The author argues that customers do not actually want chat bots for customer service, contrary to what companies claim. Chat bots can only handle simple, routine queries, but for complicated issues customers want to speak to a human representative. Companies are pushing chat bots to reduce costs and increase profits, without considering the negative impact on customer experience. The author only sees chat bots as useful for customers when used to cancel subscriptions that require contacting customer service, showing how frustrating the current system is. The author believes we should build technology that customers actually want and would appreciate, rather than focusing on bad experiences or defending against them.
Customers want their issues to get solved… but that ship has sailed a long time ago: first tier support, is often outsourced to call centers which are given a very strict list of subjects and procedures to follow; if a customer’s case is not in there, then they’re SOL.
What’s worse: call center companies, accept contracts from multiple companies that want to offer support, meaning the people working at a call center now have to learn not just one company’s script and strict guidelines, but those of multiple companies at once.
If we add the fact that these call center companies pay peanuts and have poor worker retention, there is close to zero chance a customer will contact a first tier support worker who knows all the strict guidelines they’re required to follow from the company the customer is seeking support for.
Chat bots are not a general solution to all customer support, despite their overhyped marketing, but they are a solution for “first tier agent knowing each and every strict guideline by heart”. Now each company just needs to feed their predefined procedures to an AI, and customers will never again call someone who has barely any clue and needs to fumble around for half an hour just to give a wrong answer.
From a consumer’s point of view, it’s like having access to a 100% accurate search engine into the company’s predefined procedures… which might not sound like much, but is still better than the current state of affairs. For anything not prepared ahead of time in the company’s support book, customers will still need to ask to escalate as usual… or even get escalated transparently when the bot realizes it can’t provide an answer.
Tangential, but my last employer (US based) outsourced L1 IT to a call center in India, and it was maddening. They didn’t know very much beyond the script, and often you just had to say the right words to get your issue escalated, but it would always take a day or so to get called back. It drove me nuts as an engineer, but I’m sure it works fine for people who are less familiar with computers.
A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is “go to this webpage or call this number”.
It’s kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.
Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn’t want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don’t even fucking know.)
I like chat bot IF it actually tries to help you and sort through/filter simple DIY support issues. There are some chatbot I think just leading you around the circle or just there to frustrate you so you give up.(basically like the voice command phone menu or waiting queue that auto disconnect you.)
On a side note, if a company/service really like to keep their customer, they should just implement that keep queue place and call back system.
Half the “support chat bots” I’ve talked to is just a paraphrased version of searching their support article database. If it’s not in there I pretty much have to talk to a real agent.
That said I don’t think companies would want chatbots that could do more than that, at least for the time being.
They could end up being convinced into giving me an 80% VIP discount without the company’s consent.
E: fixed a they’re i was tired this morning
Yeah, you’re right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that’s all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don’t want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don’t really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn’t an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.
I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don’t want chatbots for customer service. They don’t care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.
A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones (“why is my bill fucked up?”) to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.
Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.
It there is an issue you have that you can’t figure out from the website but the chatbot is capable of solving you should make a better website.
Yup. Chatbots can in every case be replaced by a knowledgebase articles/a wiki, and a self-service portal. Give me those and a support email in case I do need to speak with a real person. I don’t under any circumstances want to talk with a chatbot.
