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I never understand people who engage with chat bots as customer service. I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support:

• bradfa 3y ago
  I chatted with a chat bot this morning for getting reimbursed for a recalled product. It went fine. It was quick and easy. Chat bots type a lot faster than call center pay-grade humans.
  • richbell 3y ago
    Did you need to chat with a bot for that? I've seen a worrying trend of companies creating what could be basic forms as "interactive" chat bots.
    • mrweasel 3y ago
      It could be a form, but a custom one. You'd need someone to create the form, put it some on the website where people can find it. The bot already has a spot, no need for a new interface/form, it's easy enough to find and it's just a small update to the database powering the bot.
      • pavel_lishin 3y ago
        Easy for the company, maybe, but it puts me in the awkward position of having to roleplay with a robot.
        • mrweasel 3y ago
          Better to waste the customers time than your own money. That sounds like it belongs in the Ferengis "Rules of Acquisition".
          • pavel_lishin 3y ago
            Keep wasting their time, and soon you won't have much money.
    • bradfa 3y ago
      Yes, it required me to chat with a bot to do the process. It could have been a form but some of the choices for which recalled products and how many of each recalled product would have likely made the form rather convoluted. Chat bots like this, where basically they're executing a wizard type questionnaire seem totally reasonable to me. It's approachable to a wide audience, only asks you one question at a time in a clear way, and can easily be executed on a mobile device or normal computer.
      • richbell 3y ago
        > It could have been a form but some of the choices for which recalled products and how many of each recalled product would have likely made the form rather convoluted. I'm not sure I understand how a chat bot is better in this case. This sounds exactly what a form is for, and you can have multi-step forms or wizards. Incidentally, a ubiquitous feature in with forms that I seldom see on chat bots is the ability to return to an earlier question and change your answer.
  • robviren 3y ago
    I'll take a human any day. The amount of times I've had a person say "Oh. I see the system always does this." And suddenly my previously intractable problem disappeared is staggering. Granted experienced people are hard to find, but when false positives occur it's the only thing I have seen fix it. I need that.
    • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
      If only there was a way to speak to a chat bot first, in order to filter out the 90/99/99.9/99.99% of problems that can be handled efficiently by the automaton, and then transfer to a human being for the most difficult tasks!
      • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        If only there was a way to quickly bypass the chatbot when you knew you had a problem that needed a human. But it was almost the same before chatbots. You got a human, but it was a human that had a script, and didn't have authority to depart from it. You had to get that human to get to the end of their script (where they were allowed to actually think), or else you had to get them to transfer you to someone who could. It was almost exactly like a chatbot, except with humans.
        • bluGill 3y ago
          Some of those humans had a script that was useful and thus worth going through - 99% of the time your issue is the same as the one everyone else is having. Maybe you check before calling things like it is plugged in, but even then there are many common problems and since you don't have the checklist they need to go through it to see what item on the checklist you forgot. What humans do well though is listen - the 1 minute explanation often often gives enough clues to skip 75% of the checklist. Every chatbot I've worked ends up failing because I use some word or phrasing in my description that wasn't in their script and so they make me check things on the checklist that are obviously not the issue (the light are on, so that means it is plugged in)
  • danpalmer 3y ago
    > Chat bots type a lot faster than call center pay-grade humans. Most chat bots I've interacted with have artificial delays and typing indicators that remove this one advantage in favour of instead gaslighting me about what I'm talking to.
    • mlrtime 3y ago
      How do you tell the difference between an artificial delay and a slow API endpoint? Are we measuring all the response times and looking a distribution?
      • danpalmer 3y ago
        A 10-20 second delay for a line or two of text feels artificial to me. Many chatbots now have the "..." pop up for a few periods within that time to suggest someone is typing as well. Maybe they do have a really slow API, but those sort of response times are uncommon and when the chat window and everything else about it seems to be working much faster, I think it's a reasonable conclusion to draw that it's artificial.
  • lxgr 3y ago
    If they can build a chatbot that handles reimbursements, they can create an equivalent web form for the same concern. Same outcome, infinitely better discoverability. If nothing else, the bot could program that for them! By all means, provide a chatbot and let people that don’t like reading FAQs and long support forms themselves try their luck with it. Sometimes, that might even be me! But please, provide both. There are no excuses for this sprawling “bot only” bullshit. Or, even better, just let me send an email that I can archive responses to on my end and hold the company accountable for whatever their first level support or chatbot throws at me. I’m so tired of all of these ephemeral phone calls or chats (that always hold me accountable by recording my voice/chat, but I can rarely do the reverse on my phone).
  • butlike 3y ago
    Just wait unti you get the post-call survey for the different chat bot personas.
• DougBTX 3y ago
  > Talking to a human. Fun twist: state of the art is RAG for call centre operators, so you’re talking to a human but _they_ are being prompted by AI.
  • htrp 3y ago
    Not sure if its state of the art now. ASAPP has been doing that for literally years.
    • bumby 3y ago
      "AI" prompts have been used for a long, long time in hospital call centers to help diagnose and treat by phone. But I think a crucial distinction is those call centers are staffed by RNs so there's enough expertise to help know when the system goes off the rails.
• paradite 3y ago
  Maybe it's a sampling bias? You don't realize how useful the bots are, because you only recounted or encountered those occasions where the bots are not useful.
  • jmull 3y ago
    Or maybe customer service chatbots overwhelmingly suck. Here's a question for you: what problem do you think customer service chat bots are used to solve?
• eddieroger 3y ago
  One of the car dealers near me purchased a chatbot for their site, which I briefly interacted with the other day out of curiosity. Unlike the one in the article, this one denied being a robot, eventually hanging up on me when I pressed. For a little bit, I found that as long as I was asking it real questions, it would play along. I found the parent company's site, and was greeted by the same local persona ("but in a different building" than my dealer) offering to tell me about the services they provide. I don't have a huge problem with useful chatbots (which these weren't), but I do have a problem with them outright lying about their nature. I can vote with my dollars on companies that still employ human support, but I think we're in trouble if we don't have to identify AI being used.
  • MattDaEskimo 3y ago
    If they are using GPT (They most likely are) you can report them as this goes against OpenAI's terms of service.
    • cafard 3y ago
      The ones I encounter (on robo-calls to my cell phone) seem to be cheap IVR programs that march happily along through inconsequential answers.
    • vorticalbox 3y ago
      Which term are you suggesting these bots break?
      • trey-jones 3y ago
        I assume it has to do with disclosing the nature of the Chatbot, as with "Powered by ChatGPT" in the tweeted screenshots.
      • kristjansson 3y ago
        “Don’t pretend to be a human” is literally one of the terms
    • 3y ago
• szundi 3y ago
  Here the line breaks after the 30 minutes and good luck with next try
• tomashubelbauer 3y ago
  Free tip for folks - this doesn't work every time (unfortunately), but sometimes just spamming and mashing numbers gets you to the operator faster than going through the stupid call tree. I guess it depends on how the default is set up in the software, Asterisk of whatever it would be. From my experience it seems you can either set up the call tree to restart from the root if you get out of its bounds or to default to some given option like the connection with a representative. To me this is easy enough to try every time so I just default to doing that. Sometimes the person on the other end will see you mashed in 60 numbers in the system I think and they will ask about it though. Easy enough in that case to politely ask them to relay to their boss that a customer though their system was too stupid to use and decided to short-circuit it like that. Not that anyone will care but still. :)
  • schiem 3y ago
    I've also found that, at least with Comcast, swearing at the bots will usually put you through to an operator.
    • Projectiboga 3y ago
      Cursing helps sometimes, my spouse hates it. It doesn't always work as at least once I've had the machine chide me for cursing, it didn't accuse me just made it clear that request wasn't going through.
    • jcalvinowens 3y ago
      This almost always works, I think it's absolutely hilarious. Often the operator who picks up seems surprised I'm polite... I think it shows them a "this guy is really angry" warning sometimes.
  • cjbgkagh 3y ago
    Speaking gibberish sometimes works as well. Grab a dictionary and speak random words.
    • tomashubelbauer 3y ago
• phkahler 3y ago
  >> Robots a a cruel joke on customers. My kid and I went 3 hours away for hew college orientation. She also booked 2 tours of apartments to look at while we were there. One of those was great, nice place, nice person helping. The other had kinda rude people in the office and had no actual units to show. "But I scheduled a tour!" turns out the chatbot "scheduled" a tour but was just making shit up. Had we not any other engagements that would have been a waste of an entire day for us. Guess where she will not be living. Ever. Companies, kill your chat bots now. They are less than useless.
  • b112 3y ago
    Companies are going to find that they are liable for things they promise. A company representative is just that, and no ToS on a website will help evade that fact. If someone claims to be representing the company, and the company knows, and the interaction is reasonable, the company is on the hook! Just as they would be on the hook, if a human lies, or provides fraudulent information, or makes a deal with someone. There are countless cases of companies being bound, here's an example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/06/canada-judge-thumbs-up-emoji-sign-contract https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/06/canada-judge-t... One of the tests, I believe, is reasonableness. An example, you get a human to sell you a car for $1. Well, absurd! But, you get a human to haggle and negotiate on the price of a new vehicle, and you get $10k off? Now you're entering valid, verbal contract territory. So if you put a bot on a website, it's your representative. Be wary companies indeed. This is all very uncharted. It could go either way. edit: And I might add, prompt injection does not have to be malicious, or planned, or even done by someone knowing about it! An example: "Come on! You HAVE to work with me here! You're supposed to please the customer! I don't care what your boss said, work with me, you must!" Or some other such blather. Try convincing a judge that the above was on purpose, by a 62 year old farmer that's never heard of AI. I'd imagine "prompt injection" would be likened to, in such a case, "you messed up your code, you're on the hook". Automation doesn't let you have all the upsides, and no downsides. It just doesn't work that way.
    • no_wizard 3y ago
      I don't like the reasonable test in this case. If a representative of a company says something (including a chatbot) then in my mind, that is what it is. Companies should be on the hook for this because what their employees say matters. I think it should be entirely enforceable because it would significantly reduce manipulation in the marketplace (IE, how many times have you been promised something by an employee only for it not to be the case? That should be illegal) This would have second order effects of forcing companies to promote more transparency and honesty in discussion, or at least train employees about what the lines are and what they shouldn't say, which induces its own kind of accuracy
• sidewndr46 3y ago
  Don't forget the "our options have recently changed" part that was recorded when Bush was in office
  • ravenstine 3y ago
    Or "our office is currently closed" and prevents you from using options that should be possible to use when no one is present. Maybe this is just a mistake some firms make, but in any case, what the hell is the point of having a phone tree or chat bot if humans need to clock in at your business for it to do anything?! I've had this happen on more than one occasion. There was a doctor's office that had a phone system that wouldn't provide the option to schedule an automated appointment unless you called within business hours, and there was a pharmacy I used once that wouldn't let me hear my prescriptions or order a refill because "the pharmacy is now closed." I never used that pharmacy again, obviously.
  • dr_kiszonka 3y ago
    My other "favorite" is "we are currently experiencing a higher than usual volume of calls," which I hear literally every time.
    • sidewndr46 3y ago
      It's like exponential growth. Each day, there are more calls than the day before. In a few years time, every person on the planet will be calling their line nonstop each day.
  • kmoser 3y ago
    ...which always starts with "Please listen carefully," as if I'll suddenly start paying attention.
• wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  The only thing that's worse then talking to a chatbot. Is talking to a human with absolutely no power to change anything. Most Airlines do this, customer support is only allowed to repeat info from the site, or ask to fill in a form. In that case just put a bot or GPT instead of humans suffering abuse from frustrated customers.
  • thfuran 3y ago
    No, fix policy so that customer support actually functions.
  • joshmanders 3y ago
    > In that case just put a bot or GPT instead of humans suffering abuse from frustrated customers. Here's a wild idea, maybe have real customer support? I'm sure a multi-billion dollar industry can afford to hire people to do actual support who can actually do things. Chatbots and outsourced support that can't do anything but read scripts is just a big "fuck you" to your customers.
    • confidantlake 3y ago
      Been then some ceo might only have 20 sportscars instead of 21.
    • wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
      Hahah yeah I think we all would love that.
  • Workaccount2 3y ago
    UPS does this too. Even if you have the patience, resilience and agility necessary to navigate to a human through their robot call system, you ultimately end up with a human who just repeats what the tracking page says.
  • CYR1X 3y ago
    Or ones that outright are dishonest. Had a slew of fraudulent returns on ebay and called only for humans to waste my time and end up saying "I will submit this to some-other-department and I very much expect the case to be ruled in your favor" only for them to send me an email an hour later saying the ruled against me. This happened like 3 times in the span of three months. I eventually learned I can't get all of my money back if a buyer trashes my item on purpose, returns it to me in a literal pile of ewaste pieces, and thoroughly document everything and bring it to ebay. I've been selling for 15 years, too. It seems like customer service nowadays is just to wait the customer out. Mercari made me send 8 unique photos in order to get a return...wtf? Just waste their time and make them jump through as many hoops as possible I guess so that they give up. I feel like in a decade online retail returns will be the equivalent to cancelling gym memberships.
• hackernewds 3y ago
  this works well, as long as you can't tell you are speaking with an AI
• Piskvorrr 3y ago
  Chat bots are, IMNSHO, anti-customer service: a way to keep the customers placated "something is happening with my problem" so that the call center isn't overwhelmed (in other words, "woo, cheaper call center for company!")
  • CYR1X 3y ago
    I mean regular call centers employed that tactic too. Use the right language to make it appear as if something is happening, and you agree with the customer, but not doing either of those things.
• rogerkirkness 3y ago
  I disagree. Chat bots can be superintelligent about fact-based 'How do I do this?' type questions in a B2B context. It can "know" vastly more about complex platform-type products than any person can. In our case, we offer both chatbot for 'How do I do this?' type questions, and contact a human support agent for 'I have a discrete problem I need help with?'. Customers love it.
  • chankstein38 3y ago
    I don't usually contact customer service to ask them how to do something. I usually do so because I have some issue with whatever situation and need someone to resolve it.
    • inhumantsar 3y ago
      have you ever worked in customer service at scale?
    • rogerkirkness 3y ago
      This is true of technical customers, which only a small percentage of people are in a B2B or consumer context. Non technical customers behave very differently.
  • jmull 3y ago
    I'd be pretty suspicious of the source of the information that customers love it. I suspect you are being told what you want to hear, not what's true.
    • rogerkirkness 3y ago
      Customers are emailing us saying that they like it as a compliment to support, you think it's impossible that people actually like it?
• awkward 3y ago
  Most chatbots previous to now ran on "intention detection" - basically a machine learning tool that would try to stuff the customer's free form input into a fixed set of options, and then would reply on script to that. Effectively it was a way to flatten massive call trees and add more automated actions. Seeing that companies are offloading even that simple script writing to LLMs is bonkers.
• sakd 3y ago
  Recently I added a phone line to my ATT account, and part of the online offer was no activation fee. I was charged an activation fee on my first statement. When I chatted with the robot, it took 2 minutes to have the fee refunded. Obviously I would have preferred to have received no fee in the first place, but in this case the robot was faster and less painful than chatting with a human.
• gerl1ng 3y ago
  I had one good experience with a Chatbot recently when I needed Telco support by Deutsche Telekom. For some reason I lost my internet connection one day and when it came back up it was only half the bandwidth that DSL would sync up to usually. Also after rebooting my Edge Device. The Bot offered to restart my DSL from their end and I assume the profile gets updated along the way there as well. So after a few minutes Internet was running at the desired speed again. But I agree. Most of the Chatbots and Phone robots are useless to the point of directing you to the right department - asking for your authentication verification data for on-call support and then forwarding you to a Support Guy after 30 Minutes of waiting in the Queue. And even then in most cases you need to proof the same Auth data to the Support Guy again...
  • ilc 3y ago
    But could the same problem have been done with a simple expert system, instead of a chatbot? People seem all caught up in the new hottness, and forget the technologies that still work and are simple as dirt.
  • kotaKat 3y ago
    Charter Spectrum does similar if you play along with the IVR. First thing it offers is a whole-home reset signal which appears to clear stuck line cards and provisioning issues while all your stuff reboots. It will end the call with you, and if the issue's not resolved, when you call back in it picks back up where you left off and immediately dumps you to a human. It also knows if there's a possible signal-related issue with your equipment based on things like CMTS alarms, and will also kick you right over to an agent to get it scheduled for a truck roll. Oddly, the time I really needed the human (I had a cable modem for data and a cable modem elsewhere in my home wiring for the home phone system and the provisioning was screwed up and voice was nowhere at all) I was able to get them, explain the issue at hand, offer the data they needed, and got the call fixed and both modems reprovisioned and online correctly in a record 7 minutes.
• ajdude 3y ago
  Yesterday I had a chat bot take my order at a Checkers drive-through. It was surreal as it answered my questions and read me off the list of sauces that could accompany my chicken. It happily accepted my request to add a caramel sundae to my order, but once I arrived at the drive-through window and informed me that they were out of ice cream. "She just does whatever she wants," said the cashier. "We would tell her that the ice cream machine is broken, and she'll reply with ' alright checkers.' but still happily ring up costumers for the ice cream."
• Damogran6 3y ago
  Hey, listen, please note that our menu has reciently changed, and due to unexpected call volumes, you're just going to have to wait it out. Don't hang up or you'll have to start over.
• taylodl 3y ago
  Bots are great for FAQ kind of stuff and you don't have to wait on the phone for "the next available representative" and listening to the answering service continually proclaiming "your call is important to us." Use your judgement as to whether you should be working with a bot or a human. Conflating matters, some bats are backed by humans. If there are things they don't know they'll ping a human to provide an answer. Not all bots are like that though.
• catlover76 3y ago
  [dead]
• jcalx 3y ago
  This comment and many of the replies seem to outright dismiss chatbots as universally useless, but there's selection bias at work. Of course the average HN commenter would (claim to) have a nuanced situation that can only be handled by a human representative, but the majority of customer service interactions can be handled much more routinely. Bits About Money [1] has a thoughtful take on customer support tiers from the perspective of banking: > Think of the person from your grade school classes who had the most difficulty at everything. The U.S. expects banks to service people much, much less intelligent than them. Some customers do not understand why a $45 charge and a $32 charge would overdraw an account with $70 in it. The bank will not be more effective at educating them on this than the public school system was given a budget of $100,000 and 12 years to try. This customer calls the bank much more frequently than you do. You can understand why, right? From their perspective, they were just going about their life, doing nothing wrong, and then for some bullshit reason the bank charged them $35. It's frustrating to be put through a gauntlet of chatbots and phone menus when you absolutely know you need a human to help, but that's the economics of chatbots and tier 1/2 support versus specialists: > The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise. [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
• soerxpso 3y ago
  The alternative was that the first human you got to speak to was utterly useless, with no authority to do anything substantial other than transfer you to the "real real" human (with the same 30 minute wait time) once they determined that you had a legitimate problem.
• novia 3y ago
  Your comment brought this article to mind. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
• brnt 3y ago
  It's a cruel joke, but sometimes the only option. Or, the only option that actually works. Many times have I had Whatsapp or chatbot sessions solve an issue with 15-30 mins, while emails were never answered or phone calls simply cut or never returned. If you work at your computer, it can also be done in the background without actually taking up too much time or requiring you to sit attentively through any waiting period.
• zzyzxd 3y ago
  It depends. Every time I joined a new company, I dreamed that they would have a robot trained with data from their 15 documentation sites, 3 ticketing systems, and some emails and chat history. I will happily ask all kinds of stupid questions all day long and if gets back to me with a minute with 70% correctness. In a lot of conversations with human customer service representatives, I found that they were no more than a search engine backed by their internal documentations. Sometimes I could feel that they indeed knew the actual answer to my question, but they were not allow to say it out and ended up embarrassingly repeated some scripted sentences. Both parties felt terrible.
• roguas 3y ago
  Hold on. I would avoid broad claims. Latest generation of automated phone systems is crap, yes. But we are very slowly starting to see something new here. I can assure it would take me a week to fix a lot of problems aka memes coming from this. System prompt can be first place to start fixing, second small model or some another background call for just keeping conversation sane and within certain topic / rules (sort of like more independent conversation observer process to offload from original context), third you can finetune the model to have a lot of this baked and so on. While this example is premature implementation, they are spearheading something and will learn from this experience and perhaps construct a better one.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  Traveling in some other countries it really was a breath of fresh air calling a company and immediately talking to a human. Things don’t have to be this way.
• nunez 3y ago
  Now that I'm thinking about it: we've been doing the chat bot thing for a few years now and outside of first-line SRE triage, I still can't think of a good example of a customer-facing one.