Technology

I fully support that shift to AI customer service, on the condition that everything their AI support bot says is considered legally binding.

The transition to an AI-focused business world is proving to be far more challenging than initially anticipated.

No shit, Sherlock.

AI is worse for the company than outsourcing overseas to underpaid call centers. That is how bad AI is at replacing people right now.

Hilariously, many of these companies already fired staff because their execs and upper management drank the Flavor-Aid. Now they need to spend even more rehiring in local markets where word has got round.

I’m so sad for them. Look, I’m crying 😂

Well yeah, when ai started to give people info so wrong it cost the companies money this was going to happen.

I called the local HVAC company and they had an AI rep. The thing literally couldn't even schedule an appointment and I couldn't get it to transfer me to a human. I called someone else. They never even called me back so they probably don't even know they lost my business.

Can we get our customer service off of "X former know as Twitter" too while we're at it?

Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble with burst along with it and I don't have to listen to techbros drone on about how it's going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.

Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

/s

This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

So providing NO assistance to customers turned out to be a bad idea?

THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME IN THE HISTORY OF CUSTOMER SERVICE!

The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.

The bad thing: half of them haven't.

I hope they all go under. I've no sympathy for them and I wish nothing but the worst for them.

I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.

I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.

I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.

These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.

If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.

I’m frankly amazed this many of them realized the sheer idiocy of their decision.

from what I've seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.

It's always funny how companies who want to adopt some new flashy tech never listen to specialists who understand if something is even worth a single cent, and they always fell on their stupid face.

I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support "solutions", ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it's funny how our prompts looked something like:

• please do not suggest things you were not prompted to
• please my sweet child do not fake tool calls and actually do nothing in the background
• please for the sake of god do not make up our company's history

etc. It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.

I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.

You've heard of Early Adopters

Now get ready for Early Abandoners.

I spent 25 years on this planet without the need for an actual Ai, I’ve used Siri when she was dumb to make quick phone calls or to turn lights off but other than that I really don’t need to know the last digit to Pi.

Surprised pikachu face

My company gets a lot of incoming chats from customers (and potential customers)

The challenge of this side of the business is 98% of the questions asked over chat are already answered on the very website that person started the chat from. Like it's all written right there!

So real human chat agents are reduced to copy paste monkeys in most interactions.

But here's the rub. The people asking the questions fit into one of two groups: not smart or patient enough to read (unfortunate waste of our resources) or they are checking whether our business has real humans and is responsive before they buy.

It's that latter group for whom we must keep red blooded, educated and service minded humans on the job to respond, and this is where small companies can really kick ass next to behemoths like google who bring in over $1m per employee but still can't seem to afford a phone line to support your account with them.