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The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing

• jjav 2y ago
  > providing customer support on a massive scale is hard This is a silly myth that these providers want to use as an excuse. Support has a lot of economy of scale so providing support to a huge user base is a lot cheaper per user than doing so if you only have a few customers.
• Lutzb 2y ago
  It's gotten so bad, that I have started to actively look for for products and services with known good customer support. E.g. I switched to an internet provider for SMEs. Costs around 20% more, but has dedicated IPv4/IPv6 IPs and offers a real human help desk.
  • canpan 2y ago
    I am doing the same recently. It took me a while to learn this (because I started life without much access to money). Buying convenience is a thing! Some examples: I pay for my search (Kagi). I picked my home builder by how they took my wishes into account. Instead of the chain restaurant, with disinterested staff, go to the one where the person behind the counter is the owner. I think good customer services can be your special sauce when making a business!
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• Rinzler89 2y ago
  >The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.
  • rkuodys 2y ago
    Interesting. But I can already imagine how it's going to backfire - you will reach a person and plead to better speak with AI:)
  • hobs 2y ago
    That's going to be spicy - things like product launches often have 100-1000x the call volume than a typical day, so training up 100x workers temporarily is going to suck - I used to train apple's tech support.
    • jenscow 2y ago
      I guess they will work out on the average wait time over a period, or the company's can just drop the calls to keep it down.
      • hobs 2y ago
        Dropping calls is the worst case scenario for customer service - what they will probably do is just institute callbacks by default.
    • Workaccount2 2y ago
      They'll just work the cost of the fine into the product launch.
  • huppeldepup 2y ago
    …so they’ll disconnect at the 9m59s mark?
  • 2y ago
• KptMarchewa 2y ago
  It's rather simple. If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it. Especially if you pay nothing and the product business model is ad-based. If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
  • dogleash 2y ago
    > If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it. If you do pay enough money for a product that can sustain good customer service, you won't necessarily get it then, either. >If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot. That "usually" doesn't kick in until you have a sales rep that is worried about loosing your business specifically. Then they'll exercise soft power to escalate your tickets. Because despite their profit margin, their customer service team is still under pressure to cut costs as much as possible.
  • mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well. Humans cost a lot. And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them a lot more, and likely they wouldn't last long at this job even then.
    • nmstoker 2y ago
      Isn't the issue that even the scripts aren't up to scratch. A chatbot that had the nuances correctly distinguished would not be a concern but it's because the script is not well put together and most likely poorly applied with a bot that it's so painful.
      • mewpmewp2 2y ago
        The chatbot that is used in the OPs conversation likely just does keyword matching and responding with hardcoded messages. It's not even an LLM. You can't really get much further with this type of thing. LLM can potentially get you further.
• mattpavelle 2y ago
  I remember in the early days of the web people said similar things about online shopping. The LL Bean catalog had more photos in higher resolution than their early e-commerce website, and you would call a phone number and talk to a person who knew the clothing in order to purchase from the catalog. No one would want to buy on a website… We are in the beginning days here. I expect chatbot advances to similarly start with a lesser customer experience but to eclipse human service in the next decade or so. We’ll all see, I guess :)
  • 8b16380d 2y ago
    Well, the bar is pretty low so I suppose you’re right.
  • throwacc11 2y ago
    HN is full of people who thought who needs Dropbox when we have rsync. AI is gonna replace everything. Bubble or not it's gonna last for a decade (worst crypto bubble is still going on). Better all jump on the bandwagon before its too late
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      > Better all jump on the bandwagon before its too late Heh, my take is the opposite. Better to get out before it's too late.
  • heelix 2y ago
    In the early days of the web, that is exactly what we did. I was part of a home shopping network, prior to HTTPS being a thing. We were given enough budget to put together a pentium pro, a fractional T1, and coded up a website in C++ that allowed folks to use the same cable TV call center infrastructure. That original 5K generated 200k+ orders.
• worldsayshi 2y ago
  I admire your viewpoint but I also find that it's extremely seldom that I need customer support for the majority of services I use. If I need it it's usually because of a flaw with the service. Surely it's very hard to be aware of their flaws if they don't have customer service but if they have other ways to reliable gather that data isn't it better for the customer if the service provider spends that effort fixing the flaws?
  • zamadatix 2y ago
    People on HN likely lean towards "If I need it it's usually a flaw with the service" more often (particularly regarding technical services) but the vast majority of customer support for the typical company is either "people who think it's a flaw with the service due to a misunderstanding or 3rd party problem" or "people that couldn't figure out how to pay the bill online because they don't use computers much" type things, not necessarily things that can be resolved for everyone in the next push to prod. The difficulty in well focused support is it's two different sets of problems and the people finding honest to god flaws in your product or service are usually the extreme minority and so not the focus of customer support workflows.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    Well, the way it usually goes is that the service provider has no reason at all to fix their flaws if they can just send to the complains into cheap "customer service" instead.
• uniclaude 2y ago
  Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes. I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.
  • xg15 2y ago
    > Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. Has any business actually tried?
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      Average people would switch to a $10/month service instead of $12/month. For internet, mobile plans, people in all sorts of circles brag about what a deal they were able to get with a service provider by haggling. Even when it's a $2 monthly difference. They are proud about their negotiation skills and how they pitted the service providers against each other to make the lowest bid. Maybe once after they have received unsatisfactory customer support, they would consider switching, but passionate, skilled, caring and creative customer support would cost far, far more than that. Even if you employ enough customer support to provide a human out of the gate for everyone, you would only get people following the same script as the basic chatbot would. People and especially creative people wouldn't stay at this job for long, dealing with entitled customers. In most cases, it's mostly a thankless, dead end job that will get to your mental health.
      • jjav 2y ago
        > customer support would cost far, far more than that That's not at all a given. Taking the example of $2 more per month, if the average customer needs a support call every two years, they could spend a whole hour on the phone with a support agent making $30/hr and the company is still ahead since they charged an extra $48 over those two years. An realistically most support calls don't last an hour. Fifteen minutes maybe. That's why I use Sonic for my ISP for example. I've only used support a few times in over ten years, but when I do, I want to talk to someone who knows what an IP packet is and what Linux is, not someone who just reads from a script telling me to find the start menu and click reboot.
• amelius 2y ago
  There should always be a button "let me speak to a human".
• zarathustreal 2y ago
  This is easy to say as a consumer but on the other side of it you’ve got to realize, most people are not like your average HNer. In my experience, customers are unwilling to dedicate even 60 seconds to reading documentation, FAQs, bright blinking banners, etc. The majority of “customer support” is answering questions and solving problems that have extremely simple answers and very obvious and well-documented solutions. It’s not something you want to spend money on, it’s usually worth it to throw an LLM at them and let go the ones that refuse to read. Even on the employee side, no one wants to be on calls all day dealing with people that are intentionally ignorant, it’s rage-inducing.
• bux93 2y ago
  The general trend is towards customer contact that does not have any agency. At least if you're connected to an AI, you can feel less guilty about hating their guts.
• bcx 2y ago
  I agree. If you are selling ANY product, customer experience is part of what you are selling. Apple gets this better than practically anyone else. BUT, as a small business owner you are forced to make decisions about where to allocate your limited resources. In your case (and in mine) customer service likely created word of mouth referrals, retained customers, and future expansion opportunities. I guarantee you that there are many businesses where folks somehow think customer service is merely a cost center to be eliminated. For the folks who are already in that boat, AI arguably will likely be better than their outsourced callcenters. When will they swing back to seeing the bigger picture, and realize their business is only as valuable as the customer relationships they build?
• Clubber 2y ago
  When I was a youngster, you could call a company and a person would answer. They'd ask what you wanted and route you to the appropriate person. It was nice.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    You know, then they automated the routing with a menu, what was worse. Then people discovered how to make those menus work, and they became nicer. Then people discover how to use the menus to make the customers go away, and business segmented into the ones that were nice to use and the ones that would clearly tell you they just want to scam you out of your money. I'm not sure the problem here is rooted at the LLMs customer service.
• oliwarner 2y ago
  I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with normal people interfacing with a technical product. They're not asking the same questions you or I might, they're asking documented questions and they're doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves. ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It's not just a modem, there's a line, an internal network and a really bothersome user all working against optimal service. Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week. This isn't new. We've had customer service levels for decades. What happened before is you talked to non-technical staff following scripts before escalation. Then that model pushed those staff overseas. Now the lowest rung is a LLM. The trick they have to re-learn when to let the user tell you to step back and fetch a real person. That, and getting the tone of the LLM to not declare everything as if that'll definitely fix the problem.
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  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    My dad's ISP did exactly what you say is impossible. It was a small ISP in Salt Lake City (xmission, if anyone cares). They had actual humans answering the phone, and no bankruptcies.
    • icedchai 2y ago
      I worked for a small ISP in the mid 90's and we did the same. The only reason this worked is because back then, barely anyone was online. And many of the people who were online were technically sophisticated early adopters that needed less support. Today's world is very different.
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      Most of the companies I've worked for have been the same, and my personal companies as well. The financial reality that I've experienced is that customer service is a very expensive, and it doesn't take long for a call to use up your profit margin. But good customer service pays dividends in the long run even if it appears to be a loss in the short. In cold money terms, it's not an expense, it's an investment.
• gjtorikian 2y ago
  I completely agree that the prioritization of support is woefully lacking, but I think this is a consequence of the shoddy state of support tooling. If customer support professionals were given the right tools to do their jobs, instead of half-baked solutions from 15 years ago, we might see a new virtuous cycle between customers-support-product. That's why my friends and I started Yetto [0], a help desk for people, not cogs. You can see an overview of the core support workflow in our recorded demo [1], and we have more videos showing off more of the features on the way soon. Feel free to sign up for access [2] and we'd love to get your feedback on it while we're still in beta. Let me know what you think! (As a small business owner I am sure you can appreciate the opportunity to pounce on opportunity. ) [0]: https://www.yetto.app/ https://www.yetto.app/ [1]: https://youtu.be/jQ30Ce-J144 https://youtu.be/jQ30Ce-J144 [2]: https://web.yetto.app/application https://web.yetto.app/application