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I think using AI for customer service is really, really ineffective, and it's plain to anybody that has interacted with it. It's a shame that we've had decades

I think using AI for customer service is really, really ineffective, and it's plain to anybody that has interacted with it. It's a shame that we've had decades of shitty customer service from companies that have the most responsibility and resources to do it, and people in tech have shrugged their shoulders saying "it's unreasonable to expect people to scale up their customer service! They gotta make money!" Now AI customer service has arrived and things are worse, not better. Now we can't even get in contact with anyone because an agent redirects us to documentation instead of directing us to a human being. The future, when a company steals your money, is making viral posts online trying to get enough public shame going that you will maybe get some of that money back.

vanuatu 10d ago
I've seen it be very effective (moreso than human agents at resolving issues) but its extremely implementation sensitive, so you're more likely to encounter a bad one in the wild than a good one. There are voice agents picking up phones that the vast majority of people don't realize is an agent
autoexec 10d ago
AI is perfect for tasks if you don't care about them being done correctly. Many companies just don't care about providing effective customer service and really don't want to provide it at all.
kbelder 10d ago
I feel that attempts to replace customer service with AI have and will continue to fail. It's not able to do that for both technical reasons (the AI is still to dumb) and business reasons (the AI is usually deliberately scoped to be impotent at helping customers with any important issue). But, when properly used AI can reduce the customer service load. It can handle a lot of simple questions and status updates. There just needs to be a human available when there's any request that escalates past that simple case.

vanuatu 10d ago

I've seen it be very effective (moreso than human agents at resolving issues) but its extremely implementation sensitive, so you're more likely to encounter a bad one in the wild than a good one. There are voice agents picking up phones that the vast majority of people don't realize is an agent

autoexec 10d ago

AI is perfect for tasks if you don't care about them being done correctly. Many companies just don't care about providing effective customer service and really don't want to provide it at all.

kbelder 10d ago

I feel that attempts to replace customer service with AI have and will continue to fail. It's not able to do that for both technical reasons (the AI is still to dumb) and business reasons (the AI is usually deliberately scoped to be impotent at helping customers with any important issue). But, when properly used AI can reduce the customer service load. It can handle a lot of simple questions and status updates. There just needs to be a human available when there's any request that escalates past that simple case.