This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If it worked for most shit and escalated to a human when it actually needed to, reliably, I'd be fine with it.
I don't believe there's a realistic chance that there's a lot of overlap between the people willing to invest to actually do it properly and the people paying for AI instead of people though.
The problem is the same as with the telephone answering trees.
If they’re used to help you get where you’re going, then they’re great. But that’s not the best financially motivated decision. Solving your problem costs the companies money. Pissing you off and convincing you that your problem shouldn’t be fixed saves money on support.
So making you go round in circles is the machine doing EXACTLY what they want it to do.
That's an additional problem.
But the bigger problem is that it's not actually possible to do a good job without genuine meaningful investment in building out the tooling properly.
That’s just it….. they are building it out properly, their goal is just not what you think it is.
I get one of those meal kit delivery services. Every few weeks I'll go to their AI customer support and ask for cancellation and it'll give me discounts on upcoming orders. I keep the service at about 40% off at all times. Also when there's a problem with the order the chat bot just tosses me a discount. Cases like this are perfect for AI customer service.
Edit
Wow this blew up in a weird way. Just to be clear on a few points:
With the discount I pay $87 Canadian which is $76 untaxed or about $55usd. I also pay for this service using gift cards from Costco that are 20% off ($100 for $80) bringing that $55 weekly cost down to about $44. For 6 different dinners for me and my wife delivered to my front door every Monday. With crazy grocery prices where I live I cannot come close to beating that without giving up something. I won't eat the same thing every night (Sunday meal prep bros, don't at me), I don't want to expend the mental energy gathering recipes and ingredients but I do enjoy cooking a lot. It's something at the end of the day I can do with my hands free of screens. At regular price this was worth it to me, at 40% off it's actually saving me money. If they're still making money shipping this big box off food to me on a weekly basis, then good for them, we're both coming out on top.
Except they're selling you the kit at waaaay over cost in the first place, so they're still making money off of you. I promise you they are aware of the "glitch", and are not ignoring it out of the kindness of their hearts.
(not criticising you for using the service, if it works for you go for it and get those discounts, but don't let them manipulate you in to thinking you've got one over on them, they 100% account for this kind of thing and are still making money)
If X number of people pay full price and only Y number people go through the hoops of getting a discount the company comes out ahead!
It's worse then that. They're actively profiting from that discount rate, meaning they're ludicrously profiting from everyone who doesn't spend half their life getting discount codes (the cost of convenience)
And it's quite possible that it's cheaper for them to give those discounts since they're not employing as many humans. Humans are expensive.
It's more likely that the food is so cheap that the company still makes money at 40% off. Like how mattresses are always discounted 30% to 70% .
I dislike the fact even more then the idea.
Called a bank recently.
They: "please say in a word the subject your call is about so we can immediately connect you to the right department "
Me: "LOAN"
They: you said "limits on your cards", 1 for yes 2 for no
I tried 3 times, gave up. They won, I guess.
"Talk to a human"
Repeat these words over and over. Most automated phone systems are programmed to bail out when its clear the customer is just flat out unwilling to engage with their bullshit.
I usually use the "cuss at the bot" method. Gets out my frustration ahead of time so i can be sweet with the human. Tho one time the computer hung up on my ass haha
I think it was Comcast that refused to connect me with a human unless I said the right thing.
No matter what method, it would either hang up and tell me to try again or just not route me to the right place.
I ended up sending a letter to my state Attorney General. 30 days later my issue was fixed.
I extremely hate this idea. I I already hate the automated systems that are definitely designed to make you give up just trying to talk to an actual human being. Hopefully, we can get more lawsuits around the world like the Air canada one where they are liable for any bs the ai decides to make up, along with actual laws saying the same. Hopefully, it would discourage them.
I had the displeasure of being called by one from a vendor. It pissed me off that they couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone and call using a human, with how much we paid them. I canceled that contract and went with a different vendor, and let the sales team know exactly why. LLMs have their place, but my time is not the waste bin.
The point of modern "customer service" is to NOT provide customer service. If you can drag out the conversation to the point where the caller rage-quits in frustration, then the company can avoid spending any money on fixing any problems they've caused.
This is how companies that don't have competition act. This is how most companies act. We need more anti-trust enforcement.
LOL, as if they care about what consumers want.
We have decided that you want something else instead. Take it. Now.
Already out there in certain ways. There's a restaraunt near me that uses an automated system to collect orders in the drive-thru, and puts them into the system incorrectly.
At least that's what seems to be its purpose, because it does that really well. That, and piss people off.
"Corporations love the idea of not paying anyone."
Would be a more useful headline. It doesn't matter what consumers want. All that matters to large corporations is what the consumer will bear.
I think it's more "Most consumers hate the idea of a bad, unhelpful customer service".
I'm fine with AI if it was actually helping to solve my issue, but it is generally not the case.
I cannot imagine a scenario in which it comprehends my problem that I can’t just solve on their website
Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.
So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen.... which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon's "chat support" AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours "in case my package shows up". I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it's not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I'm willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final "solution" and I have to restart the convo over and over.
Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.
My guess is you're one of the 10% or so who didn't give up in frustration. My % assumption might be off, but assuming any percentage of people gave up and walked away without costing Amazon a dime the system was working perfectly.
Consumer disapproval of AI use in customer service is unlikely to keep firms from deploying the technology as the cost savings are just too great
So much for the market determining what goes
Companies don’t want to provide actual service for problems. That costs money. They want you to give up.
Customers hate anything that actually gets between them and someone that can actually help. Not shitty, complicated automated phone menus. Not some underpaid stooge who refuses to da anything except read from a mandatory customer service script. And not AI, which will combine both of the worst aspects of automation and scripted service along with a cheerful idiot that will spare no effort to direct you away from the nearest actual assistance.
I do like it in the sense that people HATE working in customer service. Because people have zero respect and customers make your job day miserable all the time.
Is one of the places where people deserve getting a hallucinating robot as a vengeance for how bad they treated people that worked there.
There's this boomer obsession with making it listen to human speech...
Nobody under 40 wants to use human speech to talk to an AI. We don't want to us human speech to talk to humans most of the time, especially if we don't know them.
But they always want to jam an AI into areas where human speech is the main communication method.
The absolute last place AI should have been deployed is answering a phone call. Because that is the last resort for most people, but the boomers calling the shots still think that's people's go to move before trying anything else
While some of this is cultural, it’s also about accessibility. Old people want to use their voice because their sight is often less reliable and they aren’t as good at pushing the right buttons. My father for example is functionally blind and voice is all he has. So before we get mad at boomers calling all the shots, let’s consider that they’re not just old fashioned. They’re old. and so will you be one day.
Automated phone systems have been a thing for decades. They are notoriously shitty and adding a layer of “friendly AI” on top of that shitty system doesn’t bode well.
Realistically we only dislike it because it’s a half baked solution. I know that if those LLMs actually did anything useful we wouldn’t mind them. But all these LLMs do is spam the documentation, which is already on the vendor website anyway.
There’s a NYT article somewhere, and I’ve been desperately trying to find it, about a woman who worked as some kind of real estate(?) call center AI augmenter. Essentially people would call in about listings or something, and she had to step in when the AI went off the tracks or didn’t know how to answer questions, matching its tone/inflection while refusing to acknowledge that there was a human stepping in. She ended up being super burnt out from the job. So the whole system was just super redundant, awful for the people working there, and as we’ve come to expect from AI, just a half-baked turd sold to some MBAs for a mint.
Edit: it was a n+1 piece, thanks @[email protected]
I'm already pissed with bots, had to call my ISP yesterday because my internet was spotty, I couldn't talk to a single human, the bot was walking me through the tired modem restart, and then it ended the call and asked for me rate it even though it didn't solve anything!
The other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.
I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I forget to take my pill and then I have an extra. After years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.
So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?
Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.
I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those options. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons...
