No one who actually wants to provide a good experience for their customers would offshore, nor would they offload this to AI agents. They know that customers have very limited opportunities nowadays, so the company responses seem to be along the lines of, "fine, go somewhere else! Oh, there's nowhere else to go? I guess you'll be staying with us afterall muahaha!"
Usually when I chat with a support bot it doesn't feel like an LLM but something that performs keyword matching and a prewritten response pre-LLM era.
But all shibboleths are obsolete now.
They are already fairly cost effective. A the Corporate VC arms of the major call center and BPO players like Infosys, TCS, and others have already funded a large portion of TTS startups, and in a lot of cases are training on customer calls.
There's a reason ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and others are the giants they are now.
I believe Sierra is the market leader in this space with a few other companies like Salesforce and Decagon also competing. It would be more interesting to see an evaluation of performance by these parties before making sweeping claims about the performance of AI agents as a whole.
However, if I need support and cannot reach a real living breathing human in under 30 min regarding any purchase over $500, I hang up, call AmEx and file a chargeback, citing inability to gain support. So far they have backed me every time. If enough people do it, chargeback costs send the message.
Most of the others are terrible. I'll pick on Dell for this next one. Their website in general, is terrible. Why would their support agent be any better?
We purchased a switch from Dell, that cost more than my SUV. Having a hardware issue with it, can't remember if it was fans or a power supply or what. It needs someone to come out and repair it, and we have the big fancy service plan.
There's no way to find the switch on the Dell support website. It's not listed anywhere.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/products/networking_...
You can't actually contact support, you have to identify your device, and then you get options from there.
https://www.dell.com/support/incidents-online/en-us/contactu...
However, this product doesn't have a service tag, or express service code, so you can't do that.
So you try to use the 'Virtual Assistant', who has no idea what you're trying to tell it, no matter which way you try. They link to a contact page but you just end up getting looped back around. There is no useful information to be extracted from this dumb thing.
I finally found a phone number on the website, and was connected to a woman who sounded like she was smoking cigarettes in a basement somewhere in Alabama. She looked through her notes on the computer, and found out for this particular switch I need to go through the OEM manufacturer. I was relieved to have gotten useful information.
After putting in AI agents this year, our customer service scores went up considerably. And the reason was basically that the average customer was getting way faster answers to queries.
toomuchtodo•38m ago
- California’s AB 1609 requires large businesses to connect customers with human agents within 15 minutes.
- Businesses exceeding $500 million in revenue must display wait times and disclose chatbot interactions.
- Violations carry civil penalties starting at $5,000, making human access a legal obligation.
redox99•37m ago
gjsman-1000•34m ago
toomuchtodo•33m ago
https://support.apple.com/en-us/127521
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/10071878?hl=en
odo1242•31m ago
toomuchtodo•31m ago
jcastro•32m ago
"We're sorry, we're receiving more calls than usual, stand by..."
24/7 for over 30 years!
toomuchtodo•31m ago
Think about all the time and effort for all of the consumers in the aggregate that would be needed to hold corporate counter parties accountable, with the cost being code and some compute time on device. This is where AI agents shine. They can do the mundane work of capturing evidence of compliance violations, packing the violation event, and reporting them.
Every consumer’s phone becomes a regulator watchdog node. We can even use LLMs to rapidly ship the app(s) needed to do this.
seattle_spring•11m ago
dmitrygr•14m ago
Status: (Engrossed - Dead) 2016-11-30
dataflow•4m ago