Comment by lobstersammich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lobstersammich | Hacker News Reader

I thought that people understood that this was the point of chat bots? Much like useless phone trees with awful automated speech recognition chatbot are - IMO as someone who has worked in NLP for over a decade - simply there to tire out the customer from tasks like:

- getting a refund for an order - cancelling a service - anything else that would cost the company money

Hostile design but in cutesy-wootsie 'Digital Assitant' form. Yuck.

Thankfully some geographies require the option to be able to one-click cancel your service (California) and some other localities (the EU) prohibit deceptive or 'hostile' website design. Try using Amazon.fr or Amazon.de sometime and compare it to the user experience of Amazon.com. Amazon Prime will notify you in the EU several days before your month of 'Free Prime' is up, before your credit card is charged. Even then, you have up to 14 days after the charge to cancel your membership AND the cost of the Prime membership will be refunded in full.

There's definitely a lot of hostile design around stopping things like cancellations and probably refunds, but I can also say, having worked on a support team and built tools for said support team, our main focus is that most support requests don't need us at all and paying support reps to answer them is a big cost.

I wish I still all my old charts about support ticket categories, but I'd bet that before we built out various tools to deflect them, the majority of our tickets could be answered by "read this help doc", "go to this section of your account page and click this button", or "you need to email the seller, not us". (I work at an Etsy-like site where only the individual sellers can answer most product and shipping questions.)

Simply having a chatbot answer all the questions answered in the helpdocs is worth tens of thousands of dollars in support agent time and should gets you the answer much faster than waiting for a small team to respond to support requests. The chatbot is dumb and annoying, but it doesn't have a backlog of tickets and it's on the job 24/7, so it might feel slow, but could easily be a day faster than emailing a human.

> our main focus is that most support requests don't need us at all

IMO this is tone-deaf. If customers want to talk to a human then a human is needed.

Sounds nice, but it's not reality. At my organization, most of the support calls were asking how to reset their password. Paying human beings to answer that question over and over again was just lighting money on fire.

We have a chat bot now.

My internal customers at my current job like to DM me on Slack at all hours of day and night to ask me banal questions about their password or MFA device status. All of these have well documented answers I've sent them before, and have a general availability chat room I've sent them to, meant for them to be able to reach any of the members of my team who could assist them, and an entire ticketing system that could resolve their issue.

But no, they've decided it is my personal touch that is needed. Thankfully, I have a manager who is willing to stand behind me to ignore these customers who need me personally to hold their hand. I've been ignoring one of them for 3 months now. They still haven't reset their password the way they were told to the last two times they forgot it. They evidently don't need that account, since it's been inactive for 3 months and they're willing to wait to personally make it my problem.

There's classes of customer that really like to use their relationship to exert some power over their world and another human, whether it is remotely reasonable or not.

Unfortunately, the customer paid a price that did not include the human fee, and likely also wouldn't have bought whatever they did if it was included.

In a few cases this is true, but usually people just want to achieve a specific task or answer a specific question, and if there's a button they could click to do it or a one-sentence answer, giving them that right now, vs. after a day of waiting, is almost always a better experiences.

What's happened recently (meaning, since the pandemic) is that some companies have de-staffed their systems to the point where there really is no path to resolution. This happens in cases where the company is completely at fault: e.g., when you order something and they charge you, but don't provide the item because they're out of stock.

It's a worrying trend, since it's hard to see what will reverse it. I imagine that every dimension of this must look profitable to management.

> it's hard to see what will reverse it

Legislation. Consumer protection laws need to be in place so that the calculus is shifted to a point where providing refunds etc is cheaper than (risk_of_getting_caught * penalty_of_getting_caught)

> What's happened recently (meaning, since the pandemic) is that some companies have de-staffed their systems to the point where there really is no path to resolution. This happens in cases where the company is completely at fault: e.g., when you order something and they charge you, but don't provide the item because they're out of stock.

This is a relevant and timely comment. I just filed a chargeback and dispute with my credit card company because a product I ordered was defective and could not be returned as the company didn’t have an address for returns and wouldn’t return phone calls. Of course, my credit rating went down 30 points after the chargeback and dispute. Seems like there’s no way to come out ahead here.

What is the company that made the sale?

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