buys a good support: customers buy cheap! If ditching the customer support department will let you lower your prices, you'll have customers; is maintaining a decent customer support service will keep your prices a few cents more than your competition, you will have no customers.
• jonfw 3y ago
  chatbots are the future of customer service. The past of customer service is the complex phone system where you select a number from a menu, and they automate some tasks (like paying your bill, etc.) and sometimes you end up talking to an agent. But the youngest generations hate talking on the phone and audio is a terrible medium for a menu. A chatbot can provide similar functionality, but you've got the ability to provide a much richer interface, and when you end up with an agent, they'll chat instead of talk on the phone. As chatbots get better and better at performing actions, you'll have to talk to fewer agents, and waiting on hold will hopefully be a thing of the past
• nehal3m 3y ago
  Typically I call customer service because I'm trying to tackle a problem that cannot be solved by using their normal interface. There is usually some subtlety or exception that requires an agent capable of understanding them at the other end, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered calling. Chatbots almost by definition cannot deal with that, at least I've never experienced one ever. And I imagine that if they can understand what I want it's just too easy to code them to toe the company line and tell me to pound sand. Empathy and understanding are not parameters, yet.
  • kristopolous 3y ago
    Right. You contact a human because you want a guarded administrative action to be taken. For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things. It's hard to hold a computer program accountable in any nuanced way when it starts misbehaving other than kicking it to the curb
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      > For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things. They don't want a person to escalate you either, but you can pressure a person in ways that a chatbot cannot be pressured. At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with reasons not to escalate, and their employer because they're paying for the time spent. A chatbot is happy to talk you in circles all day, and costs near nothing. Empowering chatbots is not the point, one of the advantages of chatbots is that they can be disempowered more easily than humans.
      • cudgy 3y ago
        “At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with reasons not to escalate, and their employer because they're paying for the time spent.” Click. Disconnect. Easy. They just disconnect the call when a customer is frustrating them and oftentimes disconnects happen when first reaching a person after sitting on hold for a long time. The other tactic is to transfer the customer around the call center into oblivion.
• kodah 3y ago
  > Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human. A couple counter points that are kind of the same point. 1. I actually hate talking to customer support that doesn't speak my language as fluently as I do. It makes communicating the important part of what's wrong in these complex scenarios that much more frustrating. 2. Customer support, even when human, often is useless because their roles get restricted to scripts. Discover is a company that used to have amazing customer support, especially when dealing with the complexities of charge disputes. I listened to a woman refuse to give me any idea of what "evidence" I should submit to a charge disputes with a hotel that was billing me despite no services rendered. Instead she read off what seemed to be a script. I hung up, dialed back in, got someone new and they answered my question in great detail. I think my point is the same as the authors; there should be a high bar for customer service but I'd take it one point higher and say we've been letting that bar slide for a while.
• charlie0 3y ago
  Chatbots can be awful. I called one yesterday because I needed to set up a new account. Twice I tried different phrases for new accounts and each time it sent me down a path where it would invariably ask me for an existing account number.
• 0x445442 3y ago
  I use Ting as my mobile provider. They use the T-Mobile network so the coverage is not on par with Verizon but it's good enough. I'm willing to sacrifice the coverage because when communicating with Ting I ALWAYS get a very helpful live human being.
  • rationalist 3y ago
    I used to use Mint, and their chatbot said customer service was closed and to try back in the morning. Interestingly, I typed "emergency" in all caps three times, and it connected me with a human.
• Kanni516 3y ago
  A little different stance on the topic: AI being able to replace these people at their jobs is not because AI has to be better than these people but because most of the people working at call centres or supply chains are extremely bad at what they are supposed to do. So AI just needs to be at par whatever the industry requires. Only matters that require a transaction are to be dealt with with caution.
• Havoc 3y ago
  Not rubbish chatbots anyway that just spit out knowledgebase links. Something more empowered and smart could be good I think
• Kanni516 3y ago
  A little different stance on the topic: AI being able to replace these people at their jobs is not because AI has to be better than these people but because most of the people working at call centres or supply chains are extremely bad at what they are supposed to do. So AI just needs to be at par whatever the industry requires. Only matters that require a transaction to happen are to be dealt with a little caution.
• xkcd1963 3y ago
  [flagged]
• expertentipp 3y ago
  I want AI to do my plumbing, electricity, service my car, and fix the washing machine. Actually do these things, not create some abstract walled garden mobile app-based layer. Chat is the most useless superfluous and irritating application.
• est 3y ago
  > that there’s no way the app will have the answer ... Hey, my credit card isn’t working, and maybe it’s because of a weird charge I had on it yesterday, but then something else happened right before this purchase” – that’s the sort of complicated scenario Hmm, what makes OP think a chatgpt can't answer this question? Given enough tokens passed to a ChatGPT session, a chatbot can eventually find out what's going on and provide a simple to understand explaination.
• nkotov 3y ago
  Chat bots and automated phone customer service suffer from the same problem - they don't solve the exact problem/questions I'm running into and it requires a real human to get me the answer I need.
• crosen99 3y ago
  Strong disagree. The way I see it, any successful customer service operation needs to have three things in place: 1. Properly defined and articulated customer service policies and procedures 2. A training program that adequately prepares agents to know, understand and apply those policies and procedures 3. Sufficient inherent capability and disposition of the customer service agents to apply that training My take is that the (relevant) inherent capabilities of LLMs at even at this early stage are as strong or stronger than what I see in the human customer service agents I typically deal with. And the disposition of an LLM can be arbitrarily good through fine-tuning and prompt engineering. As such, any company that gets 1. and 2. right has a high chance of providing a better support experience by replacing human agents with LLMs.
• manicennui 3y ago
  This is the real threat of "AI". Companies are going to use it to make things that already suck even worse in an attempt to reduce costs.
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  My internet went down, and I couldn't reach customer service. I could only reach (drumroll), a chatbot. The chatbot couldn't confirm that anyone knew about the problem and was working on it. (How do I know that it just doesn't always say "someone's working on it?") I submitted an FCC complaint. A few days later, a customer service rep called me. She told me that I could contact the chatbot. I told her I'd never submit an FCC complaint if I could talk to a real person, because I don't trust the chatbot.
  • LeafItAlone 3y ago
    Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot? Can you elaborate on why you didn’t trust the chat it but would trust a human?
    • hakfoo 3y ago
      The local power company (a psuedo-governmental co-op, I think) has a website with a big interactive outage map. When the power goes out, the icon is usually on the map by the time I've pulled up the site on my phone, describing the outage area, and the ETA is usually surprisingly accurate. 100% automated service, but as good if not better than anything I could get from a human. Conversely, a weasel worded chatbot could say "we are responding to outages as noted" or something similar, and that doesn't actually provide any evidence the utility is aware of the outage or its scope in the actual monitoring and management systems; your report of a failure could go straight to /dev/null.
    • meroes 3y ago
      Accountability for one. Another being hallucinations are still too common.
      • LeafItAlone 3y ago
        Accountability for what? I’ve had human customer service members tell me things that I knew to be false. At least computers should be able to calculate confidence levels, like Watson was doing for Jeopardy a decade ago.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  I definitely want and prefer chatbots. Telephone/internet customer service isn't a job that people should be doing, it's soul destroying. The problem with chatbots is that they make customer service time far cheaper than my time. If they have to pay $15/hr for somebody to argue with me about a $10 refund, they're motivated not to do it. If that cost goes down to $0.15/hr, however, you're incentivizing Kafka.
  • ouid 3y ago
    [dead]
  • myth2018 3y ago
    > Telephone/internet customer service isn't a job that people should be doing, it's soul destroying. That's true, but it's a different issue. My gas company has already deployed a number of chatbots and automated phone responses. Now you simply just can't talk to a real person via phone. These days they double-charged an invoice and I simply had no way to inform them about the problem they created. And this is not the sort of service you just move on to a competitor.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  yeah i do, skimming biology literature is tedious and requires extensive effort. i'd love a chat bot trained on scientific literature where i can ask questions about what is out there on very specific topics across articles that might otherwise look irrelevant.
• wolrah 3y ago
  I think chatbots can and will replace the useless frontline "Tier 0" support agents that all too many companies have. The ones who are working from a script that they can not substantially deviate from where most of us here are just trying to get through to someone who can really help.
• LeafItAlone 3y ago
  > but customers can get those answers already from the app or website. We’d need to have access to the specific company’s call categorization to know this. Just last week I was chatting with someone in their mid-thirties who was telling me how they don’t have an ATM card or access their bank through the app or website. Everything is done in person at a physical branch. They need money? They go to the teller. And I know many older people who are the same way. This is why many companies already have automated phone systems that walk customers through the easy to solve problems with mostly rote formulas. Add in a chatbot that can be better at handling slight exceptions and now the company can solve customer issues without having to pay a human to do the interaction. From my time answering phones for an internal IT department for a large-ish company, it’s clear that some people called just to interact with and talk with a human. Even if they could have solved their problem through an app before a human answered the phone. > Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human I’d suspect most of these aren’t all that specific or gnarly, but just that it can’t be done through the customer facing app, yet. When switching from physical SIM to eSIM, Verizon’s website kept erroring and directing me to call. I looked online and many posts said it was quickly solved with a call. I called and they fixed it quickly. That could almost certainly have been handled in an automated way, just not yet. I don’t think they even asked any questions, other than confirmation style ones, which a chatbot could have done. I needed to waste time calling and waiting in a queue to talk to a human. The company needed to pay someone to be waiting to answer that call and spend a few minutes with me. Seems like a great spot for a chatbot. My expectation from my limited experiences is that the number of calls that a sufficiently large business receives are not the specific or gnarly cases. I’d love to see real data.
• charles_f 3y ago
  Completely agree with the content. Side note on that: > Customer service is one category where I expect a lot of these jobs, honestly, to just go away. For long I have, and in normal conditions, I would have said hurray. Humanity invented a technology that automated some of its bothersome tasks, one thing less to do, we're collectively all for the better, freed to enjoy life or spend our time in a more productive way, whichever suits best. But in this world, the fruit of this automation is always reaped by the same people, and they're not those whose job was automated. The latter are now in a shity situation, the former are now marginally richer and won't share with anyone else.
  • itslennysfault 3y ago
    Yeah, lots of people think rich capitalists like exploiting people for their labor to enrich themselves, but the truth is they hate it. It's is an unfortunate necessity. If they can replace bothersome employees with a system that does the job "well enough" they'll do it over night and won't lose a wink of sleep over those who were displaced.
    • staticman2 3y ago
      >>Yeah, lots of people think rich capitalists like exploiting people for their labor to enrich themselves, but the truth is they hate it. The people who genuinely hate exploiting people for labor to enrich themselves do not become rich capitalists, in the same sense that people who genuinely hate heights do not become airplane pilots, and people who genuinely hate public speaking do not become theater actors.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > and won't lose a wink of sleep over those who were displaced. So then they don't hate it after all.
    • charles_f 3y ago
      Note that I didn't talk about the motivation, but just observed that this is how the system works. > but the truth is they hate it They hate having to rely on other people, or the exploitation part? Because if your thesis is the latter, go explain union busting, benefits stripping, or pretty much the entire state of the social system in the US.
• im_down_w_otp 3y ago
  > "The tech industry continues to push forward with chat bots, even though customers don’t want them" The same was true for the previous explosion of AI. Autonomous driving. That was, and remains being, an almost entirely industry-side push to the marketplace.
• danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Customers don't want crappy chat bots.
• lamontcg 3y ago
  Workers don't want open-office plans either but they keep building them. And there's a vocal minority that want to be able to buy a smaller truck in the United States, but they keep on building monstrosities with beds too short for a sheet of plywood. Time to start realizing that Capitalism doesn't really offer consumer choice or optimizes for the best outcomes for people, it optimizes for the best outcome for the business.
• magwa101 3y ago
  [dead]
• barbazoo 3y ago
  I would be happy talking to a chat not the was a real chat not not just a narrow and shallow decision tree with every leaf ending in connection to a human. Train a LLM on actual subject matter and give it access to customer data. The send a request for a change to a customers account to a human for approval. Example: making a minor change to a phone plan.
• WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Chat bots are the same as the support forms that suggest articles. Ergo useless. If I've arrived at your support form it already means I've done everything your articles say they do. Yes the modem is plugged in. Yes I've rebooted it. Yes the cable is good. Yes the house's electricity is on. No you didn't report an outage. files claim. 2 days later they replace a piece of cable 2 neighbors down and things work again. ...
• andylynch 3y ago
  I just want useful bots. A good one is in Bloomberg’s help function. Mostly it’s there to route you the the right human, but it does save time
• technimad 3y ago
  FTA: A chat bot can handle expected, middle-of-the-road queries (as in, for a bank, “what’s my balance” and so on) – but customers can get those answers already from the app or website. This is where the author misses the point. Chat bots will be te main interface in the future. Especially for these mundane middle of the road queries. Integrated into voice controlled ai buddies. The author is spot on for the more complicated requests. Even though these will be triaged by a the ai buddy.
• Tagbert 3y ago
  Our company, a travel provider, has a "chat bot" but it is just the first stage of a layers customer service experience. It is not an AI backed bot, though I'm sure that will come, eventually. The bot can handle basic functions like information, change, and cancel but on more complex servicing, it brings in a human agent. The customer always has the option to request a human agent. This lets customers self service for the simple stuff but still get a helping hand when they need it. In surveys our customers seem to like this approach with some indicating that they like being able to use something like this on their own rather than having to wait for an agent to be available. I think, as long as you give your customers options a structured first layer can be helpful as long as you give them a way out to more hands-on support.
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    I'm creating bots like this where the ai enhanced bot is fed a clients docs/industry info, and it's trained on closing techniques specific to the industry and it basically keeps following up on a schedule until the customer decides to book an appt, or opt out of further messages. I'm planning on other automations in the future for other workflows, but lead closing and appointment setting on autopilot 24/7 with a single monthly fee that's way less than hiring staff(even from India), in the end it's about giving automations knowledge and power through that knowledge but still the end result is a booking or action to often speak with someone after being warmed up. A friendly non pushy ai sales agent might even be better at sales than a seasoned sales person after some trial and error on training it. My agency is in it's infancy but I'm excited to see what our sales pros can/can't do.
• kderbyma 3y ago
  Chat bots are a way of saying Fuck you....without saying it.