Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

The number of chatbot services popping up promising to solve customer support for businesses is concerning. I've personally had bad experiences with chat bots when trying to get a refund and all it did was point me to some help article that I've read, ask me a question that I've already answered before, or worst is provide an answer that is totally unrelated to the question I asked.

IMO, most chat bots out there are just digital reincarnations of phone VRU systems. I don't see them taking over customer support anytime soon. Bots should not be the front and center of customer support, but should be assistants on the sides of both customer and the support agent to provide sideline help while a conversation is ongoing, instead of the bot taking over the role of the support agent.

For example, when I start a conversation with a support agent, I could be prompted to enter my email address if I havent, or select a category (shipping, refunds, etc), all while waiting for the agent to get back to me, or as a starter to the conversation. On the agent side, a bot could be helping me by suggesting responses to the customer's question and letting the agent pick a response, instead of the bot answering the customer directly.

The human experience is crucial when dealing with a business. We're not there yet with AI to have bots take over the entire conversational experience between a customer and a business, so if you're building a chat bot, please don't bring the horrible phone VRU experience to the internet.

Don't get me wrong on bots though, they're awesome when it comes to certain situations and tasks that don't require human to human interaction and are usually structured, like shopping. Take Shopify's Facebook Messenger bot where a person could shop on a business's Facebook Page via their Messenger bot, with the bot taking on the role of navigating the catalog for the user.

I have a simple test before I subscribe to anything: I call the support hot line. If it is answered by a human who introduces themselves with their name I'll give them my money. If there is no phone #, if the only kind of support is a bot or some online tool then forget it. Companies that want to do business without interaction with their customers will not see my patronage.

You must save a lot of money by not buying anything, ever.

You'd be surprised how many businesses take customer service seriously. For now. Maybe your vision will come to pass at some point.

So, no AWS [0] or Stripe [1], then?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/

[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone-num...

Yep. Though I love the guys behind Stripe and I sincerely hope it succeeds.

It's really easy to get a human on the phone with AWS..

It makes me wonder, what if the chat bot were able to browse for information, in addition to using table look-ups or supervised training? This would allow the bot to be flexible in unfamiliar situations, or ones where the company policy has changed.

What AI's are there that attempt information gathering and understanding? All I can think of is IBM Watson on Jeopardy.

If you really wanted to get rid of human customer support agents, you could just put their internal manual on the open internet. After all, nobody could ever remember all the various policies within a company, so they have to be written down somewhere.

Of course, if the rules say "if the customer asks for a refund, stall for 5 minutes and then transfer to a different department, unless they threaten with legal action", you can't really do that. So I'd guess that most companies won't want to expose themselves that way.

This. I feel all help would already be self service if it weren't for fraud vectors like this that would be exploited en masse if publicly exposed. Redditors would devour these scenarios.

There are a quite a few now. The barrier to entry for natural language processing has been lowered to a point where there has been a proliferation of chat-bots attempting to replace people. These AI models are learned by scanning the corpus of FAQ's and customer service training materials for a specific company.

So far, in my experience... they don't work all that well. Although to be fair, it might be entirely psychological. When you're speaking with a human, you feel as if there is a possibility for improved understanding. When you're talking to a robot which doesn't understand you, that's a pretty hard barrier.

>It makes me wonder, what if the chat bot were able to browse for information, in addition to using table look-ups or supervised training? This would allow the bot to be flexible in unfamiliar situations, or ones where the company policy has changed.

That requires actual intelligence to be able to interpret what it browsers -- which we are nowhere near close.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com