4 ms·

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... an

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?

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?