I’m not a huge fan of Amazon, but last time I had an issue with a parcel it was sorted out insanely fast by the AI assistant on the website.
Within literally 2 minutes I’d had a refund confirmed. No waiting for people to eventually pick up the phone after 40 minutes. No misunderstanding or annoying questions. The moment I pressed send on my message it instantly started formulating a reply.
The truncated version went:
“Hey I meant to get [x] delivery, but it hasn’t arrived. Can I get a refund?”
“Sure, your money will go back into [y] account in a few days. If the parcel turns up in the meantime, you can send it back by dropping it off at [z]”
How is a chatbot here better, faster, or more accurate than just a “return this” button on a web page? Chat bots like that take 10x the programming effort and actively make the user experience worse.
But that nuance is probably limited to a paragraph or two of text. There’s nothing the chatbot knows about the returns process at a specific company that isn’t contained in that paragraph. The question is just whether that paragraph is shown directly to the user, or if it’s filtered through an LLM first. The only thing I can think of is that chatbot might be able to rephrase things for confused users and help stop users from ignoring the instructions and going straight to human support.
That has nothing to do with AI and is strictly a return policy matter. You can get a return in less than 2 minutes by speaking to a human at Home Depot.
Businesses choose to either prioritize customer experience, or not.
There’s a big claim from Klarna - that I am not aware has been independently verified – that customers prefer their bot.
The cynic might say they were probably undertraining a skeleton crew of underpaid support reps. More optimistically, perhaps so many support inquiries are so simple that responding to them with a technology that can type a million words per minute should obviously be likely to increase customer satisfaction.
Personally, I’m happy with environmentally-acceptable and efficient technologies that respect consumers… assuming they are deployed in a world with robust social safety nets like universal basic income. Heh
You can just go to the order and click like 2 buttons. Chat is for when a situation is abnormal, and I promise you their bot doesn’t know how to address anything like that.
We can! We also know how to use web search, read an FAQ, interpret posted policies…
Some folks can’t find buttons under “My Account” but can find the chat box in the corner.
Also I suspect traditionally, you’ve been able to protect features from [ab]use by making them accessible to agents. Someone who would click a “request refund” button may not be willing to ask for a refund. I wonder how this will change as chatbots are popularized.
So how “intelligent” do you think the amazon returns bot is? Gerbil level or human level or beyond? Has it given you any useful life advice or anything?
Doesn’t need to be “intelligent”, it needs to be fit for purpose, and it clearly is.
The closest comparison you made was to the cyoa book, but that’s only for the part where it gives me options. It has to have the “intelligence” to decipher what I’m asking it and then give me the options.
The fact it can do that faster and more efficiently than a human is exactly what I’d expect from it. Things don’t have to be groundbreaking to be useful.
To be fair, it is useful in some regards.
I’m not a huge fan of Amazon, but last time I had an issue with a parcel it was sorted out insanely fast by the AI assistant on the website.
Within literally 2 minutes I’d had a refund confirmed. No waiting for people to eventually pick up the phone after 40 minutes. No misunderstanding or annoying questions. The moment I pressed send on my message it instantly started formulating a reply.
The truncated version went:
“Hey I meant to get [x] delivery, but it hasn’t arrived. Can I get a refund?”
“Sure, your money will go back into [y] account in a few days. If the parcel turns up in the meantime, you can send it back by dropping it off at [z]”
Done. Absolutely painless.
How is a chatbot here better, faster, or more accurate than just a “return this” button on a web page? Chat bots like that take 10x the programming effort and actively make the user experience worse.
And it could hallucinate, so you would need to add further validation after the fact
Presumably there could be nuance to the situation that the chat bot is able to convey?
Like a comment field on a web form?
But that nuance is probably limited to a paragraph or two of text. There’s nothing the chatbot knows about the returns process at a specific company that isn’t contained in that paragraph. The question is just whether that paragraph is shown directly to the user, or if it’s filtered through an LLM first. The only thing I can think of is that chatbot might be able to rephrase things for confused users and help stop users from ignoring the instructions and going straight to human support.
That has nothing to do with AI and is strictly a return policy matter. You can get a return in less than 2 minutes by speaking to a human at Home Depot.
Businesses choose to either prioritize customer experience, or not.
There’s a big claim from Klarna - that I am not aware has been independently verified – that customers prefer their bot.
The cynic might say they were probably undertraining a skeleton crew of underpaid support reps. More optimistically, perhaps so many support inquiries are so simple that responding to them with a technology that can type a million words per minute should obviously be likely to increase customer satisfaction.
Personally, I’m happy with environmentally-acceptable and efficient technologies that respect consumers… assuming they are deployed in a world with robust social safety nets like universal basic income. Heh
You can just go to the order and click like 2 buttons. Chat is for when a situation is abnormal, and I promise you their bot doesn’t know how to address anything like that.
We can! We also know how to use web search, read an FAQ, interpret posted policies…
Some folks can’t find buttons under “My Account” but can find the chat box in the corner.
Also I suspect traditionally, you’ve been able to protect features from [ab]use by making them accessible to agents. Someone who would click a “request refund” button may not be willing to ask for a refund. I wonder how this will change as chatbots are popularized.
So how “intelligent” do you think the amazon returns bot is? Gerbil level or human level or beyond? Has it given you any useful life advice or anything?
Doesn’t need to be “intelligent”, it needs to be fit for purpose, and it clearly is.
The closest comparison you made was to the cyoa book, but that’s only for the part where it gives me options. It has to have the “intelligence” to decipher what I’m asking it and then give me the options.
The fact it can do that faster and more efficiently than a human is exactly what I’d expect from it. Things don’t have to be groundbreaking to be useful.