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Comment by klabb3 | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who questions or points out that the technology doesn't do what the business people think it does[...]

Uh oh, we've got a downer!

Jokes aside, I'd like to consider an even simpler explanation, namely that "The purpose of a system is what it does"[1]. In this case, it would suggest decision makers are fully aware that they suck. Why would anyone want something that sucks? Because it's discouraging, and customer service today is all about discouragement. Unsubscribing, replacements, returns, special requests are all costs, and that's a fixable problem in the current business doctrine, especially in the faceless megacorp flavor of business. While chat bots (and other dark patterns) are frustrating, it creates a veil of plausible deniability for the business. It's hard to claim that it's deliberately hostile to customers, even though it's the simplest explanation.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

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The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem.

It doesn't really matter how the chatbot saves the money, they can just see the end results and use the money for bonuses instead.

>People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem.

With customer service systems I have to disagree here. I've got experience working with these issues and for the vast majority of companies most contacts to customer support are for small, banal, things that current crappy chatbots can easily solve. The 80-20 rule works here too.

Bad companies try to do too many things with their chatbots, and use it as a way to make it harder for customers to actually get to talk to a human.

Good companies use them to allow customers to solve common issues faster than getting a real human on the line.

Then there's the other issue of how people want to find information - some people want to find it themselfes and do not want to talk to a person, whereas others specifically want to ask someone and do not want to look at all. For the latter group, no chat bot or fancy autocomplete knwoledgebase (Looking at you Zendesk) or similar will work. They'll always try to contact support as their first step, and they will get very frustrated if you make it impossible.

If your a more software oriented company, it can be very benificial to have software developers (or even a team, if you're a larger company) devoted to helping support. The majority of issues customers contact support for are UI/UX or business process related, and if you systematically start to solve them you will reduce customer support burden and customer support related costs.

I suspect that in a forum like this one, most of the people get pushed into customer support when they've probably exhausted online resources (though we also all screw up from time to time). So, most of the time, you're dealing with a chatbot (or for that matter an L1 CSR--which often isn't a lot better) when you really need a human with some experience and agency to make things better.

I even had a weird thing with Apple a couple of weeks ago. Some edge case related to buying something. The chatbot and telephone tree was as frustrating as anywhere else but once I got to an appropriate person it was trivial to solve.

> The 80-20 rule works here too.

Yes, and that's the problem: solving 80% of the problems may be a net positive for the company, but it is a net negative for the users: they are now interacting a bunch of time with a device that isn't able to solve their problem, resulting in a negative experience for 20% of the customers. If a waiter would refuse to help 20% of the customers by pretending to take their orders but not actually doing anything with them then that would kill the place where that person worked.

Solutions like these should not work better than 50%, they should work as often as a human on the other end would work, so closer to 100% including escalation options in case it ends up not working after all.

That's definitely how some companies use it. I needed a human from Comcast to help me with something, and instead of getting me on with a human (after spending a few minutes on the phone trying to communicate to the bot why I needed to talk to someone) it sent me an SMS with a link to their online chatbot and promptly hung up. I then called back and said my reason for calling was to "cancel my service," which of course got me through immediately to a human.

>> The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem.

That's not going to serve the company when they deploy it to take orders at a drive-thru. McDonalds pushing the state of the art, now that's interesting!

I don't go to McDonalds much anymore, but if I ever detect that I'm talking to a machine I will just drive away. I don't use the order kiosks either, because they take 5x as long as just telling a person that I want a Big Mac, fries, and a medium Coke. I can say that faster than I can even get to step 1 on the kiosk.

I understand they're even putting in conveyor belts in some drive-in restaurants There was a time when the little girls came running out in short little skirts. Remember them? You pull in and the little girl would come running up. "May I take your order sir?" "Yes, but I don't believe it's on the menu, ha ha" They don't, they don't let you flirt any more now. They give you a little green box with a white button on it A little speaker grill...

(from https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peterpaulandmary/paultalk.ht..., c.1960s)

In the short term, yes. But if customers have a consistent bad experience with the products or services of a company they will stop doing business with them. I routinely buy products from one place where I know the service is better (delivery, returns, helpdesk) than somewhere else where it might be cheaper.

I don't think that if you want to be in business for a long time, aiming to frustrate your customers is a good idea, assuming you don't have some monopoly position.

I have to agree with this. I do not understand why I type all of my relevant information into a chatbot, and then a real person comes on the other end, and asks me all the same questions. Worse is when it is on the phone.

I can only assume the intent is to discourage me, as that amount of ineptness is even more depressing to assume.

I call a company one time and the phone was answered in 1/2 second, the person picking up clearly got all the details on their screen as she correctly guessed why i called (which was not all that obvious) then suggested a good solution and (now 2 sec into the call) told me to call again if i had more questions, to have a nice day and ended the call. It went so fast im still laughing how right they got it. Its a great experience, it feels like the helpdesk is with you all day, always ready to answer instantly. It doesnt matter if their competition is cheaper. I would recomend them to anyone over anything.

For sure, there are some businesses out there that do do it right and have your info ready to go based on called ID.

But you have 99% of businesses that do not even offer a call back system, including the government. In 2021, if you do not offer call back systems or email, then it can be assumed you are intentionally being hostile to customers who need help.

To be fair, people disregard the prior experience with other people too, so they're not necessarily treating bots that differently here. I had this in the supermarket the other day: went through an issue with the first person, they explained it to the more senior person who I heard listening, she then ignored what was said and repeated the exact same steps (whilst I was trying to talk her out of it because I could see it was a waste of even more time!)

What I find odd about the online time wasting approach is that I just get the money back from the bank eventually, so they lose in the short-term (as the bank is sure to pass this cost back to the company) plus next time/long term I take my business elsewhere because I then know they aren't an honest participant.

I am talking about just verifying your identity. You spend 5 minutes punching in your life story via a numeric keypad so that you can get transferred to a person, then you spend another 5 minutes phonetically spelling out your life story why?

It is even stupider in a chat bot, why are people not able to scroll up to see what you have already typed in?

>Unsubscribing, replacements, returns, special requests are all costs, and that's a fixable problem in the current business doctrine, especially in the faceless megacorp flavor of business.

I'd believe that. Especially as processes mature and you really get your QA down pat, a good chunk of support requests tend to come from high-maintenance "black hole" customers who will only consume more of your resources when you help them.

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