4 ms·
No offense to anyone but if I've learned one thing in life, those "Indian" (emphasizing "low-cost", not to appear racist or anything, just using the term Indian
by can16358p 3y ago
No offense to anyone but if I've learned one thing in life, those "Indian" (emphasizing "low-cost", not to appear racist or anything, just using the term Indian because of the contextual relevance) tech support calls never ever solve anything at all, and anything they can remotely solve can be solved by reading FAQ or through simple menus anyway.
Pretty much sure AI can do a better job at virtually negligible cost.
- ishaanbahal 3y agoIndian here, that may be true for outsourced customer support with no actual company folks intervening but rather giving guidelines and scripts, but the startups running for India (say Zomato, Swiggy etc), the support team tends to help a lot (once you manage to connect with them after the silly chatbot that's always useless, relinquishes control), their priority is much like the early days of amazon where customer success was everything. Ironically, all western companies that have made it to India, have the same kind of support as you mentioned, like Uber, Amazon(lately) etc. I'm unsure what the Dukaan model is, as its a storefront business, I guess most requests were essentially about how to do this/that on the store front, that can basically be an LLM ran over a small data set of their own FAQ. I wonder if their bot also has hallucination issues.. The 10% remaining CX folks are probably there to answer questions or give support on the genuine problems that are solved case by case.
- solarkraft 3y agoYou're responding as if it was about nationality. It's not fair that the keyword for "useless customer support" has become "Indian". Of course there are competent tech people in India - a lot of them. Can we find a better name?
- xethos 3y agoI would have thought "Outsourced", personally. Because whether to America or Uzbekistan, outsourced support always leaves me feeling like the company just does. not. care.
- mcny 3y agoThat is my understanding as well. It is like faulting “Chinese manufacturing” when they actually mean bottom of the barrel cheapest option. I mean the Chinese manufacturers build everything from Xboxes and iPhones to fly by night knock offs. I’d imagine if our customer service based in India sucks it is either because we didn’t pay them enough or because even we don’t understand our own business processes to explain what we want from them.
- inglor_cz 3y agoAlmost all my horror stories from tech support involve a live call with someone whose accent was so heavy as to be almost undecipherable. Either from India or from Malaysia. As a non-native speaker myself, I struggled to understand anything, but going through the call was necessary in order to get important situations solved, or at least bumped up to someone more qualified. (Hey Microsoft, you really like to cheap out on support!) If a robot calls me instead, it will at the very least speak some kind of standard English.
- hulitu 3y agoI don't want to invalidate your answer but a lot of spoken English is non intelligible. Ever heard a scot speak English ? Or an american from midwest ?
- DharmaPolice 3y agoI doubt they'd make the default dialect for a chatbot Glaswegian. Although presumably giving variable accents (based on customers location or even user input) wouldn't be impossible.
- DougN7 3y agoIsn’t the American midwest considered the default? Maybe you mean the deep south?
- slowmovintarget 3y agoIt is. American Midwestern accent is the equivalent of BBC English in the UK. Source: Am from the Midwest, and have heard interviews of actors and newscasters discussing this.
- can16358p 3y agoSame. I'm not a native myself but have a generally good level of understanding English. Those tech support people (and the always-extremely-compressed-level-audio-quality-from-56k-era) are another level: even if they are actually telling me an answer that'd work (which they rarely do), it's almost impossible to understand what they say. No one expects native-Shakespearean-level accent with lossless FLAC encoded audio, but at least a baseline level of English accent and a microphone better than a potato should be a requirement when hiring.
- reaperducer 3y agoPretty much sure AI can do a better job at virtually negligible cost. So instead of reading the same paragraph of a script at me in a loop when it doesn't know the answer to a question, the customer service agent is going to "hallucinate" an answer. What could possibly go wrong?
- can16358p 3y agoThe user must "convince" the chatbot for it to tell anything truely/dangerously wrong, in which case it's user's own fault.
- thunkshift1 3y agoFwiw tech support for any indian based company especially startups is pretty damn good. I. US you have to move mountains to be able to talk to a human.