One is the type where people are working to actually help the customer and the rep is authorized to take whatever action necessary to accomplish that goal.

The other is the type where the rep has no authority to do anything. They'll endlessly transfer the caller to another rep, make them wait, transfer again, make up excuses for why nothing can be done, and just do what they can to goad the caller into consenting to giving up, absolving the company of having to pay anything or provide any sort of service.

I don't think number one will be replaced by AI. I think number two will be replaced by AI.

But it doesn't really matter what "people" think. Corporate sees a way to save money by employing less people, customers be damned. Sadly customer service does not seem to have any bearing on a company's success, considering Google is successful as it is when it literally does not offer any kind of customer service at all.

Yes.

One of the things that I learned, early in my career, is that the best customer service, is good product design, obviating the need for customer service. That’s something within my control.

For many companies, post-sale customer service is a money sink. I remember being told that the margins on a product were so thin, that a single call from a user would wipe out the profit.

But I was also never given support to produce a decent UX, because that was expensive.

Damned if you do[n’t].

Lex was the state of the art for these sorts of systems at the time.

These newer LLM based systems won't be perfect, but they'll be 10x better at free form intent recognition, and significantly less repetitive and robotic for menus and similar. I suspect the agent experience when you get to a human will be far more comprehensive, enabling real human agents to be just a little bit more helpful sounding.

Realistically though, anything that could be used to improve agent or callers experience in these environments will be squeezed and stretched in the name of profit to the point where both parties suffer.

Now I prefer to get this information from websites. But there is still a chunk of the population (mostly the older half) who prefer calling over websites, and maybe that's true even for these chat bots

If the AI had a similar mode that would be reasonable.

You're right, but AI isn't needed to do this - just a competent call centre manager who watches the analytic and has control of the menus and messages.

The "real issues" that remain after the easy ones are filtered out probably aren't the issues any company would want to leave to AI anyway.

If the website had a clear priority on discoverable FAQs that wouldn't be an issue. But most of the time these types of websites don't care about these issues and tutorials on how to use their systems and services, at all.

Throwing an LLM onto a problem like this, which requires a good knowledgebase to begin with, is just a plain stupid idea. It will make things much worse, not better.

"What if it's agentic AI with tool use and we build MCP servers for it?"

"It will only be as good as the APIs and forms you expose to users today and if those could solve their problems they wouldn't be calling in"

They're literally the best suited companies to take full advantage of this new technology!

They have existing customer relationships, training manuals, past call recordings (== training data), and enough humans for fallback / oversight (often legally required!)

But yeah, you have to continue being entrepreneurial or risk being replaced by being complacent

Oh well, who cares if there's a breach, some idiot gets to put a shiny AI product on their CV and get that new promotion/job. Users be damned.

The rage-beast problems are exacerbated by companies designing their support system so that human operators cannot take a lot of reasonable decisions and risk losing their job getting someone involved who might. You can easily end up frustrated and angry if you need to call five times a week to get a basic request handled because the four people before you couldn't get it done and had to rush to take the next call. Call center companies are placing down human shields around their probably-illegal pricing systems and profit margins.