3 ms·

What’s obvious to me is that I’m not calling customer service to talk to or yell at a human. I am calling to get my problem solved. Perhaps you and I have diffe

What’s obvious to me is that I’m not calling customer service to talk to or yell at a human. I am calling to get my problem solved. Perhaps you and I have different goals? > So, for all I know, they could have something that just says, "don't worry, we're working on it," if it detects that my internet is offline. (IE, I don't know if anyone is actually working on it.) Why would you trust this exact communication from a person over a computer?

gwbas1c 3y ago
> I am calling to get my problem solved That is the only reason why I call customer support in internet outages. I usually wait awhile before I call. (In this case, I called a few hours after their posted ETA.) > Why would you trust this exact communication from a person over a computer? This response in this thread explains it very well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661196 > 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. Like I said, above, I called a few hours after their expected ETA. This is the situation where it's time to call a human who can call up the manager of a different department and say, "you said it was going to be done three hours ago, what's happening?" It's basically a "Gall's Law" situation. The AI Chatbot is perfectly fine for a "normal" outage that's solved within the ETA; but once the published ETA has come and gone, we're in a corner case that's better handled by humans. For a good explanation of this, see this recent article on Gall's Law that explains why it's better to let humans handle corner cases: https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/complex-project-galls-law/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CA%20complex%20system%20that%20works,with%20a%20working%20simple%20system.%E2%80%9D https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/complex-project-galls-law/...

gwbas1c 3y ago

> I am calling to get my problem solved That is the only reason why I call customer support in internet outages. I usually wait awhile before I call. (In this case, I called a few hours after their posted ETA.) > Why would you trust this exact communication from a person over a computer? This response in this thread explains it very well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661196 > 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. Like I said, above, I called a few hours after their expected ETA. This is the situation where it's time to call a human who can call up the manager of a different department and say, "you said it was going to be done three hours ago, what's happening?" It's basically a "Gall's Law" situation. The AI Chatbot is perfectly fine for a "normal" outage that's solved within the ETA; but once the published ETA has come and gone, we're in a corner case that's better handled by humans. For a good explanation of this, see this recent article on Gall's Law that explains why it's better to let humans handle corner cases: https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/complex-project-galls-law/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CA%20complex%20system%20that%20works,with%20a%20working%20simple%20system.%E2%80%9D https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/complex-project-galls-law/...