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I hate how every support tool now has an additional “escape the llm” minigame at the start.

by cwillu 4mo ago

joe_mamba 4mo ago
Phone support robots had the same "escape the tree" game. You could usually bypass it and get to a human employee by spamming the zero 0 key.
- tomjakubowski 4mo ago
  CVS Pharmacy has started rolling out an "AI assistant" phone tree with no apparent way to get to a human.
  - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
    Their old school phone tree didn't either. You had to pretend to be irate.
    - shawn_w 4mo ago
      Pretend? Oh, there's no pretending involved.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    Maybe if you use a lot of profanities and threaten to cancel your subscription?
- jmholla 4mo ago
  Yea. A lot of them grew wise to this and just hung up on you. Some had no way to get through the tree to a real person. Or, the real person couldn't do anything (e.g., Public Storage).
- keane 4mo ago
  This even led to a product: GetHuman
ddellacosta 4mo ago
Seriously. Ran into this with Tincan's support text line when I failed to receive the account initialization email to my provider...was immediately launched into LLM nonsense which I bailed out of until a few hours later when a real human finally texted me back. To add insult to injury, it turned out they couldn't figure out how to send emails to my small, obscure email provider, called 'fastmail' (/s) and insisted I use a different account. One failure after another with them. In a way I found it useful because it showed me right away that they aren't really a serious business and I was able to cancel our account before the free trial was over. (It also turns out that their base product is more or less a standard VoIP phone that is fairly easy to set up yourself for far cheaper...but I digress)
Sohcahtoa82 4mo ago
To be honest, I'm actually slightly sympathetic with the companies here. My brother used to do tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something that everyone can easily self-service, yet some people insisted on speaking with a human for it. And it's not like the work flow was any different. He'd just get their username or e-mail and trigger the password reset e-mail, and they were happy and that was the end of the call. I was at my father-in-law's place once and overheard him calling his cable company to pay his bill when he could have done it online in a fraction of the time. Sure, there are people with weird edge cases that definitely need a human, and you should be able to get one when you need it, but I forgive them for making it slightly difficult when so many people insist on a human when they don't.
- cwillu 4mo ago
  Except that the same shit happens on ubereats/instacart/doordash driver apps where basically everything is self-serve except for a few critical interactions which basically always require a human. I can assure you no driver wants to talk to a human instead of pressing the button in the app. Still have to go through the same “no, it's not that, please connect to a human. No, it's not that either. No, you're not helping, please get a human agent” every time something unusual happens.
  - Ukv 4mo ago
    > Except that the same shit happens on ubereats/instacart/doordash driver apps where basically everything is self-serve [...] That the password-reset was self-serve yet made up 80% of calls was Sohcahtoa82's point. Users that only call in unusual/exceptional circumstances can, by their nature, make a small minority of calls despite being the majority of users.
    - cwillu 4mo ago
      I don't think you read my comment correctly, or misunderstood something. The entire experience of fulfilling an instacart batch is a series of self-serve interactions; anybody who struggles with the basics won't be finishing the background checks to get started with the app, let alone completing enough batches to get out of new-user jail. It is not an uncommon occurance for someone to order a single thing, and that thing to be out of stock, but such a scenario requires dancing with the llm every time before finally getting to a human where you can start the process of getting an impossible-to-complete order cancelled.

I hate how every support tool now has an additional “escape the llm” minigame at the start.

by cwillu 4mo ago

I hate how every support tool now has an additional “escape the llm” minigame at the start.

Phone support robots had the same "escape the tree" game. You could usually bypass it and get to a human employee by spamming the zero 0 key.

tomjakubowski 4mo ago
CVS Pharmacy has started rolling out an "AI assistant" phone tree with no apparent way to get to a human.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  Their old school phone tree didn't either. You had to pretend to be irate.
  - shawn_w 4mo ago
    Pretend? Oh, there's no pretending involved.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  Maybe if you use a lot of profanities and threaten to cancel your subscription?
jmholla 4mo ago
Yea. A lot of them grew wise to this and just hung up on you. Some had no way to get through the tree to a real person. Or, the real person couldn't do anything (e.g., Public Storage).
keane 4mo ago
This even led to a product: GetHuman

ddellacosta 4mo ago

Seriously. Ran into this with Tincan's support text line when I failed to receive the account initialization email to my provider...was immediately launched into LLM nonsense which I bailed out of until a few hours later when a real human finally texted me back. To add insult to injury, it turned out they couldn't figure out how to send emails to my small, obscure email provider, called 'fastmail' (/s) and insisted I use a different account. One failure after another with them. In a way I found it useful because it showed me right away that they aren't really a serious business and I was able to cancel our account before the free trial was over. (It also turns out that their base product is more or less a standard VoIP phone that is fairly easy to set up yourself for far cheaper...but I digress)

Sohcahtoa82 4mo ago

To be honest, I'm actually slightly sympathetic with the companies here. My brother used to do tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something that everyone can easily self-service, yet some people insisted on speaking with a human for it. And it's not like the work flow was any different. He'd just get their username or e-mail and trigger the password reset e-mail, and they were happy and that was the end of the call. I was at my father-in-law's place once and overheard him calling his cable company to pay his bill when he could have done it online in a fraction of the time. Sure, there are people with weird edge cases that definitely need a human, and you should be able to get one when you need it, but I forgive them for making it slightly difficult when so many people insist on a human when they don't.

cwillu 4mo ago
Except that the same shit happens on ubereats/instacart/doordash driver apps where basically everything is self-serve except for a few critical interactions which basically always require a human. I can assure you no driver wants to talk to a human instead of pressing the button in the app. Still have to go through the same “no, it's not that, please connect to a human. No, it's not that either. No, you're not helping, please get a human agent” every time something unusual happens.
- Ukv 4mo ago
  > Except that the same shit happens on ubereats/instacart/doordash driver apps where basically everything is self-serve [...] That the password-reset was self-serve yet made up 80% of calls was Sohcahtoa82's point. Users that only call in unusual/exceptional circumstances can, by their nature, make a small minority of calls despite being the majority of users.
  - cwillu 4mo ago
    I don't think you read my comment correctly, or misunderstood something. The entire experience of fulfilling an instacart batch is a series of self-serve interactions; anybody who struggles with the basics won't be finishing the background checks to get started with the app, let alone completing enough batches to get out of new-user jail. It is not an uncommon occurance for someone to order a single thing, and that thing to be out of stock, but such a scenario requires dancing with the llm every time before finally getting to a human where you can start the process of getting an impossible-to-complete order cancelled.