6 ms·

Can't read the whole of the article, but it mentions 2.3 million conversations in the first month of deployment. I wonder how this will play out in a six-month

Can't read the whole of the article, but it mentions 2.3 million conversations in the first month of deployment. I wonder how this will play out in a six-month-to-year timeframe. A month's enough time for the suits to say "look at all of the money we're not paying employees now!" but not enough time for customer service issues to bubble up into the zeitgeist. Considering Klarna's business is in lending I could see some regulatory attention here in the future. I used to be a bank teller. There was a point of pride that when a customer called with a problem, a human answered the phone. Now, that was 15 years ago, and LLMs are pretty good at impersonating a human's presence, but when you have people unable to easily get to a human on something that can impact finances and credit ratings, that's not going to fly.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
AI can probably do pretty well at 95% of the questions, if you insist you probably still can get an operator, but that's like maybe 1/100 calls, or 1/1000... and one person could handle 1000 jobs, people still get their issues solved (maybe a little slower), but for the company they probably see that as worth it.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  If you are talking to support, you already know your question isn't in the 95% easy ones.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    That might be true for you, but truly there is a lot of silly/low hanging fruit support questions.
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    I think that's circumstantial. Much as I'm a grouchy curmudgeony geezer at heart, I must begrudgingly admit that at my company, the "HR Chatbot" went from "complete waste of time" to "can, shockingly, answer my questions most of the time" in the last 5 years. It's actually pretty good these days, and has good paths to guide it, constrain it, or escalate to a human. Mind you a) This is for internal customers not external and b) I don't think it's LLM in the backend, mind you, but not every AI is LLM. This is not to say that I enjoy the current level of customer service or its direction, but honestly I have not enjoyed customer service levels for the last 25 years, on average, well before AI. The problem is usually fundamentally corporate policies and priorities and processes, not whether they're implemented by a human or AI. In the perfect world of unicorns and rainbows, I'm OK with the concept/goal of "90% of repetitive questions/requests get handled automatically, save humans for where human judgment is required". So I guess there's a semi-optimistic part of me in addition to the grouchy geezer :)
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Why does no one else get this?
    - zith 3y ago
      Because it's not true? Anyone who has ever been close to the customer support role knows that there is a constant battle to help the customers answer questions on their own, and you will never be completely successful. It seems some people prefer calling/chatting to finding info on their own. Even trivial info.
    - grepLeigh 3y ago
      This is only true for some customers, who obsessively research a solution before reaching out to support. Having worked in CS roles early in my career, 95% of tickets are covered verbatim by an FAQ macro. For some (most) people, it just never occurs to them to search/research their question.
      - _xivi 3y ago
        > For some (most) people, it just never occurs to them to search/research their question. I think this is more of an illusion because you're close to the action. Just think of how many times you looked for your phone while holding it in your hand? or how you missed your keys that where on the table multiple times until someone else pointed it out. How many time you could swear you had to flip the USB 3 times before you could plug it in. This preception happens whenever there's an imbalance. For you, this system is centric to your life, you know it inside out, while for customer, it's a 1/100 fraction in their life and it's also not functioning at the moment and they need to move on. So there's a mix of inexperience, stress, fear to DIY and f it up, etc. When you personally contact support for another service, you think of it as normal, you done your homework, it's a serious issue, you rarely do it, you think you're an example of a good customer, the problem is with their product, but on the other side, at scale, it's another customer who didn't bother to RTFM or learn their 100s of courses. At scale, you're not going to sit and imagine the life of every person and plot different complex scenarios of how they got here, your brain just takes the easy way out and say it was clear as day, there's no possible excuse other than they didn't look. This is one ugly side-effect of having "departments", you only ever see one side. In the past, you both lived in the same town, you have a business, they have a business, you got invited to their wedding, your kids played with their kids, etc. Now you only see people outside your inner circle through one lens. If you're in sales you see $$, if you're in support you see purely clueless people.
  - pradn 3y ago
    Much of the time you have to call support to get them to do this they don't want to be easy to do - like cancelling subscriptions, or initiating a refund.
  - nicbou 3y ago
    People will use the contact page on my website to ask me questions all the time. In many cases, they will ignore all the content that answers their question, skip the part of the contact page that tells them to use the search first and that I don't offer services, find my email address and ask me to do work for them. Some people are just unwilling to help themselves. Just thinking of how many times people outsource their Google search to a community.
  - sekai 3y ago
    > If you are talking to support, you already know your question isn't in the 95% easy ones. Common sense is not that common
  - sfn42 3y ago
    People are idiots, they call support for the dumbest shit.
    - UncleEntity 3y ago
      I call one of my utilities every month to get them to tell me the same thing (flush the cookies) so I can pay my bill. They can't be bothered to fix their website and I have the free time so...
- kikokikokiko 3y ago
  I was usually able to get through a human operator on the biggest fintech in my country by starting every conversation on their website chatbox with "I want to talk to a human being". Well, last week I had a problem that needed to be solved, and guess what, my "magic" phrase resulted in "human assistants are only available on business days, 9 to 5... the problem is, it was Monday 10AM. And the same happened on Tuesday. And my problem still isn't solved. So I believe they're phasing out the human part of their customer service. And I'll probably be phasing out the customer part of our relationship very soon if these shenaningans persist.
  - alsetmusic 3y ago
    > And I'll probably be phasing out the customer part of our relationship very soon if these shenaningans persist. And over time, all banks will adopt these technologies and the market won't give you a choice. This is the hell we live in.
  - madphilosopher 3y ago
    First, they phase out the service part of "customer service." Then, the customer part falls away naturally. Or, at least, that's what we would hope for.
  - ericmcer 3y ago
    They have to keep a human element, there is no way they can give the chatbot authority to do things like reset passwords, add users to accounts, issue refunds, etc. If they do that will be a hilarious attack vector for companies.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > no way they can give the chatbot authority to do things like reset passwords, add users to accounts, issue refunds, etc. Plenty of companies have zero human support. The shitty solution is to just refuse to do those things. Lost your password and back-up codes? Create a new account. Need a refund? Contact the vendor.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
- intended 3y ago
  I deal with these kinds of things, and to me it boils down to these 2 questions 1) What is the actual error rate? 2) What is the acceptable process error rate?
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Given what Klarna is, which is basically low friction financing taking advantage of people with bad impulse control^1, I suspect the LLM will do fine because like... what are you really doing here, as a Klarna customer service person anyway? I'd imagine the lions share of their calls/chats consist of one of the following scenarios: - Yes you do actually have to pay this payment - Yes we can arrange to pay off the full balance immediately - Some kind of potential fraud - A problem with the ordered item, which gets redirected to the seller immediately [1]: This is not a judgement on the people, to be clear. I think shit like Klarna is frankly disgusting and blatantly taking advantage of people susceptible to impulsive purchases.
- tagyro 3y ago
  You have my vote! Klarna, and other BNPL's (Buy Now, Pay Later), are predatory and misleading. Source: https://www.klarna.com/us/customer-service/what-is-financing-and-how-does-it-work/ https://www.klarna.com/us/customer-service/what-is-financing...
  - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    I use Klarna Pay Later all the time for planned purchases. It's awesome. I pay only when an item is delivered, the state is verified, and I'm keeping it. If I have/decide to send the thing back (a couple of occasions), I just let them know that the return is on the way. No money changes hands.
- kristofferR 3y ago
  I don't agree, I think Klarna is awesome. Klarna BNPL is like a CC, good for those who can handle it. It doubles your credit period (so you get 30 days Klarna + 30 days Credit Card) for free, leading to higher returns if you believe you can handle credit profitably. Not only that, but it's also quicker to pay with than CC (No 3DSecure) and you get all your ordered items in a usable list. Way more secure than giving my credit card information freely away to random webshops too. If you don't want BNPL you can pay right away through Klarna anyway, it's like Paypal in that regard. They don't seem predatory at all to me TBH, if they were, they wouldn't have autopay and send you so many notifications if you don't have that enabled. They don't even charge me anything for semi-late payment of a few days late.
importantbrian 3y ago
> Considering Klarna's business is in lending I could see some regulatory attention here in the future. I hope they've solved the hallucination problem because I would be terrified to trust LLMs to handle customer service issues in a heavily regulated industry.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  LLMs should never do customer support in heavily regulated Industries in the first place. I hope that becomes one of the new regulations. Why is it that brick and mortar businesses need to provide customer support and online business get to dodge that responsibility? Regulations need to catch up on them.
  - Novosell 3y ago
    I mean, we have self check out at every grocery store and fast food place in Norway. Automation is coming for all the jobs.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Yeah but the self checkout hasn't and most likely wont' replace all human cashiers.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      That came to the US like 15 years ago and there are still cashiers and nonself checkouts
      - Novosell 3y ago
        Is there a 15 year deadline for it to disrupt the market or something? And there are markets other than the US. The big store near me has, I believe, 16 self checkouts and 2 tills, usually 1 being manned by the same person who handles all the self checkouts.
        3y ago
midnitewarrior 3y ago
I don't think they are a lending company. They do not charge interest, their model lets you pay over time, and you pay a fixed fee to extend the payments. It's all fee based, no interest, so i think there's some regulations they get to sidestep.
- salawat 3y ago
  What's interest but a fee for not paying right now? You can call it a fee, or a surcharge, but in the end it's principal + interest for deviating from a schedule.
- piva00 3y ago
  They have a product called "monthly" in some markets, in Sweden it charges 19,99%/y of interests. Klarna Bank AB is a bank, providing credit and charging interests, it got its bank licence from Finansinspektionen around 2017-2018.
spywaregorilla 3y ago
I pray for the day I can get an LLM representing a bank with apparent authority to negotiate financial arrangements.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  I wouldn't want that. They can't be held liable.
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    They absolutely can. That is how apparent authority works.
  - Incipient 3y ago
    The airline in Canada was held liable for what it's support bot said...which I think is a great precedent, and would/should apply to banks too.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      Generally when I see decisions like that, I just wonder how long before the companies either come up with some good case law to defend against such a suit in court, or get the legislatures to release them from liability for what their chatbots say. Maybe I'm just a liiiiittle bit jaded, though.
    - Havoc 3y ago
      “Great” precedent - sorta. You can make an LLM say nearly anything even with safety rails as the jailbreaks prove. Hardly something liability can be pinned on Great in principle perhaps but it won’t stand the test of time.
      - ado__dev 3y ago
        I think it'll fall on some "would a reasonable person believe this" test. Like if you ask an official company chatbot a question and it blatantly lies to you, I'd say you have some recourse. Like for example you ask about the return policy and bot says 30 days, when it's actually 15. Versus looking at the chatlog and seeing the customer tell the chatbot to repeat to them that the company is going to give them $10,000, and then suing said company to get the $10k.

gremlinsinc 3y ago

AI can probably do pretty well at 95% of the questions, if you insist you probably still can get an operator, but that's like maybe 1/100 calls, or 1/1000... and one person could handle 1000 jobs, people still get their issues solved (maybe a little slower), but for the company they probably see that as worth it.

LtWorf 3y ago
If you are talking to support, you already know your question isn't in the 95% easy ones.
- krisoft 3y ago
  That might be true for you, but truly there is a lot of silly/low hanging fruit support questions.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  I think that's circumstantial. Much as I'm a grouchy curmudgeony geezer at heart, I must begrudgingly admit that at my company, the "HR Chatbot" went from "complete waste of time" to "can, shockingly, answer my questions most of the time" in the last 5 years. It's actually pretty good these days, and has good paths to guide it, constrain it, or escalate to a human. Mind you a) This is for internal customers not external and b) I don't think it's LLM in the backend, mind you, but not every AI is LLM. This is not to say that I enjoy the current level of customer service or its direction, but honestly I have not enjoyed customer service levels for the last 25 years, on average, well before AI. The problem is usually fundamentally corporate policies and priorities and processes, not whether they're implemented by a human or AI. In the perfect world of unicorns and rainbows, I'm OK with the concept/goal of "90% of repetitive questions/requests get handled automatically, save humans for where human judgment is required". So I guess there's a semi-optimistic part of me in addition to the grouchy geezer :)
- tomcam 3y ago
  Why does no one else get this?
  - zith 3y ago
    Because it's not true? Anyone who has ever been close to the customer support role knows that there is a constant battle to help the customers answer questions on their own, and you will never be completely successful. It seems some people prefer calling/chatting to finding info on their own. Even trivial info.
  - grepLeigh 3y ago
    This is only true for some customers, who obsessively research a solution before reaching out to support. Having worked in CS roles early in my career, 95% of tickets are covered verbatim by an FAQ macro. For some (most) people, it just never occurs to them to search/research their question.
    - _xivi 3y ago
      > For some (most) people, it just never occurs to them to search/research their question. I think this is more of an illusion because you're close to the action. Just think of how many times you looked for your phone while holding it in your hand? or how you missed your keys that where on the table multiple times until someone else pointed it out. How many time you could swear you had to flip the USB 3 times before you could plug it in. This preception happens whenever there's an imbalance. For you, this system is centric to your life, you know it inside out, while for customer, it's a 1/100 fraction in their life and it's also not functioning at the moment and they need to move on. So there's a mix of inexperience, stress, fear to DIY and f it up, etc. When you personally contact support for another service, you think of it as normal, you done your homework, it's a serious issue, you rarely do it, you think you're an example of a good customer, the problem is with their product, but on the other side, at scale, it's another customer who didn't bother to RTFM or learn their 100s of courses. At scale, you're not going to sit and imagine the life of every person and plot different complex scenarios of how they got here, your brain just takes the easy way out and say it was clear as day, there's no possible excuse other than they didn't look. This is one ugly side-effect of having "departments", you only ever see one side. In the past, you both lived in the same town, you have a business, they have a business, you got invited to their wedding, your kids played with their kids, etc. Now you only see people outside your inner circle through one lens. If you're in sales you see $$, if you're in support you see purely clueless people.
- pradn 3y ago
  Much of the time you have to call support to get them to do this they don't want to be easy to do - like cancelling subscriptions, or initiating a refund.
- nicbou 3y ago
  People will use the contact page on my website to ask me questions all the time. In many cases, they will ignore all the content that answers their question, skip the part of the contact page that tells them to use the search first and that I don't offer services, find my email address and ask me to do work for them. Some people are just unwilling to help themselves. Just thinking of how many times people outsource their Google search to a community.
- sekai 3y ago
  > If you are talking to support, you already know your question isn't in the 95% easy ones. Common sense is not that common
- sfn42 3y ago
  People are idiots, they call support for the dumbest shit.
  - UncleEntity 3y ago
    I call one of my utilities every month to get them to tell me the same thing (flush the cookies) so I can pay my bill. They can't be bothered to fix their website and I have the free time so...
kikokikokiko 3y ago
I was usually able to get through a human operator on the biggest fintech in my country by starting every conversation on their website chatbox with "I want to talk to a human being". Well, last week I had a problem that needed to be solved, and guess what, my "magic" phrase resulted in "human assistants are only available on business days, 9 to 5... the problem is, it was Monday 10AM. And the same happened on Tuesday. And my problem still isn't solved. So I believe they're phasing out the human part of their customer service. And I'll probably be phasing out the customer part of our relationship very soon if these shenaningans persist.
- alsetmusic 3y ago
  > And I'll probably be phasing out the customer part of our relationship very soon if these shenaningans persist. And over time, all banks will adopt these technologies and the market won't give you a choice. This is the hell we live in.
- madphilosopher 3y ago
  First, they phase out the service part of "customer service." Then, the customer part falls away naturally. Or, at least, that's what we would hope for.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  They have to keep a human element, there is no way they can give the chatbot authority to do things like reset passwords, add users to accounts, issue refunds, etc. If they do that will be a hilarious attack vector for companies.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > no way they can give the chatbot authority to do things like reset passwords, add users to accounts, issue refunds, etc. Plenty of companies have zero human support. The shitty solution is to just refuse to do those things. Lost your password and back-up codes? Create a new account. Need a refund? Contact the vendor.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
intended 3y ago
I deal with these kinds of things, and to me it boils down to these 2 questions 1) What is the actual error rate? 2) What is the acceptable process error rate?

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

Given what Klarna is, which is basically low friction financing taking advantage of people with bad impulse control^1, I suspect the LLM will do fine because like... what are you really doing here, as a Klarna customer service person anyway? I'd imagine the lions share of their calls/chats consist of one of the following scenarios: - Yes you do actually have to pay this payment - Yes we can arrange to pay off the full balance immediately - Some kind of potential fraud - A problem with the ordered item, which gets redirected to the seller immediately [1]: This is not a judgement on the people, to be clear. I think shit like Klarna is frankly disgusting and blatantly taking advantage of people susceptible to impulsive purchases.

tagyro 3y ago
You have my vote! Klarna, and other BNPL's (Buy Now, Pay Later), are predatory and misleading. Source: https://www.klarna.com/us/customer-service/what-is-financing-and-how-does-it-work/ https://www.klarna.com/us/customer-service/what-is-financing...
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  I use Klarna Pay Later all the time for planned purchases. It's awesome. I pay only when an item is delivered, the state is verified, and I'm keeping it. If I have/decide to send the thing back (a couple of occasions), I just let them know that the return is on the way. No money changes hands.
kristofferR 3y ago
I don't agree, I think Klarna is awesome. Klarna BNPL is like a CC, good for those who can handle it. It doubles your credit period (so you get 30 days Klarna + 30 days Credit Card) for free, leading to higher returns if you believe you can handle credit profitably. Not only that, but it's also quicker to pay with than CC (No 3DSecure) and you get all your ordered items in a usable list. Way more secure than giving my credit card information freely away to random webshops too. If you don't want BNPL you can pay right away through Klarna anyway, it's like Paypal in that regard. They don't seem predatory at all to me TBH, if they were, they wouldn't have autopay and send you so many notifications if you don't have that enabled. They don't even charge me anything for semi-late payment of a few days late.

importantbrian 3y ago

> Considering Klarna's business is in lending I could see some regulatory attention here in the future. I hope they've solved the hallucination problem because I would be terrified to trust LLMs to handle customer service issues in a heavily regulated industry.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
LLMs should never do customer support in heavily regulated Industries in the first place. I hope that becomes one of the new regulations. Why is it that brick and mortar businesses need to provide customer support and online business get to dodge that responsibility? Regulations need to catch up on them.
- Novosell 3y ago
  I mean, we have self check out at every grocery store and fast food place in Norway. Automation is coming for all the jobs.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Yeah but the self checkout hasn't and most likely wont' replace all human cashiers.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    That came to the US like 15 years ago and there are still cashiers and nonself checkouts
    - Novosell 3y ago
      Is there a 15 year deadline for it to disrupt the market or something? And there are markets other than the US. The big store near me has, I believe, 16 self checkouts and 2 tills, usually 1 being manned by the same person who handles all the self checkouts.
      - 3y ago

midnitewarrior 3y ago

I don't think they are a lending company. They do not charge interest, their model lets you pay over time, and you pay a fixed fee to extend the payments. It's all fee based, no interest, so i think there's some regulations they get to sidestep.

salawat 3y ago
What's interest but a fee for not paying right now? You can call it a fee, or a surcharge, but in the end it's principal + interest for deviating from a schedule.
piva00 3y ago
They have a product called "monthly" in some markets, in Sweden it charges 19,99%/y of interests. Klarna Bank AB is a bank, providing credit and charging interests, it got its bank licence from Finansinspektionen around 2017-2018.

spywaregorilla 3y ago

I pray for the day I can get an LLM representing a bank with apparent authority to negotiate financial arrangements.

lenerdenator 3y ago
I wouldn't want that. They can't be held liable.
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  They absolutely can. That is how apparent authority works.
- Incipient 3y ago
  The airline in Canada was held liable for what it's support bot said...which I think is a great precedent, and would/should apply to banks too.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    Generally when I see decisions like that, I just wonder how long before the companies either come up with some good case law to defend against such a suit in court, or get the legislatures to release them from liability for what their chatbots say. Maybe I'm just a liiiiittle bit jaded, though.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    “Great” precedent - sorta. You can make an LLM say nearly anything even with safety rails as the jailbreaks prove. Hardly something liability can be pinned on Great in principle perhaps but it won’t stand the test of time.
    - ado__dev 3y ago
      I think it'll fall on some "would a reasonable person believe this" test. Like if you ask an official company chatbot a question and it blatantly lies to you, I'd say you have some recourse. Like for example you ask about the return policy and bot says 30 days, when it's actually 15. Versus looking at the chatlog and seeing the customer tell the chatbot to repeat to them that the company is going to give them $10,000, and then suing said company to get the $10k.