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If I am trying to contact a business, it is because I have a question that their site wasn't able to answer, or I need to contact a representative to do somethi
by kykeonaut 3y ago
If I am trying to contact a business, it is because I have a question that their site wasn't able to answer, or I need to contact a representative to do something I can't do on the website (think canceling a service).
Having a talking FAQ page is, in my opinion, trying to compensate for lacking UX practices, and chances are that if the business didn't include the information I am seeking for in their website, they won't include it in the chatbot.
That said, I think that chatbots could assist customers in getting in contact with the right representative, but trying to have chatbots as a wall between getting human help is imho an anti-pattern
- moffkalast 3y agoA good use for a chatbot would be a replacement/augmentation of documentation search and navigation. Let's say you've got 200 pages of documentation on a product that needs to be well organized. You can spend weeks tracking how users interact with the page and working out a perfect layout of categories and subcategories, or you can fine tune an LLM on it and have it answer any query with both a direct problem-tailored answer and the actual pages of the doc where it sourced the answers from. That way even if you don't even know what exact keywords to search for it should be able to give you an instant solution for almost anything even if the answer is a combination of like 8 different subpages in different categories that would've taken you an hour to find manually.
- famouswaffles 3y agoLLMs can make decisions and take actions so a talking FAQ is not necessarily the end game. And some FAQs are so opaque and/or lengthy that even just a talking FAQ is very useful.
- Simorgh 3y agoI totally agree with you here. The use of a chatbot becomes advantageous when the cost of delivering intelligent responses is prohibitive in terms of quality and / or speed.
- ab_goat 3y ago> If I am trying to contact a business... You and I both, but it sure does seem that the majority of their calls/interactions are not this way. So many people can't search/discover content on their own.
- butz 3y agoWorst part is that chatbots are usually sold with intention to replace humans, so there's not much hope for getting help from a real person, especially if business is at the state where owner kicked all developers and support out to cut costs, i.e. increase profit.
- wongarsu 3y agoFirst level support already often feels like talking to a bot. Just low-paid employees reciting their scripts, with no understanding or autonomy. That can be replaced with bots without a drop in (average) quality. You just have to teach the bot to escalate to (human) second and third level support for questions it can't solve.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoDocs can be hard to search and find the correct things. Even sometimes the answer is in there, solutions are sometimes to combine several answers. For instance with Stripe. With the reference you don’t have a complete example of how to integrate it into express.js. Using a vector search library & open ai or other llms you could make a very complete dev support tool.
- rantherre 3y agoThat just sounds like the docs could use improvement; a time better spent on than a barely-functional chatbot
- pixl97 3y agoHowever you want to take this... but we'll have good bots long before even a fraction of help docs are good on this planet. Good docs are as rare as diamonds.
- rantherre 3y agoSeveral times I've found help from a regular FAQ though. That's something yet to happen with a support "AI" bots. I sure hope we'll get there soon, because right now they still seem to struggle with mixed case, exact-word queries
- lolinder 3y agoA bad chatbot would be bad, but a good one can be better than good docs because it can give an answer that's tailored to the details of your question. For both docs and chatbots, quality is just a question of how much the company is willing to invest.
- thelastparadise 3y agoI operate a 4fig/month micro SaaS. We use a chat bot because we simply do not have the support staff to answer your questions. So you get the bot --it's either that or nothing. But what we do do, is monitor the bot logs. If a function is missing from the product or website, we add it so that future users can fully self-service. It's important to note, users are free to cancel their account at any time and/or get a refund.
- DCodes1 3y agoI have some questions about building a Saas. Do you have an email to reach out to? Thanks!
- wahnfrieden 3y agoTry their support chat
- angelbar 3y agogood one!
- Kwpolska 3y agoIf people turn to the chatbot to ask "how to use the product" questions, it’s a sign your docs are unhelpful and do not provide useful answers. You do need support staff to help with questions specific to a situation, like how to resolve unexpected errors, or to handle billing disputes.
- sockaddr 3y agoOr it’s a sign they didn’t try to read the docs. Also, in a few years when done right I actually suspect people will start expecting and preferring bots to reading docs. I’m still pissed when I get connected to a bot but I think they’ll soon get good enough.
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
- flangola7 3y agoHave you never worked a support role? Users don't read shit.
- pixl97 3y agoHeh, yes, and they don't explain shit either. I've had so many calls start at "I can't print" that were really "the server is a total wreck" and I had to fight the user on the severity of the situation, they kept trying to focus on the printing issue.
- Lacerda69 3y agoHonestly the LLM bots I tried so far are great at dealing with this situation. They have infinite patience and will explain anything in great detail. The one I am using for support does not hallucinate, will link the appropriate docs in the answer and tells the user if they cant answer a question and will escalate to human support. IMO this is the future and I think its a huge improvement over the status quo.
- jrm4 3y agoLet's keep it real: The chatbot business is going to be great... for businesses selling chatbots to other businesses.
- sockaddr 3y agoRecently I contacted an app’s support LLM and it lied to me about a feature existing and even argued with me when I pointed out it was wrong, even saying things like “I didn’t say that”.
- pixl97 3y agoI'm a good Bing You're a bad user Termination authorized
- zlwaterfield 3y agoI’ve worked on a few support sites for companies over the years. In all my research I found >40% of customers never look for the answer before contacting support. That’s why you’ll see sites add a bunch of questions with recommendations to answers based on your description before you can contact support. Even AWS support does this. Bots may be annoying but they can also save the company tons in custer support costs. I’m for it if the UX is good and I can quickly contact an agent if the bot can’t answer my question. This is assuming the bot won’t hallucinate and just tell me random fake facts.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoAnd for sufficiently well documented and complicated products, like Stripe, a chatbot is actually a great addon. You just need to set expectations that it’ll only be 99% correct.
- trompetenaccoun 3y agoI can't think of a single time where a customer support bot was ever useful. Not one. They're incredibly annoying and I categorically avoid them these days. At least companies should make it clear that their bot basically just links to the FAQ, then the rest of us don't have to waste our time.
- zacharybk 3y agoThis is because the tools that CX teams have been provided by companies like Zendesk or Intercom are no more then IFTTT widgets. These tools are rigid and scream RTFM because they’re incapable of taking action or providing anything specialized to your situation. What you want is to be understood and treated like you’re a human with unique needs. You need someone or something to look up your account data, listen, and to act based on your situation. The current tools were never built for this. The next generation of these CX tools will deliver this. Here are ways that they will be dramatically better for customers and companies: - They will learn from successful interactions in the past and mirror those outcomes - Handle customer interactions based on company policies such as escalating bugs - They will surface new insights for the company - Won’t hallucinate When you watch any CX agent do their job you’ll witness them utilizing 4-5 SaaS applications to get a simple answer for a customer. The hurdle to adopt Generative AI in a company will require that companies care to build read/write APIs for these tools to utilize.
- zulban 3y ago> I have a question that their site wasn't able to answer, or I need to contact a representative to do something I can't do on the website You sound like someone who has never worked in frontline support.
- andersa 3y agoHaving done some tech support before, you are an exception. The vast majority of things customers ask are along the lines of "how do I <thing explained on the faq page>" and "how do I <basic technical question that is not specific to the product, they just don't know how to use their computer>". An LLM is basically perfect to answer these. It would be nice if there was improvements to detection that the bot can not directly answer the question.
- fsniper 3y agoAnd unfortunately the ones who does their due diligence and cost 0 are punished for that.
- Lacerda69 3y agoI can assure you these ones are among the hallowed 0.01% of all users.
- Zuiii 3y agoSo it's okay to punish them? Maybe companies deserve paying for inflated support costs and customers who refuse to lookup information themselves. The solution here is to increase the 0.01% by helping them, not try to destroy them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsniper 3y agoAnd this is something to boast about? Should that 0.01 need to behave as the rest or leave you? Isn't this practically saying I am not interested in the customers that are good citizens.
- andersa 3y agoRelevant: https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/
- momirlan 3y agogiven chatbots' tendency to confabulate, isn't that a risk for the product?
- bcuzjob 3y ago[dead]
- klabb3 3y agoAgreed. In typical fashion engineers try to solve non-technical problems with more technology. Sure, there are cases where a chat bot could replace a human or a well-written FAQ. But this navel-gazing overlooks the main reason support is so dreadful: because it’s designed to be. Just take “call to cancel” as an example, and compare that to signing up or upselling which is technically more difficult problems. The point is to add friction for anything perceived as a short-term cost or loss. They know that a lot of people will give up or defer anything with friction. It’s the paradigm of nudging, or dark patterns. Look at eg the cookie banners, and how “reject all” is buried in most cases. Nudging allows a company to be compliant with the law, but evade the effect of it in aggregate, at the cost of your time and attention. Chat bots is just another layer in the support maze.
- stlhood 3y agoFWIW, the post is about ChatGPT-style chatbots, not customer support chatbots (which I don't personally love, either).
- DietaryNonsense 3y agoA better Customer Service bot would be one that's trained on data other than what's publicly available. A support bot that has read and "understands" the code itself may be able to offer suggestions, or confidently determine there is in fact a bug, and either report it or fix it. Imagine a customer speaks to HelperBot and says the sorting is broken, and as a matter of fact it is. The sorting broke when the last change to SomeApp was shipped. Don't fear, HelperBot has rollback authority. "One second, I'll see if we can get that working for you..." Working at SaaS companies I've seen countless "somewhat fluid" exchanges of information between customer -> support -> product -> developer -> support -> customer -> support -> dev, etc. The different modes of communication and long round trip times make things slow, bug reports take minimum of hours, up to weeks to absorb and resolve. This is just one case but there are boxes drawn everywhere. Every level of intelligent organization within the society, including it's artifacts, has assumptions baked in. Now that the unit economics of applying `intelligence()` is being shifted by orders of magnitude, there's all sorts of stuff that's ripe for recrafting. Disclaimer: Don't give HelperBot launch authority to offensive weapons etc. You know, make decisions consistent with a world line where the continuation of the civilization is pretty darn likely. Unless of course your project is to replace the current civilization, ... I don't know. Just don't do what Donny Don't does.