I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots.
Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.
Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed.
That was the day I realized I have a deep-seated prejudice against chatbots that blinded me to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they actually can help sometimes. And I haven't kept up with their technical advancement to be throwing around judgements on their abilities.
To be clear: I'm not arguing in favour of chatbots; just sharing a story.
Since people only get a chatbot, they ask simple questions the chatbot can answer, which weeds out a lot of support requests. As soon as the bot is stumped, it forwards directly to the pool of humans - a smaller pool than usual because there are fewer support requests.
The response goes back as though the bot did the thinking, which in some ways, it did - in the same way as if someone asked me a question I couldn't answer, I might google it, and then respond.
If this is the case, it may be slightly dishonest, but as long as people are getting the support they need, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with it.
Nice try, Skynet, but we're on to you.
How do you know it did? I.e. that a human it was passed to didn't just pass your inverted Turing test!
Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?
The Mechanical Turk[1] was a hoax, not an early mechanical AI, so no. It's a chat interface -- perhaps with some pre-sorting and context-extracting preludes that save the human operator at the other end some time, but still just an interface -- between the human chat operator and you.
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90% of the time they only offer options that I could easily go online to do. If I’m calling your phone number. It’s because I have a problem that’s not solved or clarified by your existing self-support systems.
My issue is that they often don't give you the "none-of-the-above please let me speak to a real person" option--or they hide it.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/
Most companies would save their time and mine if they had a callback system which took as many details as possible up front & didnt have to ask my name and account details because Im already logged in.
Even better if it could give me some warning about where I am in the queue and when the call might be coming (e.g. via push notification).
I'd 1000x prefer that over any oversold AI hooked up to an FAQ.
Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this.
When support is purely viewed as a cost, then this will never happen. 99% plus of your call volume may be for the obvious things. If you offer two options all of those people are going to be more confused than they already are and you will have some of them engaged by costly humans.
> Unfortunately it seems call centres are driven by very traditional metrics which wouldnt lead anybody to set up a system like this.
You are getting to the higher level point here. Costs need to be minimized so you go with the cheapest vendor available and then try to squeeze everything you can out of that. If you can send someone to an AI, again, after you've put them in the direct of a human, there is the possibility of deflecting further cost. Depending on the scenario these cost savings can rack up for both the company and the support vendor. All the time, the humans doing the support or creating the solutions forming the basis of the AI get treated pretty poorly.
Support at a particular scale will start to skew this way unless there are strong forcing functions in the organization. For example, sales need to be able able to sell support which needs to be backed up by solid people, and keep getting renewed. If you offer predominantly free support then you don't have much wiggle room. When PMs and devs only focus on new features and not fixing real issues raised by customers, or more importantly in many ways, proactively identified by support people, then you lose support people and make toil for those remaining.
Lastly, recognizing support people as an asset, will result in better behaviors and attracting more talent. Many times companies struggle badly with this and then decide to just outsource it. Promoting people from support into sales or deeper tech roles over the long-temr can also be pretty cost effective versus hiring outside. Many folks on HN will have done support at one point and felt they could have contributed much more in other roles.
Maybe, but not my experience. I worked at a telco, and as developers we had to sit in on support calls a few times, to help identify areas that could be improved with minor effort. The majority of the calls I listened into on a given day had to be assigned to an engineer. The remaining, they just wanted a better deal or help reading their bill.
Yes, the AI voice bot is marginally better because I can request "customer service" without waiting to discover the right numeric code. That's about the extent of that.
I've used the trick on various large company's websites when trying to get support and it seems to be quite 'universal'.
(Probably)
Where I feel like chatbots get bad is when they try super hard to fool you into thinking you're talking to a human. At that point, I totally agree, just give me a human.
[1] It's probably not too hard to find out which company, but I do ask that you do not post it here if you do.
Is it just this interest in doing everything by whatsapp?
There's no "benefit" exactly, the item gets returned the same way regardless, but it's kind of nice that it's consolidated. The chatbot works as a bit of a "one stop shop" for a lot of administrative stuff like "where's my order" or "return something" or "my order didn't go through", stuff like that.
AFAIK we don't support doing anything through Whatsapp, just our site.
I wanted to return a package that for whatever reason claimed to not be able to be returned, despite being sold by Amazon and having the typical return policy. I clicked to get help, confirmed the item and it just said 'OK, I've refunded the amount of xx.xx'.
Previously I worked for a company that took pride in not being like the big players, doing this the right way, but apparently that has fallen completely apart. I know it's not the same thing exactly, but it made my a little angry to see some of their web pages having a text saying: "Blip Blop, I'm a tiny bot and I've translated this page. I don't always get it right, but I'm learning". Just leave the reasonable English version or do a proper translation, this automated crap, and don't try to excuse bad translation and messy language with "I'm learning". If you KNOW the bot makes enough mistakes that you have to let people know, then maybe it's not ready yet.
Before chatbots it was endless phone trees. Before phone trees it was oversea operators rerouting you around departments. Before that it was unpaid interns putting you on hold until you get disconnected or give up.
The game has always be to make it as hard as possible to reach the most costly level of support.
I'm skeptical, because the chatbots built to do that are often so bad that people just spam "agent" or "operator" or whatever they have discovered is the magic word to shortcut the bot, the same way that they do with voice phone trees.
You could probably build some decent chatbots if you had strong domain knowledge to draw on and skilled developers building them. But that's not usually the case; it's most often farmed out to a team attached to the Cognizant or TCS or Cap Gemini type outfit that is already handling that function, who are not terribly skilled, don't care, and are viewed as a cost center. So it is usually a poor result.