Technology

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.

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

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.

Most chatbots are speed bumps. Like phone menu trees and hold times, they slow you down on your way to get actual help.

Sometimes that means you give up before getting to the real help, which saves money on support.

Whether it's the intended effect or not, it is so well known at this point that we shouldn't excuse anyone using this tactic. It's malicious.

A decent chatbot will be able to handle the most common transactions in a conversational way similar to a person, and will automatically escalate to a human when they get out of their depth. But most chatbots are unfortunately not good.

I agree that I absolutely do not want a chat bot and that getting in touch with a human who knows what theyre doing is more important.

That said I've also worked a job where I manned the little chat box on a website by myself and I was consecutively talking to like 13 people at the same time for 8 hours. It was not fun, and while I did what I could to help people there were times I wasnt as fast to respond and that I didnt give people as much help as I could. There were also times when the the question was super simple and it saved the customer time on hold for nothing.

I've also seen chat windows on websites that are pushed out to underpaid overworked people in third world countries where they are so stuck to the script that it might as well be a robot. Overall I think chat windows on websites for anything serious arent great, human or otherwise, though they should be better. In some cases the bots may improve experience, but I dont like that it'll just lead to cutting their customer service crew further.

When I contact customer service I almost never want information, I want them to do something. As long as the bots can't actually make anything happening, they are just a waste of my time. And that's why I don't like them

I don't know what type of chatbots these companies are using, but I've literally never had a good experience with them and it doesn't make sense considering how advanced even something like OpenOrca 13B is (GPT-3.5 level) which can run on a single graphics card in some company server room. Most of the ones I've talked to are from some random AI startup that have cookie cutter preprogrammed text responses that feel less like LLMs and more like a flow chart and a rudimentary classifier to select an appropriate response. We have LLMs that can do the more complex human tasks of figuring out problems and suggesting solutions and that can query a company database to respond correctly, but we don't use them.

I would prefer a documentation site with a fuzzy finder, where I can search terms and the articles are well written, and If I don't find my answer I would like to contact a real person. Chatbots are very inconvenient for finding information, and they are also slow. Maybe something like this https://support.system76.com/, https://wiki.archlinux.org/, https://wiki.archlinux.org/. good docs save more time that those crappy chatbots, and a way to have a cal with a real human. (Maybe chatbots if they were something like chat gpt)

I think the worst application of chat bots is when they replace a form that is served on a webpage. I don't know why anyone thinks this is a good idea but I've seen it a lot.

In my country they are thinking about putting chat bot on the emergency line (same as 911 call for reference).

So no...when I call I want help, not a chat bot with limited options, no empathy and that will probably desconect my call if I choose the wrong option.

I have never interacted with one of those chat bots that didn't lead to me just speaking to a representative anyway. Why the extra steps.

Chat bots are by and large fucking annoying and slow. I do however like chatting with a live agent. It's easier for me to do other things and not be tied up.

I can see it somewhat working once those transition to using ChatGPT-like models trained on every bit of documentation available, but as of now most of them are only able to answer really basic questions and sometimes even ask you to answer very specific keywords. Those are annoying as hell.

At least ChatGPT is capable of actually helping you. It's been a good companion to navigate AWS, you can usually just ask it how to do it and it'll even spit out some CloudFormation configs for you. My ISP's chatbot though? Can barely tell me to unplug or replug my modem until it gives up and transfers me to an agent.

Currently they’re stupid, and their grasp on coherence just isn’t there. They “drift” in a way. They’re like compulsive liars and confabulators, just rattling off speech without any sense of responsibility to ensure it’s true.

I think there are ways they could be used. If they're intelligently used as a filter to resolve basic issues that don't require human intervention and immediately transfer to a human when the query doesn't fit into a bucket extremely cleanly, they could be an efficient force maximizer, and you could theoretically even have specialists in different areas of your service that the bot attempts to direct most relevant queries to.

But the companies using them don't want great, efficient service. They want cheap service at all costs to anything else. So that's what you get.

If a chat bot can answer any question that is answered by its documentation -- and can shunt me to a human (instead of hallucinating the answer) when the documentation does not have the answer -- I say BRING ON THE CHATBOTS

Customer service chatbots are useful for helping someone use natural language to find an answer that already exists in the documentation/FAQ. I imagine this must be useful for a non-zero number of people who find it difficult to troubleshoot issues using an FAQ.

Personally, my first port-of-call is always to go to the documentation/FAQ myself to look for the answer. I will only use a chat service if I cannot find the answer. So having a chatbot trying to suggest me solutions from the documentation is always very disruptive and annoying because it's just forcing me to press "no this doesn't answer my question" enough times until it actually connects me to a human... if I'm lucky.

I think there is value pursuing and researching the technology more. For the benefit of people who aren't like me and struggle troubleshooting issues on their own. It can be useful for helping with routine queries and allows for existing customer service personnel focus on the more complex issues. As it stands at the moment almost every customer service chatbot I have encountered has been a negative experience for me.

If I had a simple, routine problem, I wouldn't be calling you; I'd be solving it myself.

Yeah when someone decides they need help, they don't want to traverse a tree of questions that more often than not end with something obvious you've done. Also, you want a real person to empathize with you frustration