Today I needed to contact a government service office for a task that only a human could perform. Now unfortunately, the phone tree of this office is broad and deep, you need to authenticate with about 4 data points before continuing, and if you hit the wrong option after authenticating, they will hang up on you without a second thought.
So I authenticated got through to the correct option on the first try, and it seemed like they were going to drop me into a queue to wait for a live operator. And then a recording informed me that "due to a high call volume, nobody is available to take your call." and dropped the call! Can you believe that. No option to leave a callback number or wait 4 hours in a queue, just terminate the connection. I called back and got the same thing.
The website does have a chatbot, but of course it is not capable of connecting to a human being and only capable of relaying the simple FAQs they've programmed into it.
I am pleased and impressed, for the most part, with the proliferation of Live Agent Chat for many services. I really prefer this over a telephone interaction (most of the time.) So it's good when I can easily break past the "virtual assistant" trying to FAQ me and get to a human.
But in this case, today, I suppose there were no humans to be found. Tragic. They have good compensation packages there.
Yeah, when I sense that (B) or (C) is coming up, I stop the person cold and I demand to know the direct-dial number for wherever they are transferring me. And these days I also ask to know the department name as well, so I can figure it out if presented with a tree or org chart or something. It doesn't always help, but it helps me feel a little more secure.
Yup. Ohio unemployment office. They didn't process my application during the pandemic. I had to sit through a 6 minute monologue and then immediately get hung up on after it's finished, many, many times. Several people I have talked to had the same problem. Their applications automatically expired and couldn't be resubmitted because no one on the government side did anything.
Chat bots are annoying due to potential inconsistency, having to guess the types of things you ask for, due to their latency, but they've made major advancements recently, and we are only beginning to see what's possible.
If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away. Why do we want to discourage them from exploring this new area? Experimentation is critical to understanding what will work and to the development of our society.
there is plenty of reason why it shouldn't be. Generally speaking functionality is gated behind support (as opposed to being something you can just click a button on a website to do) because it requires at least some level of human judgement on whether a given action should be done (and there's still a whole class of attacks which are aimed against this process). Chat-bots will be even worse, because there will be an extremely consistent script than can be used for any given purpose.
> If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away.
The difficulty is, this is obscured to the customer.
Let's say I have a broadband account in a country with competitors I can choose between (eg the UK, where I can have BT or Virgin). I've already chosen the best package for me. I'm ringing up after six months of good service to fix my intermittent line drop.
The chat bot is terrible and I have to wait until the problem goes away on its own.
Unfortunately for me, I can't just guarantee that switching to the other service will make a difference, because chat bots are not core service. I can compare broadband options and pick the best, and I'm already on that. Now I have to gamble that some combination of:
(broadband option) + (customer service) is higher than the one I'm on.
Unfortunately for me, I have no way of checking this. There's every chance that I'll end up on a worse broadband option and a worse customer service option.
If you want decent support as part of the core offering you can pay a bit more for Andrews and Arnold, their support staff are in the UK, all technically capable rather than KB parrots, and available by IRC. Lower customer contention for their shared bandwidth so it doesn’t slow down at night is another thing worth paying a bit more for. And they have a decently technical control panel web page.
I have never met a chat bot that worked. I try the same question worded 6 different ways, I try asking it to connect me to an actual fucking human being. If it even does I still get stuck in a choice menu at first, which half of the time tells me that I can get help with this via their chat bots and disconnects.
Fuck chat bots and the money-saving horse they rode in on.
Amazon. My personal best time for a full refund was slightly under 2 minutes.
It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.
They have reputation metrics for the speed which someone walks around the warehouse picking stuff off shelves and the speed with which they use a bathroom (I assume using the toilet fast is prefered but washing the hands fast would be penalised).
I also suspect that the majority of refund requests are fraudlent, so if they dont have a reputation scoring system for their customers they are stupid.
My experience with that is the opposite. Bought inks, one bottle arrived broken. Took me a few hours to get through to a place where I could put my complaint.
Side note: after that they became even more useless. "Please mail the item back to us." Yeah no sure I'll mail you the shards of the broken bottle and a puddle of drying ink.
Meanwhile buying from the sketchiest possible "this official Arduino is 12 cents" sellers, I have lost $4 I spent on a bluetooth dongle that the "company" selling it disappeared a day after, but every other interaction, the sellers will jump over themselves to convince you to rate them higher than their competition. I had what I thought was a tiny drop shipper send me a double order because they were concerned I wouldn't get the product in time (like a day late on a 4 day shipping window, for free shipping) without me even complaining. Hell, they do this even though ebay probably lists me as a terrible buyer because I never add seller feedback.
Played dumb and contacted them again the next day and told them I put it back in the box and took it to the post office but they refused to take the package because they said you can’t ship leaking things. Asked them what they wanted me to do now.
> It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.
Being that sort of customer certainly didn't get Amazon to treat me decently.
> It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.
You had a request that was simple enough and common enough the bot's design took it fully into account.
Even the Amazon chatbot is fairly useless, and like many chatbots it is slow too, seemingly to mimic a human typing speed which is really annoying when it's not even pretending to be human.
As a customer you want someone to resolve your issue, which is mostly a matter of someone being responsible to file a ticket and ensure it gets solved.
A chatbot has no responsibility, it is just a useless parrot of the documentation. It doesn't serve any useful purpose except worsening the experience for the customer.
The worst are the bots that can't figure out what you're trying to ask about and _refuse_ to turn over to a human because you the end user clearly aren't in what they are good at.
Had this experience with Vodaphone when I tried to set up my account and add my fucking phone number so I had insight in my bills. Didn't work. Got directed to a bot, which continually misunderstood me and no amount of prompting from me made them direct me to a human person.
The WORST is when calling a specific department you in the generic queue and the bot wants a piece of information that you don't have (eg. demanding an ATM card number when you only have an investment account) and hangs up when you don't give to them.
The thing is, I wouldn't be asking for support if I was able to find a fix for my issue in the first place. ChatBots are unable to fix the initial problem because the system used to fix said issue doesn't already exist in the account tools. Human intervention is required to fix the problem, so therefore chatbots are completely useless in this context.
> The thing is, I wouldn't be asking for support if I was able to find a fix for my issue in the first place.
You are the exception though, the vast majority of people don't do that. Those are the users the chatbot is designed to help (because they represent a large portion of a typical support team's interactions).
I believe this is a clear example of the Moloch effect [1].
Companies race towards having the shiniest chatbot or _virtual assistant_, without fully understanding all the implications and customer needs. Everyone wants to have their brand name associated with being "the first" or "the best" in their segment for providing such technology, no matter how trivial it may seem -- e.g. as the article points out: just wrapping already available info in a dialogue.
Given these incentives and high stakes, it's also hard to "exit" the bandwagon, due to various factors like reputation, costs, and the uncertainty around your competitor not doing the same.
Honestly, I've heard that for a regular user chat bots are amazing. Tech people are just bunch of nerds who are used to going through documentation. For a regular grandma it's so much easiser to just write like she's used to.
The overwhelming majority (like 98% or more) of support requests are from people who have not read the documentation and are asking about something that is well-covered within it.
Chat bots can't (currently) eliminate the agents who exercise critical thought and report bugs, but for any company large enough to outsource "tier one" support to a call center overseas, the chat bot would actually be a big improvement.
> for any company large enough to outsource "tier one" support to a call center overseas, the chat bot would actually be a big improvement.
More likely, a lateral move rather than a big improvement. But you're right -- companies that outsource the support to crappy call centers are companies that barely have customer support at all.
There is a distribution of users. Definitely some users are better off (no matter how good the chatbot is) using the FAQ or websites. Some people are not chat interface orientated.
Some people would benefit from a very powerful and effective chatbot. The grandmother you cite for example! But the problem is that almost all chatbots are incompetent and really function to:
1) deflect users
2) bolster the innovation credentials of the organization or sponsors for the project.
OpenAI's ChatGPT has over hundred million users. Customers want chatbots just fine, they just don't want a shitty broken useless chatbot that's a waste of time. If it's a bot then respect the user and give it enough CPU resources to answer quickly.
thanks. my intuition is that the demand is, actually, there - customers don't want to read through an faq and a knowledge base. they want to go "I <their problem>, can you fix it?". whether that's to a human intelligence or artificial is besides the point, they want someone who's able to understand it first, empowered to fix it, second. where a bot can only regurgigate the docs, psh.
To expand on staticman2's reply, the size of the set of ChatGPT users says nothing about its composition, and it certainly includes AI researchers, representatives of companies looking to build their own bots, and no doubt many people exploring the thing just for fun. The number of users by itself therefore says nothing about whether or not people in general want to interact with bots for customer service queries, since it could be that, say, 95% of ChatGPT users are there because they want to learn more about ChatGPT, not because they generally enjoy fulfilling daily tasks with the help of a computer.
I don't think the argument is "customers want chat bots", but "customers will hate our chat bots, just like they hate our (poorly paid and trained) human customer service, and it'll cost less".
I used to not want chat bots because they were bad. I can imagine situations where I would prefer a chat bots over humans. For example, if it's a niche problem that a human would be unaware of and would have to look up, read, and verify taking a long time to respond, I would definitely want a chat bot or a bot assisted human.
At work, I hated an hr bot for years. But in the last year it became good and useful and I now like it.
If a bot gives me what I need I'll like it. If it only provides value for YOU though and makes MY life more difficult then I will not enjoy it very much.
Big problem with most bots is they don't have authority and they refuse to turn you over to someone who does. If I'm engaging with your customer service, it means I have an issue I need resolved. The worst bits are the equivalent of incessantly yet cheerfully asking me to restart my computer in an endless loop with no path out.
You should try talking to people who work in customer service call centers, most of their calls are arrogant opportunists that aren't calling to fix any issues... but to get something extra.
"This item is scratched, so I want a 50% discount refunded" - comes to my mind. Most of customer service is dealing with Karens
Oh that's fair enough. Both sides suck! I never worked in call centre, but I worked 6 months in Future Shop as a teenager (it was a Canadian version of Best Buy in the 90s), and there's a reason why I stopped as soon as I could - both the sellers and the buyers had higher percentage of dishonest bums than I was comfortable with.
The story that made me quit:
We had an extremely clear policy of no returns or exchange on opened printer cartridges.
A customer came in to obtain a refund. He claimed it was the wrong cartridge.
Did anybody help him or instruct him to take that cartridge? Nope.
Did he notice that it's explicitly not for his printer? Before he opened it? Nope.
I pick up the cartridge and... it's empty. Dry. Nothing left in it.
Before I could even say anything he looks at me, and start yelling and slamming his hands on the counter and making a scene. Not because he was upset, there was nothing to be upset about yet. It was just a rational, calculated move to obtain a refund on a cartridge he fully used. 30 seconds later the store manager comes over and gives him the refund.
Store manager coached me and indicated, this is basically retail life and where he comes in to provides judgment - the disruption and bad image this person created FAR outweighed the $50 he gave away. It was nothing personal and I should not feel bad or betrayed that I was overruled after following clear rules.
I absolutely 100% agree with manager's perspective. He did the right thing. I could not blame him or wish that he did otherwise. The only way I could find for that scenario to have a different outcome was for me to not be there anymore, so I tendered my resignation the next day.
That honestly never crossed my mind, but I think your right. Anything a chat bot could do or approve could simply be accomplished by an HTML form or some type of self service.
Chat bots will take over more and more, but only to save money, not to improve the customer experience. I do get that some people call in with the simplest of question or problems, but for the people who call in with actual issues, I doubt that companies will even grant the bots the freedom they'd need. Customer service people already aren't given the freedom and autonomy needed to help customers, so why should bot get it?
Say you call in to an ISP to have your internet connection fixed, is the ISP going to give a bot free-range to make adjustments in backends or dispatching technicians? I doubt it. All this is going to do for the companies that implement it is that they'll save a bit of money and have the bots hide any underlying issues or errors on policies.
Isn't that the point of "This could be a form". The chatbot would have certain rules that it would need to follow and I don't see why those rules couldn't be translated into a form.
I wouldn't underestimate the mental capacity of scammers, it would only be a matter of time before they would know exactly how to prompt the bot to issue a refund.
Many of them are forms in disguise. I furiously hate Virgin Media's "chatbot", because every conversation with it is "what's your name? Postcode? Account number? Select from these 3 options". This is just a contact form with a slower UI.
For super simple stuff, sure, but many issues are easier to explain in natural language and a fluent UI (something with a lot of conditionals, well beyond a simple HTML form.
NC DMV replaced all of their HTML forms with chatbots and it drives me nuts because I used to be able to pay my taxes and fees in under a minute, but now I have a stupid chat bot interaction that takes closer to 5, because you can no longer just complete the form and submit it but have to answer queries from the bot one at a time with some BS fake typing delay.
Yes. This article is criticizing the primitive chat bots deployed by companies today, not good ones that ought to be possible with the latest and upcoming LLMs.
In my experience they're useless because they're trained / limited to the FAQ and website you've already read to try to resolve your issue. The same with calling a helpline. Yes, I'm aware I can check your website for common questions. I'm calling you and need to speak to a human because the answer isn't there.
Please just understand you are part of the <2% of customers who have done your own legwork.
The overwhelming majority of people are calling in about something in the FAQ because they can't be arsed to do their own search.
The first layer of support at larger companies is usually restricted by their software from sending you anything but a pre-written response, just because you're such a rarity.
I want to call a human even if my question seems dumb for them and have it taken care of, because I don't even know if I get that one answer there might be 10 other questions hiding behind the corner.
> Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human.
I can see the author probably hasn't done much customer service? I'd say maybe 1% of customer queries go in that direction.
I agree dealing with a bot in that situation sucks, but a big chunk of customer questions can probably be answered without human intervation by LLMs, assuming they have enough data about the organization and its products.
You've nailed it. I've been a customer support specialist in tech startups for the last many years, and the HUGE and overwhelming majority of questions are about things that have been covered in detail in the support documentation by any even half-competent team. People do not normally search for their own answers. More than 90% of tickets are well-answered (according to the user's satisfaction score!) by a pre-written response explaining how an article in the support center addresses their specific question, and then linking to it.
This is why large companies end up hiring thousands of low-wage workers who are prohibited by their software from sending anything but a pre-written response. The first-level agents can't even edit it. They can only send you something someone else wrote for the common situation.
Chat bots could easily replace these workers, and the customer experience would be better for it.
You will (probably) always still need the higher level agents who are really tech support, the ones who can identify when someone's report really is a bug and get it reported to engineers for fixing.
Those aren't the low-level agents in these outsourced call centers, though. Even if those people do recognize an issue, they can't do anything until they've sent you some number of generic responses that haven't satisfied you.
At least the bot could be trained to customize responses within a set of parameters and match the tone of the asker.
Yeah, the author is assuming that the general populace is like themselves (and like most HN commenters, I suspect): fairly high degree of technical competence, able to find workarounds for most issues in an app or website or forum somewhere.
When I use these chatbots or contact customer support, it's probably because I need a very basic and simple thing done.
Not because I don't want to do it myself. Because the website I'm using is throwing error messages, the form to do it myself has disappeared five years ago, and the only way to accomplish what I want is to bother someone over the phone.
When I worked customer service, I'm sure customers could've done most of the things they wanted to do themselves, if the website wasn't unclear, the help articles weren't incomplete and outdated, the manuals were up to date and the necessary buttons were accessible to the end user.
Companies sabotage themselves with shitty business practices so their cheap support lines get overwhelmed. Almost everything I've wanted to get done through a chatbot should've been an HTML form in my account panel, but businesses don't want to make it easy to return things or ask for refunds. They want you to jump through as many hoops and redirections as possible, because that makes them money.
With the way ChatGPT just lies and deceives out of the box, I've started taking screenshots of chatbot conversations. These businesses are making these chatbots their official point of contact so I take everything these bots promise to do or claim to have done as an official statement from their support department.
> I agree dealing with a bot in that situation sucks, but a big chunk of customer questions can probably be answered without human intervation by LLMs, assuming they have enough data about the organization and its products.
Hoenstly? I don't care about the company's problems giving support. If I have a problem, and the company won't resolve it, or if they waste too much of my time forcing me to go through a bot first, then I'm not their customer anymore. There are plenty of other places who actually appreciate my business.
The author is assuming a decently high level of technical competence here. I guarantee you there are people calling into customer service with basic queries already handled by an app or website.
Sure it's already dire, but who cares what customers want (especially the few 'difficult' ones)?
We didn't want phone menu systems, or to wait minutes, tens of minutes listening to muzak on hold, or to have to decrypt heavy foreign accents and painful latency on calls, etc either.
Customers will get what companies give them, which will be phrased as 'lower prices'.
Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path.
Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother?
In those years my English was quite basic. I abandoned an adventure in a mine in front of an elevator door because open and every other verb I could think about didn't work. Very frustrating but I lived on and forgot about it. A few years ago I found a walkthrough on some retrogames site. I checked that location and... slide!
The stuff Amazon gets away with is incredible. Imagine if you returned a product to WalMart and they decided to charge you for it anyways 3 weeks later.
I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks.
Could it be that their behaviour is different depending on who is the customer, i.e. what is the customers yearly spend?
I shop frequently on Amazon. Last year I sent a gift to my nephew how was living in a dorm at the University. The gift was a comouter monitor about $500 worth. The package disappeared soon after it got signed by someone that was at the front desk and never made it to my nephew.
I was already getting ready for a long discussion but Amazon said they will handle it and my nephew got another monitor two days after.
I also routinely return stuff I buy by mistake and I honestly report I just bought it by mistake
My experience is that Amazon customer service did a complete 180 in 2020. Prior to that, every issue was resolved to my satisfaction, and they felt too generous, if anything.
Today, every Amazon rep I speak to isn't even empowered to resolve the most basic issues, and sounds like they hold their employer in complete contempt. Which is to say, they follow the scripts and /try/ to sound friendly, but it's clear they hate their employer, and want to satisfice their KPIs to keep their job, but all else being equal, would prefer for Amazon to die.
This also corresponds to a huge increase in problem rates. Prior to 2020, problems with Amazon were rare. Today, it seems like screwups happen all the time. I don't think they show up on any KPIs, though, as from Amazon's perspective, if a customer service rep e.g. satisficied and pretended to issue a refund without actually issuing one, or a customer gave up on resolving an issue, they have no visibility into the issue.
A basic, obvious issue like a missing package or a return will get handled, but anything more complex is now a black hole.
In 2018 I ordered something from Amazon and it got marked as delivered but didn't make its way to me. Amazon sent a replacement AND refunded me for the item.
In 2022 I ordered an item of similar size and cost and it was marked as delivered along with a photo of a house I could not recognize at all. When I asked Amazon to look into it I got the corporate flow-chart equivalent of "Oh haha, that sucks". I asked for it to be escalated and they more or less said that the order already has the "oh haha, that sucks" flag on it and can't be changed.
Yeah, their delivery accuracy has dropped. Since the great yuck I have had at least one delivery a year next door (easily retrieved) and one I completely didn't recognize.
> I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks.
I'm not surprised at all. There have only been two times when I needed to return an item I got from Amazon, and both times Amazon stiffed me. One of those items was for around $10.
Amazon seems to care about petty dollar amounts more than avoiding upset customers.
It’s always been possible to get refunds from Amazon without contacting a human, through a very simple form. I haven’t used their chatbot, but I’m curious how it’s better than the old form.
Some forms were replaced with bots. For me is the "Request invoice from vendor". I used to have a canned email I would copy paste into their contact form but now I have to answer a few questions the bot does so it is three or four copy/pastes instead of one. Just an annoyance but still, not progress.
This is my experience as well. Almost anything that the chatbots do competently shouldn't require more than a form on their site with a few questions and often did in the past.
I like the vision our chatbot team at work has there. They want their bot to have 2, maybe three tasks. First, it's supposed to be a neater way of presenting that initial phone choice of "Press 1 if you have an internet issue. Press 2 if you have a telephone issue". It's easier for some people to say "My phone is dead and has no free tone when picked up" and have the system recognize this as a phone issue. And second, it's supposed to make the collection of necessary data about the call smoother - since when does the issue occur, which phone number is affected, what's your account number. Once it has those (or it gives up after 1-2 tries without progress) it hands over to an actual agent.
The value proposition there is that you save a few human employee minutes per support case.
It's actually more than a few minutes. I can't speak for other places, but generally there will be an agent that is monitoring many inbound chats, and in a lot of cases the resolution can likewise be automated.
In the past this was managed by a fairly deep call queue, and has saved fairly significant amount of $ vs receiving and resolving everything manually.
Indeed we have internal clients (vs paying customers) but overall this has been quite successful for us.
Unfortunately, the majority of times I call customer service, none of this collected information gets transferred or they make me confirm everything again. It's extremely aggravating. For every company who gets this right, there are ten who don't.
Even if you do everything perfectly for every customer, I lump you in with the other ten because I think I got lucky rather than thinking you having a working system. :(
That the key point for me. If the chatbot can’t act on the system for me beside « get me human », it’s useless.
I like them when :
- it can schedule a call back with a human
- it can open ticket, ask for document on my side and make it faster for my query to process overall.
> The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother?
Because you are not the target user for the bot. For every user that proactively reads the FAQs, there's 10 more that don't and would happily open a support ticket to have someone copy/paste the FAQ answer to them. The bot is to there deflect those cases.
I don't think this is true, because if it were true, people would want chatbots. The last thing most people want to do is to call or open a chat with customer service, and they've usually looked through everything they can find to avoid it.
One of the reasons some chatbots, like at Amazon, could be useful is because their FAQs are impossible to find.
Exactly, yes. I never use the chat support (whether robotic or manned) because if I'm at the point where that's necessary, I'm at the point where I need to talk to a human being personally.
Yeah this is my take too. Chat bots are usually transparently obviously something the CTO bought, then Support dumped some basic configuration into it, and now it's a glorified redirect-provider to poorly map english questions to help articles. There's 0 vertical integration and it's purely to try to shunt traffic down cheaper support channels.
I've literally had 1 good experience with bot-based support. Exactly one. It was when I forgot I had used my Lowes' store card that month and they charged me a late fee for missing a payment. I went through the chatbot UI because I couldn't figure out how to even begin to contact human support.
And can you imagine my utter shock and disbelief when the bot offered to waive the late fee if I set up autopay? Holy shit! I'm still in awe. The chatbot waived my fee. It actually DID something. It genuinely saved them and me a support call that day instead of just feeling like they were trying to persuade me to give up by throwing friction into the process of getting to someone who could actually waive my fee.
> And can you imagine my utter shock and disbelief when the bot offered to waive the late fee if I set up autopay? Holy shit! I'm still in awe. The chatbot waived my fee. It actually DID something. It genuinely saved them and me a support call that day instead of just feeling like they were trying to persuade me to give up by throwing friction into the process of getting to someone who could actually waive my fee.
I think I had a similar experience with the Amazon customer support bot just yesterday. It authorized a refund on a $20 item that I said arrived damaged.
I agree. In my head I group chatbots into: 1. bot that can regurgitate the faqs 2. bot that can perform actions
I've had good experiences with type 2 bots with Amazon, Uber, and Doordash, refunding orders that weren't delivered, etc. I assume they have a budget for refunds based on your purchase and refund volume, very similar to the agency a normal customer service agent would have.
> very similar to the agency a normal customer service agent would have.
Exactly this is the differentiating factor. Even if you have a human on the other side, if they don't have the agency accorded to them to perform a particular action within given bounds, they are no good compared to a Chatbot. A chatbot will help such companies cut costs, but they'll also reduce the CX - but I doubt those companies give a damn about that.
Yup. The chatbots are basically a friendly version of search, useful for the non-tech but anyone here will almost certainly not benefit.
You want to cut down your customer service costs, actually provide answers online! I would say at least 80% of what I call companies about are things that perfectly well could have been done online if their website actually allowed it.
I despise most chatbots. Especially the ones bothering me while reading an article. I'm leaving these sites without reading.
But I really dig airline chatbots. I rebooked flights quite easily in the past with that. It gave me clear options, I could scroll the list of flights etc., way better than by phone. And at inconvenient times as well, so no hotline anyway.
That way I changed a very unpleasant being stranded for 2h in a hotel room in Geneva for a nice long stay in a five star hotel. Landing at 1, being in the hotel at 2 at night. Flight was scheduled for 6 something in the morning. This would've been gruelsome. So I rebooked my flight to Frankfurt for lunch and enjoyed the breakfast buffet.
The reason why LLMs are truly revolutionary is that they suddenly allow to connect and interface systems that used to require a human in the loop because of their ambiguous interfaces.
LLMs can (and will) do a lot more than providing chatbot-like interfaces. Instead, they will power agents that can manipulate a variety of tools and interface with extremely diverse systems, including end users, SMEs, etc.
You're right that LLMs can do this. Well, I guess you might be wrong about that too, but it doesn't matter. That's not the problem. Companies have very large callcenters with actual humans that can do this ... but they don't. They're not allowed to. The only thing callcenters are these days are a semi-human interface to a bad website. LLMs won't be anything more.
I dont want useless customer support.
Wether that's a human or a bot.
It's extremely frustrating to have a real issue, take for instance a plane cancelled or delayed when travelling with kids, and not being able to talk to a real person who can actually help. Let alone having to wait 30-60 minutes to get a hold of someone.
Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversation with a human who actually has the power to make a decision. All they repeat is info that's found online and tell you to fill in a form or email.
In that case a chatbot is probably better for both sides, mainly for the person behind the phone who doesn't get verbally abused on a regular basis.
Sadly best way to get helped by corps nowadays is to tweet to them.
Few years ago, I was stuck at Dulles due to a snow storm and had to resort to online customer chat support via the United app. I only used it because United was pushing people really hard to use the app for support. I was connected with a support rep who obviously did not live in the states because he tried to give me an impossible itinerary. Anyone living in DMV area knows taking an AA flight from DCA that's about to take off in 40 minutes when you're currently located in terminal C/D in IAD is impossible.
My current gig requires me to travel more and now I am able to enjoy the privileges of dedicated support line for 1K. The difference is night and day; you not only get connected to reps who are obviously American, but also reps who deal with frequent travelers so they have contextual information to get what you need.
> Anyone living in DMV area knows taking an AA flight from DCA that's about to take off in 40 minutes when you're currently located in terminal C/D in IAD is impossible.
I don’t think you need to live in the DMV area or even need to be a human to figure this out…
My thought process is that people who get contracted/hired to do cheap labor won't appreciate how big the US is (IAD to DCA is 40 minutes alone without inclement weather + bad traffic) and how TSA affects one's transit time.
But there are easy resources available to them to determine that. Google Maps alone would indicate that it’s pretty much impossible. I am actually surprised that their system even would suggest something like that.
For fun, I asked ChatGPT (gpt-4)…
Prompt:
Can I get from Terminal C in IAD to DCA in 40 minutes?
Response:
Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) are two separate airports located in the Northern Virginia area, near Washington, D.C.
The travel time between these two airports is approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour by car under normal conditions. However, this can vary depending on the time of day, traffic, and other factors. Furthermore, this timing does not include time for potential issues such as returning a rental car, waiting for a taxi or rideshare, airport security, and other possible delays.
Therefore, a 40-minute window to travel between these two airports and catch a flight is not realistic and highly risky. It's recommended to allow a much greater time buffer when scheduling flights with a transfer between these airports.
> Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversation with a human who actually has the power to make a decision.
In my experience it's equally impossible to have a conversation with a human that has a 1st grade level set of communication skills. You write out a detailed account of your problem and then get some copy/paste response back that has nothing to do with your complaint, and suggests that the person did not even bother to skim your complaint, let alone try and comprehend it.
It's probably not communication skills but workload. Their daily pay may depend on how many people they knock off, and an impulsive, quick response might work 90% of the time. If you're one of the 10%, they'll finally read what you wrote instead of skimming it quickly, hitting F6, and selecting the third option.
That has a lot more to do with the requirements laid out by their management than their communication skills. They stick to the script because they take performance hits if they don't, not because they don't know how to talk to a human.
When you outsource your customer support to a call centre where the people there have no power whatsoever to actually help you, who are just trained to get you off the call with a "if there's anything else we can help you with...", why bother? Support needs to be in-house, and the people doing it need to have the power to actually do something when you call them. Otherwise, it's just for show, it's ticking a box in some compliance or PR checklist
I agree. I've run a support team for a mid-sized SaaS company for many years and have so far resisted any outsourcing. Unsurprisingly, Support is one of the commonly cited high points of our product. The members of my team are well trained and knowledgeable and can escalate things easily so that the vast majority of customer problems can be resolved satisfactorily.
The challenge with resisting outsourcing is justifying the cost of it. I try and frame it as: what is the likelihood that a customer churns if their problem goes unresolved?
Of course in our case, each customer represents thousands of dollars in ARR, so that's an easier argument to make.
Honestly most customers do not read anything on the website before they contact support and in these cases a chatbot, given that it is trained well is probably the best solution. I personally despise them because I don't want to interact with anyone if I can solve a problem myself so when I actually have a problem it's usually just in the way of getting an answer.
But having worked technical support in the past I know that most customers don't do any sort of research at all and will (not happily exactly, but yeah) sit through two hours of phone que to ask the most basic of questions that is in the manual, on the website or anywhere on the internet really.
Problem is that there are so many questions companies (and government) do not want to give answers to, or they want it split per market, or geographically, or only to citizens, or only to their own employees.
Online you find a lot of information you're just not going to find in chatbots.
This is why Google had such extreme value. Organizations, certainly governments, generally had search functionality, but it was purposefully sabotaged according to each organisation's capricious needs and therefore sucked. The problem is that the information available and searchable was definitely NOT accidentally sabotaged, they actively want to prevent people finding out.
Chatbots are going to suck like company search fields suck. Not because the technology behind them sucks, but because their purpose is to change what you want, not give you what you want. And when this fails, and fails, and fails some more it becomes and endless horror of frustration.
This is what companies want. They want to use frustration and sabotage as a way to get what they want. Chatbots will rarely be anything but a new weapon to do so.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] threadSo I authenticated got through to the correct option on the first try, and it seemed like they were going to drop me into a queue to wait for a live operator. And then a recording informed me that "due to a high call volume, nobody is available to take your call." and dropped the call! Can you believe that. No option to leave a callback number or wait 4 hours in a queue, just terminate the connection. I called back and got the same thing.
The website does have a chatbot, but of course it is not capable of connecting to a human being and only capable of relaying the simple FAQs they've programmed into it.
I am pleased and impressed, for the most part, with the proliferation of Live Agent Chat for many services. I really prefer this over a telephone interaction (most of the time.) So it's good when I can easily break past the "virtual assistant" trying to FAQ me and get to a human.
But in this case, today, I suppose there were no humans to be found. Tragic. They have good compensation packages there.
A) Nobody is available to take your call. Press 1 to leave a voicemail. Mailbox full. Click.
B) A human answers. They're not the right person, but can transfer you to the right person. Click.
C) Same as B, but after they transfer you you're told 'Mailbox full. Click.'.
D) Same as B, but they transfer you to the top of the phone tree.
Yeah, when I sense that (B) or (C) is coming up, I stop the person cold and I demand to know the direct-dial number for wherever they are transferring me. And these days I also ask to know the department name as well, so I can figure it out if presented with a tree or org chart or something. It doesn't always help, but it helps me feel a little more secure.
I'll bet my tax rebate on it.
Chat bots are annoying due to potential inconsistency, having to guess the types of things you ask for, due to their latency, but they've made major advancements recently, and we are only beginning to see what's possible.
If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away. Why do we want to discourage them from exploring this new area? Experimentation is critical to understanding what will work and to the development of our society.
The difficulty is, this is obscured to the customer.
Let's say I have a broadband account in a country with competitors I can choose between (eg the UK, where I can have BT or Virgin). I've already chosen the best package for me. I'm ringing up after six months of good service to fix my intermittent line drop.
The chat bot is terrible and I have to wait until the problem goes away on its own.
Unfortunately for me, I can't just guarantee that switching to the other service will make a difference, because chat bots are not core service. I can compare broadband options and pick the best, and I'm already on that. Now I have to gamble that some combination of:
(broadband option) + (customer service) is higher than the one I'm on.
Unfortunately for me, I have no way of checking this. There's every chance that I'll end up on a worse broadband option and a worse customer service option.
https://www.aa.net.uk/
(Satisfied customer for years).
> For your location, forecast download sync speed is 27-37Mb/s and forecast upload sync speed is 4.2-6.9Mb/s.
I’m currently on ten times that and was considering going higher next time. Unfortunately that’s not currently competitive with Virgin.
Fuck chat bots and the money-saving horse they rode in on.
It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.
I also suspect that the majority of refund requests are fraudlent, so if they dont have a reputation scoring system for their customers they are stupid.
Side note: after that they became even more useless. "Please mail the item back to us." Yeah no sure I'll mail you the shards of the broken bottle and a puddle of drying ink.
Played dumb and contacted them again the next day and told them I put it back in the box and took it to the post office but they refused to take the package because they said you can’t ship leaking things. Asked them what they wanted me to do now.
They told me not to ship it and refunded it.
Being that sort of customer certainly didn't get Amazon to treat me decently.
You had a request that was simple enough and common enough the bot's design took it fully into account.
But it's not even close to a human level of service yet.
So I'll always try to get to a human ASAP knowing the AI will just waste my time.
A chatbot has no responsibility, it is just a useless parrot of the documentation. It doesn't serve any useful purpose except worsening the experience for the customer.
You are the exception though, the vast majority of people don't do that. Those are the users the chatbot is designed to help (because they represent a large portion of a typical support team's interactions).
Companies race towards having the shiniest chatbot or _virtual assistant_, without fully understanding all the implications and customer needs. Everyone wants to have their brand name associated with being "the first" or "the best" in their segment for providing such technology, no matter how trivial it may seem -- e.g. as the article points out: just wrapping already available info in a dialogue.
Given these incentives and high stakes, it's also hard to "exit" the bandwagon, due to various factors like reputation, costs, and the uncertainty around your competitor not doing the same.
[1]: https://danielmiessler.com/p/moloch-the-most-dangerous-idea
The overwhelming majority (like 98% or more) of support requests are from people who have not read the documentation and are asking about something that is well-covered within it.
Chat bots can't (currently) eliminate the agents who exercise critical thought and report bugs, but for any company large enough to outsource "tier one" support to a call center overseas, the chat bot would actually be a big improvement.
More likely, a lateral move rather than a big improvement. But you're right -- companies that outsource the support to crappy call centers are companies that barely have customer support at all.
There is a distribution of users. Definitely some users are better off (no matter how good the chatbot is) using the FAQ or websites. Some people are not chat interface orientated.
Some people would benefit from a very powerful and effective chatbot. The grandmother you cite for example! But the problem is that almost all chatbots are incompetent and really function to:
1) deflect users
2) bolster the innovation credentials of the organization or sponsors for the project.
> OpenAI's ChatGPT has over hundred million users
in no way validates this:
> Customers want chatbots just fine
If you told it you wanted a refund for order xyz, and it immediately gave you a refund, I'm sure people would like it.
At work, I hated an hr bot for years. But in the last year it became good and useful and I now like it.
If a bot gives me what I need I'll like it. If it only provides value for YOU though and makes MY life more difficult then I will not enjoy it very much.
Big problem with most bots is they don't have authority and they refuse to turn you over to someone who does. If I'm engaging with your customer service, it means I have an issue I need resolved. The worst bits are the equivalent of incessantly yet cheerfully asking me to restart my computer in an endless loop with no path out.
"This item is scratched, so I want a 50% discount refunded" - comes to my mind. Most of customer service is dealing with Karens
I wouldn't call a person wanting their new item to be in new condition a scammer.
The story that made me quit:
We had an extremely clear policy of no returns or exchange on opened printer cartridges.
A customer came in to obtain a refund. He claimed it was the wrong cartridge.
Did anybody help him or instruct him to take that cartridge? Nope.
Did he notice that it's explicitly not for his printer? Before he opened it? Nope.
I pick up the cartridge and... it's empty. Dry. Nothing left in it.
Before I could even say anything he looks at me, and start yelling and slamming his hands on the counter and making a scene. Not because he was upset, there was nothing to be upset about yet. It was just a rational, calculated move to obtain a refund on a cartridge he fully used. 30 seconds later the store manager comes over and gives him the refund.
Store manager coached me and indicated, this is basically retail life and where he comes in to provides judgment - the disruption and bad image this person created FAR outweighed the $50 he gave away. It was nothing personal and I should not feel bad or betrayed that I was overruled after following clear rules.
I absolutely 100% agree with manager's perspective. He did the right thing. I could not blame him or wish that he did otherwise. The only way I could find for that scenario to have a different outcome was for me to not be there anymore, so I tendered my resignation the next day.
Chat bots will take over more and more, but only to save money, not to improve the customer experience. I do get that some people call in with the simplest of question or problems, but for the people who call in with actual issues, I doubt that companies will even grant the bots the freedom they'd need. Customer service people already aren't given the freedom and autonomy needed to help customers, so why should bot get it?
Say you call in to an ISP to have your internet connection fixed, is the ISP going to give a bot free-range to make adjustments in backends or dispatching technicians? I doubt it. All this is going to do for the companies that implement it is that they'll save a bit of money and have the bots hide any underlying issues or errors on policies.
- Genuine issues
- Scammers
Probably more effectively than a minimum-wage apathetic human being.
I wouldn't underestimate the mental capacity of scammers, it would only be a matter of time before they would know exactly how to prompt the bot to issue a refund.
The overwhelming majority of people are calling in about something in the FAQ because they can't be arsed to do their own search.
The first layer of support at larger companies is usually restricted by their software from sending you anything but a pre-written response, just because you're such a rarity.
I want to call a human even if my question seems dumb for them and have it taken care of, because I don't even know if I get that one answer there might be 10 other questions hiding behind the corner.
I understand this, but it changes nothing. Bad customer service is bad customer service.
I can see the author probably hasn't done much customer service? I'd say maybe 1% of customer queries go in that direction.
I agree dealing with a bot in that situation sucks, but a big chunk of customer questions can probably be answered without human intervation by LLMs, assuming they have enough data about the organization and its products.
This is why large companies end up hiring thousands of low-wage workers who are prohibited by their software from sending anything but a pre-written response. The first-level agents can't even edit it. They can only send you something someone else wrote for the common situation.
Chat bots could easily replace these workers, and the customer experience would be better for it.
You will (probably) always still need the higher level agents who are really tech support, the ones who can identify when someone's report really is a bug and get it reported to engineers for fixing.
Those aren't the low-level agents in these outsourced call centers, though. Even if those people do recognize an issue, they can't do anything until they've sent you some number of generic responses that haven't satisfied you.
At least the bot could be trained to customize responses within a set of parameters and match the tone of the asker.
But most people aren't like that.
Not because I don't want to do it myself. Because the website I'm using is throwing error messages, the form to do it myself has disappeared five years ago, and the only way to accomplish what I want is to bother someone over the phone.
When I worked customer service, I'm sure customers could've done most of the things they wanted to do themselves, if the website wasn't unclear, the help articles weren't incomplete and outdated, the manuals were up to date and the necessary buttons were accessible to the end user.
Companies sabotage themselves with shitty business practices so their cheap support lines get overwhelmed. Almost everything I've wanted to get done through a chatbot should've been an HTML form in my account panel, but businesses don't want to make it easy to return things or ask for refunds. They want you to jump through as many hoops and redirections as possible, because that makes them money.
With the way ChatGPT just lies and deceives out of the box, I've started taking screenshots of chatbot conversations. These businesses are making these chatbots their official point of contact so I take everything these bots promise to do or claim to have done as an official statement from their support department.
Hoenstly? I don't care about the company's problems giving support. If I have a problem, and the company won't resolve it, or if they waste too much of my time forcing me to go through a bot first, then I'm not their customer anymore. There are plenty of other places who actually appreciate my business.
We didn't want phone menu systems, or to wait minutes, tens of minutes listening to muzak on hold, or to have to decrypt heavy foreign accents and painful latency on calls, etc either.
Customers will get what companies give them, which will be phrased as 'lower prices'.
Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother?
It was basically guess the verb. And also not obvious when you're talking to a human through the exact same interface.
It's a menu system but harder to use.
I finally have the thing I need
I am in the right place to use the thing such that it will fix whatever problem so I can move onwards
How hard can it be to figure out how to ask the game to use the thing to fulfil its purpose?
Quite fucking hard, it turns out. Quite fucking hard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
> What broach?
> What sword?
The keywords could be so obscure that allegedly, 25 years after release, some quests remain uncompleted by even a single player.
I complained and was ignored. It was only $10 but it teaches a lesson.
Could it be that their behaviour is different depending on who is the customer, i.e. what is the customers yearly spend?
I shop frequently on Amazon. Last year I sent a gift to my nephew how was living in a dorm at the University. The gift was a comouter monitor about $500 worth. The package disappeared soon after it got signed by someone that was at the front desk and never made it to my nephew.
I was already getting ready for a long discussion but Amazon said they will handle it and my nephew got another monitor two days after.
I also routinely return stuff I buy by mistake and I honestly report I just bought it by mistake
My experience is that Amazon customer service did a complete 180 in 2020. Prior to that, every issue was resolved to my satisfaction, and they felt too generous, if anything.
Today, every Amazon rep I speak to isn't even empowered to resolve the most basic issues, and sounds like they hold their employer in complete contempt. Which is to say, they follow the scripts and /try/ to sound friendly, but it's clear they hate their employer, and want to satisfice their KPIs to keep their job, but all else being equal, would prefer for Amazon to die.
This also corresponds to a huge increase in problem rates. Prior to 2020, problems with Amazon were rare. Today, it seems like screwups happen all the time. I don't think they show up on any KPIs, though, as from Amazon's perspective, if a customer service rep e.g. satisficied and pretended to issue a refund without actually issuing one, or a customer gave up on resolving an issue, they have no visibility into the issue.
A basic, obvious issue like a missing package or a return will get handled, but anything more complex is now a black hole.
I have 3 free UPS's, that were wrong and Amazon just refunded me without requesting a return.
And I even had a hard drive go back, because of degraded performance - but it did require some extra troubleshooting on the phone.
Granted, I live in a rural area and I spend a lot on Amazon with Prime - from cleaning supplies and food to furniture and tech.
That's because they contain batteries that Amazon will not accept.
In 2022 I ordered an item of similar size and cost and it was marked as delivered along with a photo of a house I could not recognize at all. When I asked Amazon to look into it I got the corporate flow-chart equivalent of "Oh haha, that sucks". I asked for it to be escalated and they more or less said that the order already has the "oh haha, that sucks" flag on it and can't be changed.
I'm not surprised at all. There have only been two times when I needed to return an item I got from Amazon, and both times Amazon stiffed me. One of those items was for around $10.
Amazon seems to care about petty dollar amounts more than avoiding upset customers.
I reordered and they still were going to be delayed until the day after we left.
I went to a local store and bought one.
I started a chat and told them that even if the suitcases did arrive that evening, I wouldn’t be able to send them back for a refund.
They said keep all of the suitcases and I would still get my refund.
They did come later that evening.
The value proposition there is that you save a few human employee minutes per support case.
In the past this was managed by a fairly deep call queue, and has saved fairly significant amount of $ vs receiving and resolving everything manually.
Indeed we have internal clients (vs paying customers) but overall this has been quite successful for us.
Even if you do everything perfectly for every customer, I lump you in with the other ten because I think I got lucky rather than thinking you having a working system. :(
And that human will immediately ask you to repeat all of the information you just gave to the screening bot.
I like them when : - it can schedule a call back with a human - it can open ticket, ask for document on my side and make it faster for my query to process overall.
Because you are not the target user for the bot. For every user that proactively reads the FAQs, there's 10 more that don't and would happily open a support ticket to have someone copy/paste the FAQ answer to them. The bot is to there deflect those cases.
One of the reasons some chatbots, like at Amazon, could be useful is because their FAQs are impossible to find.
If you think most people have done everything to avoid reaching out to support, I can only imagine you haven't worked in a "Tier 1" support role.
I've literally had 1 good experience with bot-based support. Exactly one. It was when I forgot I had used my Lowes' store card that month and they charged me a late fee for missing a payment. I went through the chatbot UI because I couldn't figure out how to even begin to contact human support.
And can you imagine my utter shock and disbelief when the bot offered to waive the late fee if I set up autopay? Holy shit! I'm still in awe. The chatbot waived my fee. It actually DID something. It genuinely saved them and me a support call that day instead of just feeling like they were trying to persuade me to give up by throwing friction into the process of getting to someone who could actually waive my fee.
I think I had a similar experience with the Amazon customer support bot just yesterday. It authorized a refund on a $20 item that I said arrived damaged.
I've had good experiences with type 2 bots with Amazon, Uber, and Doordash, refunding orders that weren't delivered, etc. I assume they have a budget for refunds based on your purchase and refund volume, very similar to the agency a normal customer service agent would have.
Exactly this is the differentiating factor. Even if you have a human on the other side, if they don't have the agency accorded to them to perform a particular action within given bounds, they are no good compared to a Chatbot. A chatbot will help such companies cut costs, but they'll also reduce the CX - but I doubt those companies give a damn about that.
The FAQ Page: "Was this article helpful? If not, contact our support chat!"
Endlessly. It's so stupid.
You want to cut down your customer service costs, actually provide answers online! I would say at least 80% of what I call companies about are things that perfectly well could have been done online if their website actually allowed it.
But I really dig airline chatbots. I rebooked flights quite easily in the past with that. It gave me clear options, I could scroll the list of flights etc., way better than by phone. And at inconvenient times as well, so no hotline anyway.
That way I changed a very unpleasant being stranded for 2h in a hotel room in Geneva for a nice long stay in a five star hotel. Landing at 1, being in the hotel at 2 at night. Flight was scheduled for 6 something in the morning. This would've been gruelsome. So I rebooked my flight to Frankfurt for lunch and enjoyed the breakfast buffet.
LLMs can (and will) do a lot more than providing chatbot-like interfaces. Instead, they will power agents that can manipulate a variety of tools and interface with extremely diverse systems, including end users, SMEs, etc.
You're right that LLMs can do this. Well, I guess you might be wrong about that too, but it doesn't matter. That's not the problem. Companies have very large callcenters with actual humans that can do this ... but they don't. They're not allowed to. The only thing callcenters are these days are a semi-human interface to a bad website. LLMs won't be anything more.
It's extremely frustrating to have a real issue, take for instance a plane cancelled or delayed when travelling with kids, and not being able to talk to a real person who can actually help. Let alone having to wait 30-60 minutes to get a hold of someone.
Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversation with a human who actually has the power to make a decision. All they repeat is info that's found online and tell you to fill in a form or email.
In that case a chatbot is probably better for both sides, mainly for the person behind the phone who doesn't get verbally abused on a regular basis.
Sadly best way to get helped by corps nowadays is to tweet to them.
Few years ago, I was stuck at Dulles due to a snow storm and had to resort to online customer chat support via the United app. I only used it because United was pushing people really hard to use the app for support. I was connected with a support rep who obviously did not live in the states because he tried to give me an impossible itinerary. Anyone living in DMV area knows taking an AA flight from DCA that's about to take off in 40 minutes when you're currently located in terminal C/D in IAD is impossible.
My current gig requires me to travel more and now I am able to enjoy the privileges of dedicated support line for 1K. The difference is night and day; you not only get connected to reps who are obviously American, but also reps who deal with frequent travelers so they have contextual information to get what you need.
I don’t think you need to live in the DMV area or even need to be a human to figure this out…
My thought process is that people who get contracted/hired to do cheap labor won't appreciate how big the US is (IAD to DCA is 40 minutes alone without inclement weather + bad traffic) and how TSA affects one's transit time.
For fun, I asked ChatGPT (gpt-4)…
Prompt: Can I get from Terminal C in IAD to DCA in 40 minutes?
Response: Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) are two separate airports located in the Northern Virginia area, near Washington, D.C.
The travel time between these two airports is approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour by car under normal conditions. However, this can vary depending on the time of day, traffic, and other factors. Furthermore, this timing does not include time for potential issues such as returning a rental car, waiting for a taxi or rideshare, airport security, and other possible delays.
Therefore, a 40-minute window to travel between these two airports and catch a flight is not realistic and highly risky. It's recommended to allow a much greater time buffer when scheduling flights with a transfer between these airports.
But for farm support center, I'd wager that they're just given SOPs to follow mindlessly or don't really care that much.
In my experience it's equally impossible to have a conversation with a human that has a 1st grade level set of communication skills. You write out a detailed account of your problem and then get some copy/paste response back that has nothing to do with your complaint, and suggests that the person did not even bother to skim your complaint, let alone try and comprehend it.
The challenge with resisting outsourcing is justifying the cost of it. I try and frame it as: what is the likelihood that a customer churns if their problem goes unresolved?
Of course in our case, each customer represents thousands of dollars in ARR, so that's an easier argument to make.
But having worked technical support in the past I know that most customers don't do any sort of research at all and will (not happily exactly, but yeah) sit through two hours of phone que to ask the most basic of questions that is in the manual, on the website or anywhere on the internet really.
Online you find a lot of information you're just not going to find in chatbots.
This is why Google had such extreme value. Organizations, certainly governments, generally had search functionality, but it was purposefully sabotaged according to each organisation's capricious needs and therefore sucked. The problem is that the information available and searchable was definitely NOT accidentally sabotaged, they actively want to prevent people finding out.
Chatbots are going to suck like company search fields suck. Not because the technology behind them sucks, but because their purpose is to change what you want, not give you what you want. And when this fails, and fails, and fails some more it becomes and endless horror of frustration.
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36624294
This is what companies want. They want to use frustration and sabotage as a way to get what they want. Chatbots will rarely be anything but a new weapon to do so.