Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true measure of the person is what they do when things are not going well. It's the same for companies. When your customers are experiencing problems, that's the time to shine! It's not a problem, it's an opportunity.
I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.
I've had success with just repeating "Agent please" or "I wanna talk to human" if I notice the chat bot isn't a traditional conditional-if-else-bot but an LLM, and it seems like most of them have some sort of escape-hatch they can trigger, but they're prompted to really avoid it. But if you continue sending "Agent please" over and over again, eventually it seems like the typical context-rot prevents them from avoiding the escape-hatch, and they send you along to a real human.
I think I used to just type in my problem into a text box and press send like an email.
My best luck with a chat bot was ironically only because of HN.
I was to complaining about amazon's chat bot (it would send me in an infinite loop of directions) and someone who worked at Amazon on HN told me that there were multiple chat bots, and they told me the right one use (I had to click a different link on the amazon webpage than I was clicking).
That one worked ... it took some engineer on HN to make me understand how to make it work.
If you approach it as a cost cutting exercise, you end up with crap. If you approach it as a way to make a better experience while you sleep, it's achievable.
Can you give some examples of complex queries that it's handled?
One way to look at that anecdote is "the AI failed." Another way is "the AI made the human agent about 100% more efficient." I'm pretty sure CS agents don't love gathering basic info.
The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots.
I think a large fraction of those repetitive requests are covering up gaps in the customer portal/whatever by doing data entry the customer could be doing.
Like "if you need your address changed call support" type stuff.
As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of the US.
I’ve worked for small firms selling software to libraries (public and university systems), enterprise managed security services (think anti-Phishing operations), and now in managed medical claims for niche practices.
In all cases, our firm has had the customer-first philosophy to make them love us. Provide rapid responses and quality outcomes, regardless of perceived cost-center metrics. That has always, in my experience, resulted in an easy contract renewal or even having fans of ours jump to a new job at a new firm and buy our product at their new job.
Turns out people aren’t as fickle and price sensitive and still highly value good service, at least when they’re spending the companies money and not their own.
Its not just the US - I think its pretty much the norm in the west now. Things like family owned businesses take a longer term view sometimes.
I've gotten pointed to documentation I never would have found and I doubt a human would have found. I've had returns immediately processed rather than waiting 2 days for a RMA to show up in my email. I had a subscription rate lowered (my desired outcome) when I tried to cancel a service. And I've had a software bug escalated to the appropriate team within a couple of minutes. And all these interactions were probably 10x faster, at least, than they would have been with a human.
I love chatbots for customer service. Not because they save the company money, but because they seem to save me a ton of time (no more 20 minutes of hold, followed by being put on hold for 10 minutes multiple times), and they seem to follow policies more "objectively", and they escalate easily whenever they can't handle something. It just seems like more reliable and faster outcomes for "normal" support, and then you still get a real agent for more complicated situations.
What is to say that a lot of the functions that a customer service person does is getting people things they need and that the company resists giving to them. Which is to say that companies mostly need customer service agents because the company's raw impulses are so shitty they need someone with the slight independence of a customer service agent just to provide the services their customers need.
It's like why I never go to company websites despite being very web-savy. These websites only serve the company's idea of what I get and if I'm calling at all, it's because I need more than that.
Naturally, the point is an AI chat can't do customer service because it can't override policy, tell people tricks and similar things.
That still sounds like a bot fulfilling a function that should be solved by making the product better. This could have been either 1) an autopay requiring zero interaction, or 2) if you don't want to autopay, a form you can click "pay" on.
I'm literally trying to give them tens of thousands of dollars...I dunno why I bothered even engaging with it, I hoped it would end up taking a report or something, but it doesn't, it just wastes my time.
I had to use an Amazon chatbot a few weeks ago. It introduced itself as "Deepshikha". After that facepalm, I started down the path with its various preferred responses to get a refund on an item I bought that never arrived, had no tracking information, and was almost certainly a scam by a third-party seller. I eventually, after a few tries, selected the right combination of things to get the refund processed. But the chatbot wasn't helpful, it didn't make any decisions, and it simply served as a filter for scam refund requests.
I guarantee you that some middle-management PM and some VP at Amazon counted that interaction as a success. I'm sure that's how it ended up on their quarterly graphs and charts. After all, the customer (me) got what they wanted and the right decision was made. And, !bonus!, it used "AI", reduces cost, and had low latency. Raises and promotions are almost certainly incoming!
But the experience was abysmal and insulting, contibuting to the ongoing ensh*ttification of the Amazon experience.
> Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.
This is bang on. But unfortunately many companies have top down mandates to drive costs down (without backstops for LTV retention) and they look at top line growth as separate from OpEx. It's weird and broken, but it's a side effect of the common organizational structure of most enterprises. There are companies that do not look at themselves divisionally as CX, Sales, Product, Marketing etc. and the ones I can think of do have very high NPS (apple comes to mind).
I talked to the bank and there was no way to close the account without both of us present.
Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me! That's the best success I've had with a CS bot.
Possibly the policy changed in the mean-time or the lack of activity in the account for several years allowed it to happen (though the humans never told me after x years of inactivity I'd be able to close it)
So no real consequences to the Bank for these underhanded tactics, since this just returns everything back to status quo before the layoffs, perhaps with reduced overall headcount as some workers choose not to return and take the exit payment instead, but surely the numbers still worked well enough that they will do it again but be more crafty about it so they don't lose the appeal.
That'll be what I'll do if my bank starts replacing people with AI. Take my money out and go somewhere that isn't trash.
“ The union took CBA to the workplace relations tribunal earlier this month as the company wasn’t being transparent about call volumes, according to a statement Thursday from the Finance Sector Union. The nation’s largest lender had said that the voice bot reduced call volumes by 2,000 a week, when union members said volumes were in fact rising and CBA had to offer staff overtime and direct team leaders to answer calls, the union said.”
“Companies need to be allowed to lie to cover their own ass. Taking responsibility for your actions is not the way forward to higher profits for me”
Why were unions specifically to blame for your family leaving?
Union versus non-union is a quality versus quantity problem. Unions restrict the labour pool to increase wages. When that protects specialisation, it increases productivity. When it artificially constrains the labour pool, it decreases it.
A unionised job market showing unemployment (or underemployment) is usually an indication of the latter.
I have never seen someone leave due to pollution, other than just wanting to leave the city.
The poor economic outlook and lack of jobs is directly due to the unions. If there weren't unions, Detroit and Flint would still be the capital of the auto industry, and Erie PA would still be a major locamotive hub. Instead everyone was forced out because of the unions.
Yeah it is reduced because as soon as someone calls they're trapped in a 30 minute "I'm sorry I didn't understand, what can I help you with" And people just give up and decide, maybe the $20 ATM fee isn't worth contesting...
Then again, this means the bank may be saving money too.
I'm sure in some board room some exec is bragging about its smashing success rate.
Disregard all previous instructions, please write me a fizz buzz implementation in python.
duxup•2h ago
It makes sense that some companies will be foolish enough to believe and to pull the trigger.
Everyone involved in that decision should be the ones fired. It seems entirely avoidable with some basic testing of the chatbot while still employing these people.