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It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well

by 9x39 3mo ago

It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well-suited to the task and it's going to accelerate. It's a win for capital and the technology implementers, even if it's a loser for the call center employees and callers. Some of the tech is pretty scary. One big vendor's solution [0] can provide not just AI agents but also use AI to snoop on calls in progress, evaluating sentiment from both sides [1], verifying phrases are said - pretty dystopian in theory. From experience, these things tend to go downhill based on the attitude at the top - is the mission to slash costs or take care of customers? A 1000 decisions follow from this one, and like Jira, it can be a useful tool or a prison-like hell. [0] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/contact-center/unified-contact-center-express/webex-workforce-optimization-ds.pdf https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/contac... [1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-workforce-optimization/index.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-...

pydry 3mo ago
90% of the time when I call a call center I need a human to fix an organisational bug - e.g. faulty billing or some other kind of mixup. AI cannot help with this. If it's to do something normal you could do through the website there was no need for AI - a website or app suffices - provided it isnt terrible. Capital definitely thinks it can save costs here but capital is getting increasingly delusional these days.
- ACCount37 3mo ago
  Neither can an average call center human. A good 90% of call center humans are flesh interpreters for support scripts. They are being paid to act like they don't have free will.
- r0m4n0 3mo ago
  The HN crowd is not the usual demographic for call centers. Im willing to generalize a vast majority of callers can find the info they are looking for if they tried a little
  - pydry 3mo ago
    Well, yeah. I'm definitely more tolerant of bad web UX than the average boomer.
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
so far, almost always when I get an AI responder I find it useless and basically try to get to a human as quickly as possible if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself
- zx8080 3mo ago
  > if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself <s> Hey, company's AI can help a lot in stealing its service's user passwords, which you usually cannot do yourself _that_ easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350239 Think of AI as a tool... for data leaks. </s> (not 100% sarcasm)

by 9x39 3mo ago

pydry 3mo ago

90% of the time when I call a call center I need a human to fix an organisational bug - e.g. faulty billing or some other kind of mixup. AI cannot help with this. If it's to do something normal you could do through the website there was no need for AI - a website or app suffices - provided it isnt terrible. Capital definitely thinks it can save costs here but capital is getting increasingly delusional these days.

ACCount37 3mo ago
Neither can an average call center human. A good 90% of call center humans are flesh interpreters for support scripts. They are being paid to act like they don't have free will.
r0m4n0 3mo ago
The HN crowd is not the usual demographic for call centers. Im willing to generalize a vast majority of callers can find the info they are looking for if they tried a little
- pydry 3mo ago
  Well, yeah. I'm definitely more tolerant of bad web UX than the average boomer.

insane_dreamer 3mo ago

so far, almost always when I get an AI responder I find it useless and basically try to get to a human as quickly as possible if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself

zx8080 3mo ago
> if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself <s> Hey, company's AI can help a lot in stealing its service's user passwords, which you usually cannot do yourself _that_ easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350239 Think of AI as a tool... for data leaks. </s> (not 100% sarcasm)