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Doing this stuff is literally my job. Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable wit
by com2kid 10mo ago
Doing this stuff is literally my job.
Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible.
People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the phone. Since we were selling low margin HW, a single call to tech support completely erased the profit from that product's sale.
Layoffs have already happened and they will continue to happen.
One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive. Also the price of goods will drop since the expected cost of customer service factored into the product price will drop.
E.g. $30 / support call, 1 in 10 customers call support during the lifetime of a product, $3 saved, but the way costs are structured, $3 saved in manufacturing can end up as nearly $10 off the final retail price of a product.
(And in competitive markets prices do drop when cost savings are found!)
- akomtu 10mo ago"Costs $20" really means "one of those poor call center reps got paid $20, barely enough to pay rent." Once you solve the supposed problem, all those people will be on the streets.
- tim333 10mo agoThat's not how it's mostly gone historically. People tend to find different jobs.
- akomtu 10mo agoThose who work at call centers are already desperate for any job and have zero savings. I'm not sure where they will down even further. I guess the governments will have to pick them up at the end: give them some fictious jobs and pay the minimum out of taxes from the remaining populace who still have jobs.
- bmandale 10mo agoThis replacement has already happened. Everyone who can has long since replaced their phone support with a set of menus that end in "use the website". When you need to talk to the human you still need to talk to the human. >One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive. If you could do it through the website then you would be much happier than having to argue with a chatbot. And if you can't do it through the website, there aren't going to let a robot do it on your behalf.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]