Eating disorder hotline fires staff, switches to chatbot days after unionization | Hacker News Reader

Eating disorder hotline fires staff, switches to chatbot days after unionization

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51 pointsanigbrowl15 comments

This is moronic. People reach out to these types of things because they need a human connection or relation. AI is a terrible replacement here.

AI is a terrible replacement for most customer support cases, because usually you reach out precisely because the automated solutions on the website aren't working.

That said, there is a lot of money to be made in selling cost savings... And usually, the support team was outsourced and can only click the buttons on their support interface anyway, which means there is no loss of ability if an AI is limited to the same set of API calls.

I've always done business, where competition exists, with the company with the best CS. I rarely ever use it, but phone trees and offshored support are two things that will get my blood pressure sky high. It's why I use Discover and not Wells Fargo anymore, for one example.

I just hope a company can differentiate on that, and have enough people like me to give them their business.

> usually you reach out precisely because the automated solutions on the website aren't working.

I work closely with customer care in Telco and this might be true for tech-savvy people, but 80% of our call volume is still problems solved by "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Sure, it's frustrating if you know exactly what you need fixed, but the automated triage makes sense for most businesses out there.

I love how direct and obvious unionbusting shifted over to a discussion of efficiencies in seconds. Never change, HN.

Don't forget the circumlocution that needs to happen sometimes.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" I've already done that multiple times... (Console shows uptime on device is 12 days 4 hours 31 minutes).

Ok, I need you to remove the cable going into the back on the right side (the power plug but I'm not going to say it) and let me know when the light goes off. You mean the power cord?

The cord on the right hand side. Are the lights off?, good.

"I'm initiating a reset, go ahead and plug the cable back in and let me know once the lights go steady." (no reset actually initiated on my end).

A lot of CSR is working around trigger words to de-escalate.

An AI program will never be able to do that effectively. Its a fundamental limit of computation. You can't have the same inputs map to two equally separate outputs. It breaks determinism required for computers to work, and words have same inputs, different outputs (meanings). Anyone worth their salt in IT would have warned against this article's type of magical thinking.

The foundation responsible for funding them is basically just misrepresenting and taking money and not providing the services and support that was intended at the loss of a group of at-risk individuals. Real stupid imo.

You fix this by having a good documentation website and then charging for support beyond that (refunded if the problem ends up being on the ISP's side). This will weed out the vast majority of idiots and would allow you to focus on quality/skill vs quantity when it comes to hiring support staff.

I would say the opposite. Once chatbots are at the level of chatGPT4, most customer service will be easily handled by the chatbot.

It is crisis situations with much emotions involved like this or someone who was the victim of fraud that is going to need the human touch.

Most things I can think of that I have ever called a customer service line for I would really have preferred to talk to gpt4.

There's a few companies, eBay and Tesco Mobile spring to mind where they have domestic call centres and non domestic ones. The non domestic ones are useless, but they also have no way to put you through to the domestic ones who have more tools at their disposal.

It's a bit crazy when you're doing a gdpr request and the guy on the other end has no idea what you're talking about, says they can't do it for data protection reasons and won't put you through to someone who actually knows the law. So you have to ring back up multiple times to get through to a different call centre.

Futher info

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36095384

About the Chatbot by the creators

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36095397

Money quote:

>Please note that Tessa does not replace therapy nor the NEDA Helpline, but is always available to provide additional support when needed. Tessa is not equipped to provide crisis support, but she will provide crisis resources when prompted.

Unfortunately this article is really just speculation. No official press release or statement from the actual organization. It certainly looks bad. But I'll reserve full judgement until they release their side. But overall it's an interesting current event of society and technology.

Silence is an answer in itself. If there was "another side" to the story, they would have already pushed it out.

Sometimes a duck really is a duck.

Here they talk about the why

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36095384

But I'll reserve full judgement until they release their side.

Unless they say 'look we're barely functional because our budget is leaking and here's the numbers' it's going to be meaningless PR pablum designed to derail discussion into vagueness. If they were in such dire financials traits, why didn't the board fire the management too?

Non-profit huh?

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