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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

My internet went down, and I couldn't reach customer service. I could only reach (drumroll), a chatbot. The chatbot couldn't confirm that anyone knew about the problem and was working on it. (How do I know that it just doesn't always say "someone's working on it?")

I submitted an FCC complaint.

A few days later, a customer service rep called me. She told me that I could contact the chatbot. I told her I'd never submit an FCC complaint if I could talk to a real person, because I don't trust the chatbot.

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Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot?

Can you elaborate on why you didn’t trust the chat it but would trust a human?

Accountability for one. Another being hallucinations are still too common.

Accountability for what?

I’ve had human customer service members tell me things that I knew to be false. At least computers should be able to calculate confidence levels, like Watson was doing for Jeopardy a decade ago.

> Wouldn’t this be a perfect use case for a chatbot?

It's a horrible case for a chatbot. Basically, when you have a bunch of hopping mad customers, you don't want to rub salt in their wounds. Refusing to answer the phone in such a situation is horrible customer service.

Basically, if you refuse to answer the phone and stick out a chat bot, it looks like you're just hiding from your customers.

(This should be obvious if you've ever seen post mortems on customer service disasters, like the Intel Pentium bug.)

> Can you elaborate on why you didn’t trust the chat it but would trust a human?

Two reasons:

Basically, I don't know what kinds of integrations, or lack of, are in the system. So, for all I know, they could have something that just says, "don't worry, we're working on it," if it detects that my internet is offline. (IE, I don't know if anyone is actually working on it.)

No context: The system would only respond with a short, canned answer. First it said that everything was going to be fixed at 1:00, then a few hours after it kept saying "fixed soon."

(Again, this should be obvious if you've ever dealt with automations, or ever seen an error message.)

What’s obvious to me is that I’m not calling customer service to talk to or yell at a human. I am calling to get my problem solved. Perhaps you and I have different goals?

> So, for all I know, they could have something that just says, "don't worry, we're working on it," if it detects that my internet is offline. (IE, I don't know if anyone is actually working on it.)

Why would you trust this exact communication from a person over a computer?

> I am calling to get my problem solved

That is the only reason why I call customer support in internet outages. I usually wait awhile before I call. (In this case, I called a few hours after their posted ETA.)

> Why would you trust this exact communication from a person over a computer?

This response in this thread explains it very well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661196

> Conversely, a weasel worded chatbot could say "we are responding to outages as noted" or something similar, and that doesn't actually provide any evidence the utility is aware of the outage or its scope in the actual monitoring and management systems; your report of a failure could go straight to /dev/null.

Like I said, above, I called a few hours after their expected ETA. This is the situation where it's time to call a human who can call up the manager of a different department and say, "you said it was going to be done three hours ago, what's happening?"

It's basically a "Gall's Law" situation. The AI Chatbot is perfectly fine for a "normal" outage that's solved within the ETA; but once the published ETA has come and gone, we're in a corner case that's better handled by humans.

For a good explanation of this, see this recent article on Gall's Law that explains why it's better to let humans handle corner cases: https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/complex-project-galls-law/...

The local power company (a psuedo-governmental co-op, I think) has a website with a big interactive outage map. When the power goes out, the icon is usually on the map by the time I've pulled up the site on my phone, describing the outage area, and the ETA is usually surprisingly accurate.

100% automated service, but as good if not better than anything I could get from a human.

Conversely, a weasel worded chatbot could say "we are responding to outages as noted" or something similar, and that doesn't actually provide any evidence the utility is aware of the outage or its scope in the actual monitoring and management systems; your report of a failure could go straight to /dev/null.

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