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.
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!
Yea but it works out to $87 (Canadian) for 6 different nights of meals for 2 people. Delivered to my door. I suspect their angle is using this to just keep you from churning at a loss in hopes of just keeping you around in case you go back to paying regular price. The amount of meat, vegetables and dairy in the box along with cost of shipping and paying people to assemble this order, the cost has to be damn near $87 if not a little over.
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% .
Dropping pricing down to a reasonable amount by making you jump through hoops instead of pricing it fairly in the first place?
That is like praising someone for stabbing you instead of shooting you.
I mean, I’m choosing to use this service. If it felt unfair I’d just buy the groceries myself. They’re not a charity, you’re getting a premium service and there are costs associated with this. I don’t think it’s priced unfairly to begin with, it falls somewhere between buying your own groceries and getting takeout. The value is saving me time figuring out recipes, gathering the ingredients and getting a different meal every night, this is the value you pay for. I don’t know why people expect these companies to just give this service away.
In my experience the AI assistant is just trained on the information available on the firm’s website.
In 2024 I never just call a company expecting to be able to be assisted by a person. It’s always quicker and easier to figure out how to interact with said company online. The only times you call are when it’s not possible to resolve your query by interacting with them online.
That being the case, the entire purpose of the AI in this case is just to make it less convenient to call them. “Have you tried to resolve your issue online? Are you really sure about that? Maybe I could paraphrase this blog post from our website written by an intern 12 years ago.”
90% of people calling support lines are due to questions that are in the top 10 ten on the FAQ. They’re just the type of people who don’t like reading and just want a social answer. The same kind of people who get told “just do a search, this is asked weekly” on Reddit.
If there was a way to direct the “I just need a FAQ that I don’t need to read myself” people to an LLM and the “something is actually broken I need real help” to people, that would be ideal.
If it worked for most shit and escalated to a human when it actually needed to, reliably, I’d be fine with it.
If you think that’s how it will be implemented, I have some beans I’d like to sell you.
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
Might not have been speech detection, might have been a call center agent with a sound board
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 bet I could make an phone app that just repeats that until you get through
Probably not. Access to phone calls is heavily restricted on modem smart phones. It’s why call recording apps are almost impossible to make now, despite many jurisdictions being one party consent (meaning only one person involved in a conversation needs to know that it’s being recorded).
I’ve called companies that disconnect the call or “in order to connect you to the right agent, please tell us what you’re calling about,” them inevitably get it wing enough times to make you sit through a menu of about ten choices that are not correct and disconnect after three rounds of this nonsense.
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.
Completely off topic, but I sang your username in my head… It really is weirdly catchy…
Hahahahaha!! I was sitting there, on the Pick Username screen for a good 5 minutes, singing that song in my head, trying to think of a good username. After a while, I thought to myself, “that’s a good enough username, in done thinking about this”, and sang it out loud as I typed it in… 3
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.
The worst is the "in order to free up queue space, please try your call another time. Hangs up "
It’s also similar to scammers. When you are not quite certain if you’ve been scammed, you’ll first ask. There’s a percentage of cases where you won’t bother for the sum, because you’ve used the energy on pinging them.
While in case of companies you could have used that energy to, say, post “X is crap” somewhere in the Web.
