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Comment by jzombie | Hacker News Reader

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jzombie

I find that customer support from a lot of companies these days is remarkably degraded from a few years ago.

Some companies, I can't even "spend" money with because of this.

A real crisis.

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Hi, I’m a virtual assistant. How can I help you today? Please, select of of 3 available answers.

Great! Our Support Center has a few helpful articles on that:

I was trying to change my policy with Geico today. The web browser "virtual assistant" told me I had to go to another page and gave me the link, but then the assistant and its button disappeared when I navigated away. I switched to the mobile app to try again. The available answers eventually got me to an agent who helped me, but part way through I left WiFi range and was disconnected. Trying to get on again I manually asked to skip to the agent and the virtual assistant got confused. So I clicked on one of the available answers and it got confused by its own answers. By chance I got back to the same agent, but it was definitely clunky.

Reality: they only have 1 agent.

There has been a major shift to using chat bots and knowledge bases to reduce the demand on human agents. This allows companies to reduce staffing costs considerably. Less staff, less management.

Unfortunately, there seems to be minimal investment in analysing the user experience over time. Few companies update their bot when there are known issues impacting their service (like they would for phone IVRs).

I heard a talk about 2 weeks ago from a law person who mentioned that of all the money ChatGPT is making for companies, the number one driver is savings due from customer support. ChatGPT is not pushing is towards AGI, it's only pushing Doctorow's enshittification.

As an AI language model, I don't have real-time information on specific events or talks that have taken place after my knowledge cutoff in September 2021. However, I can provide some general insights based on the information available up until that time.

The reality is, unfortunately, it's more profitable to not have customer support at all if things work for most customers, and let the customers with problems just leave.

I hate that you're right. And almost all of us will eventually be that customer with a problem someday.

Agreed, with one exception. Costco rolled out live chat and I had to use it twice. The wait time sucks but when connected I was able to get two representatives who knew what they were doing.

Also they let you skip all the auto messages and go straight to a human which is great in the world of dialog tree hell

They are now pouring money into AI hype to build the ultimate support service which I bet will be shitty as hell too because of obvious "cost cutting" and detachement from reality.

That sounds about right. I was trying to activate a Windows copy on a rented machine and ran through so many hoops that when I finally spoke to someone I just said that I lost my patience and that I couldn't even remember why I was trying to activate it in the first place.

I do think the prevalance and low cost of bots caused this.

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