Tbf most consumers hate all customer service.
While I’d prefer to just speak to a human, I’d much prefer AI over the status quo of dead dumb automated systems that just keep looping through the same preset options until you get enraged and give up or mash zero
What if it’s a dead dumb human? My god the moment I know I’m talking to someone in a sweat shop in Mumbai I know I’m not going to get a lot of support
Hmm, I wonder why… 🤔🤷♂️
Yeah it turns out that using a statistical model to handle customer service leads to a degraded customer experience, because statistical models aren’t humans and lack many human attributes.
Also, “the progress” only works because it’s humans who bend the rules and show kindness to special situations
could have told you this considering they also hated the days of “press or say your issue now”.
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.
Around my way, we have a pizza chain where they’ve began utilizing AI to take orders over the phone. The only screw up the AI made was that at first, before the process of taking our order down, it wanted to confirm that we live within the delivery distance, so we provided our home address and it verified that we were within range of delivery, after taking the order and repeating it back to us, including that the order will be delivered to our home address (providing the details of the home address) within a certain time range, the moment it asked us if this information is correct, we said yes and then a long pause, and it responded that it could not verify our home address.
Wat.
And because we decided to speak to a human, it apparently dumped the entire order and the person who answered our call did not have access to all the details we provided the AI.
Pretty much wasted a little over 5 minutes with the AI.
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.
Dude could save yourself time by just going to contact page and ask for a call. I never use these companies chat features.
Also I found if I Google customer service numbers regurdless of company than I can get a number to call 85% of the time.
Of course after that you either got to fight robot to get a human on the phone that 9 times out of 10 will be a person out of India who also acts like a goddamm robot that doesn’t understand English.
But my biggest pet peeve is a lot of times I have ro get a supervisor to solve a problem that would take the customer service agent ten seconds to solve.
I never use these companies chat features.
Historically, these chat interfaces were tied out to a call center somewhere on the opposite side of the planet. Now they’re entirely prompt-engineered. So you used to be able to work a claim through chat without sitting on a phone call for hours at a time. But now they obscure their customer support phone number behind six layers of tabs and links, while shoving the “WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHAT WITH A REPRESENTATIVE” button in your face the whole way, fully knowing it doesn’t actually connect to anything that will help.
But my biggest pet peeve is a lot of times I have ro get a supervisor to solve a problem that would take the customer service agent ten seconds to solve.
A lot of the agents are just working off of written prompts anyway. But they do get experience with these problems over time (or recognize a slew of the same problem coming in at once) and can cut through the shit to give you a real, human response. Sometimes that response is simply “We can’t help, because of widespread technical / systems issues”, but that’s better than being bounced through an automated service that feeds out generic non-answers and useless how-to guides.
Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.
These things having a clearly visible and usable button to ask for a human should be mandated by law.
Also have you tried writing “operator” to it? That may work. Sometimes.
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 tried to change the dates of a car rental through Priceline, a day after I entered the order. I got a message saying “You cannot change this order until 72 hours before your arrival” which I thought was weird. But I bookmarked the date and called as soon as I was inside the window. “Oops! Sorry, you can’t cancel or change the reservation because too much time has passed!” was the automated response.
Absolute fucking scam. So I submitted a complaint through my credit card company to reject the charges. In this particular case, automation worked in my favor, because AMEX’s dispute process is as opaque and arcane for the vendors as Priceline’s support desk was for its own clients.
But its increasingly computerized horseshit. Nothing actually fucking works, except the vacuum they hook up to your bank account every time they find an excuse to extract payment.
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.
Yeah but would they still buy from Amazon if they could avoid it?
At that point, I would’ve just googled the phone number.
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.
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
LOL, as if they care about what consumers want.
Consumers getting anything is just a byproduct of profits. They’d sell you shit in a box if they could. And some literally have.
Cards against humanity did it AFAIK
We have decided that you want something else instead. Take it. Now.
Hey, I didn’t know Apple had a fediverse account.
Hi, Tim Apple!
Introducing Apple Intelligence Genius. Now you can get technical support from the comfort of your home. We think you’re going to love it.
(It does nothing but tell you to reset your pram and turn it off and on again.)
“You don’t need a 3.5mm headphone jack. We’re removing it, and you’re going to like it”.
But I have several pairs of really nice, expensive headphones that need it.
“You will use this awkward dongle, like it, and thank us for our generosity”
Thanks! I love it!
Ah yes, the Lightning to 3.5 dongle. Which I’ve had to buy like 6 of because I keep losing the stupid thing.
You’d almost think that was the point, but
The funny thing is that Apple chat support was a real person when I tried to create an account last week. Yes, they provided the normal directions to create and account which didn’t work through their account creation website, through an iPad’s settings, or whatever the third option was, but it was very clear it was a real human being.
Ended up finding a suggestion from reddit to go through iTunes and that worked. They use real people to provide the official directions that don’t work!
Yeah, there are some things that have to happen on the phone (Account recovery is one, because it’s a special department and most IT has no way to do anything. They can’t even really do it in the store because they don’t have the access.) But their chat isn’t bad when I’ve had to use it.
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.
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’m really not sure how you read my post and got that impression.
The answer is always, the service will sick until you leave for another company.
Then you’ll find out sucks just as much there, cause you have to buy from someone
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
Let’s be honest here: they want a human to abuse. They want to be shitty to and verbally assault someone that they view as being “lower” than them. If the AI works well (a different conversation) then people will get over any trepidation they have rather quickly. The people that are legitimately upset will just miss having someone to put down for “only” working customer service.
Or maybe they just want their issues resolved.
Most people using customer service aren’t assholes.
You have a trauma history in customer service? What are you on about? This isn’t why people are calling customer service.
Let’s be honest here: they hate that the companies are jerking them around and using bullshit programs to cause even more problems, instead of employing people to solve the problems.
When I call somewhere and get a live person I ask for them to give me the machine because a machine is easier to deal with.
