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Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call. At least in my personal case

Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call. At least in my personal case, struggling with renewal at Virgin Broadband, multiple humans wasted probably an hour of everyone's time overall on the phone bouncing me around departments, unable to comprehend my request, trying to upsell and pitch irrelevant services, applying contextually inappropriate talking scripts while never approaching what I was asking them in the first place. Giving up on those brainless meat bags and engaging with their chat bot, I was able to resolve what I needed in 10 minutes.

Xunjin 1y ago
“brainless meat bags” have you ever thought they are instructed to do so to achieve product selling quotas?
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Anyone who blindly follows orders is a brainless meat bag too.
  - Xunjin 1y ago
    Again, you assume those people have choice, you definitely should search more how people on these jobs are pressured to reach quotas and are abused in many ways. A simple search on Reddit you can see plenty of reports about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_real_face_of_call_centers_abuse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_re... Abuses done by customers: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      You always have a choice. These people aren't forced to work there. And they also have the ability to go whistleblower and leak internal docs that instruct them to abuse customers. Just as an example. I know I would. If someone gives you a choice A or B that both screw you over, there's always an option Z somewhere. It might be so outrageous they don't expect it but it's there. However usually it isn't necessary. I've been put in situations where I had to do something unethical. I've refused. And every time that choice was respected. Only if I'd have been punished for it would I have considered more severe options like the whistle option. But really if you take a hard stand and have good reasons, reality tends to bend a bit further than I expected. And yes I know what these jobs are like. I have worked in that industry a long time. I've seen both very good and very terrible employers. And yeah customers can also be little shits but I've learned to disconnect from that very quickly. It's easier when they're on the other side of the phone. It doesn't help them anyway. And sometimes (especially if they're not just a dick but they have a genuine reason to be angry) there's ways to flip them around, in which case that energy might be harnessed and they can become your strongest ally. Another thing I've seen that I didn't expect.
      - Xunjin 1y ago
        I'm not fully disagreeing with you, you always have a choice. However, when the market has less demand for a large unqualified workforce, you have two choices, accept to work and earn money or go back to months or even years without a way to sustain yourself/family. Don't lose sight that these jobs mostly prey on a population that is vulnerable and often does not know their rights. We could discuss in a sociological basis on how Capitalism today uses this workforce for degrading jobs, though requires a large dialogue that HN is not the place.
kamaal 1y ago
Its strange you have to write this. In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here. When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).
supriyo-biswas 1y ago
This is mostly because CS folks are given such sales and retention targets; and while I’ve never encountered a helpful support bot even in the age of LLMs, I presume in your case the company management was just happy to have a support bot talking to people without said metrics.
firesteelrain 1y ago
> Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call. In IT, if at a minimum, AI would triage the problem intelligently (and not sound like a bot while doing it), that would save my more expensive engineers a lot more time.

Xunjin 1y ago

“brainless meat bags” have you ever thought they are instructed to do so to achieve product selling quotas?

wkat4242 1y ago
Anyone who blindly follows orders is a brainless meat bag too.
- Xunjin 1y ago
  Again, you assume those people have choice, you definitely should search more how people on these jobs are pressured to reach quotas and are abused in many ways. A simple search on Reddit you can see plenty of reports about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_real_face_of_call_centers_abuse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_re... Abuses done by customers: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    You always have a choice. These people aren't forced to work there. And they also have the ability to go whistleblower and leak internal docs that instruct them to abuse customers. Just as an example. I know I would. If someone gives you a choice A or B that both screw you over, there's always an option Z somewhere. It might be so outrageous they don't expect it but it's there. However usually it isn't necessary. I've been put in situations where I had to do something unethical. I've refused. And every time that choice was respected. Only if I'd have been punished for it would I have considered more severe options like the whistle option. But really if you take a hard stand and have good reasons, reality tends to bend a bit further than I expected. And yes I know what these jobs are like. I have worked in that industry a long time. I've seen both very good and very terrible employers. And yeah customers can also be little shits but I've learned to disconnect from that very quickly. It's easier when they're on the other side of the phone. It doesn't help them anyway. And sometimes (especially if they're not just a dick but they have a genuine reason to be angry) there's ways to flip them around, in which case that energy might be harnessed and they can become your strongest ally. Another thing I've seen that I didn't expect.
    - Xunjin 1y ago
      I'm not fully disagreeing with you, you always have a choice. However, when the market has less demand for a large unqualified workforce, you have two choices, accept to work and earn money or go back to months or even years without a way to sustain yourself/family. Don't lose sight that these jobs mostly prey on a population that is vulnerable and often does not know their rights. We could discuss in a sociological basis on how Capitalism today uses this workforce for degrading jobs, though requires a large dialogue that HN is not the place.

kamaal 1y ago

Its strange you have to write this. In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here. When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).

supriyo-biswas 1y ago

This is mostly because CS folks are given such sales and retention targets; and while I’ve never encountered a helpful support bot even in the age of LLMs, I presume in your case the company management was just happy to have a support bot talking to people without said metrics.

firesteelrain 1y ago

> Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call. In IT, if at a minimum, AI would triage the problem intelligently (and not sound like a bot while doing it), that would save my more expensive engineers a lot more time.