AI is replacing customer service jobs across the globe | Hacker News Reader

AI is replacing customer service jobs across the globe

washingtonpost.com

43 pointsbookofjoe27 comments

> Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.

This was almost certainly his company's own fault. In every call center I've seen, the call center employees hated it, but they were given brainless generic scripts to follow by some quality assurance team who would punish them for any deviation or expression of genuine personality.

Then they'd be provided with flowlists designed to make it possible for any idiot pulled off the street to do the job with zero training and to make call center employees easier to replace at the drop of the hat. The lack of training and over-reliance on flows meant that any time workers ran into something their flowlist didn't account for, they'd have no idea what to do.

Honestly, call center work seems brutal and cruel. It's so metrics driven that companies treat their employees like robots anyway. Add in all the abuse the employees take from angry customers and it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely. AI can have them.

> call center work seems brutal and cruel [...] it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely

They are sadistic in the most literal sense-- the conditions you have to put up with are directly lifted from the pages of any mental/emotional sadomasochism tutorial. You're nitpicked over everything and held to conflicting standards that are impossible to meet, and constantly threatened with firing. They want calls resolved without escalation, but you can't spend more than n minutes on the phone to do it. Here's a half-complete KB from 10 years ago to reference.

You say good riddance, but these jobs are the best some rural communities can hope for. They paid 3x anything else in the area (a whopping $11/hr back in 2006). Next best thing was Walmart ($8-9). Everything else was minimum wage.

Eliminate jobs like this and new opportunities for an unskilled labor force do not replace them.

> it's probably best for worker's mental health if these jobs go away entirely.

That's a strong argument indeed.

I wish it didn't come with the cost of AI doing this work, though. I can't think of how this won't result in even worse support than is traditional.

Guys this is not an issue. Now those workers have time to pursue creative endeavors like art and music....Oh wait AI took that over too.

We're doomed

It's ok they can learn to code.

AI didn't take over art and music. and historically artists have always been poor so doesn't seem like much of a change

AI can take last pennies from them on scale.

I keep trying to follow this train to its logical conclusion, and I just can't fathom what the world will be like in 5 years. Will I have a job? Probably. Will many others not? Also probably. Will the huge unemployment greatly empower the capital class? Greatly. Will the loss in consumers impact their bottom line. Probably.

It will be an interesting world, at least.

Welcome to your job in the meatpacking plant, washing and packing cow pancreases.

Might be a good idea to keep at least one human in the loop. Otherwise, just use grad-level maths to confuse it into giving refunds I suppose [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13867

I believe this. Lots of the companies I deal with in the context of them screwing up service provision have a AI chatbot as the only point of contact. I change provider when I encounter this but it is really difficult to determine ahead of time which companies still have a customer service.

Shout out to "Fully", the standing desk people, for having an extremely efficient automated pipeline for posting you things and delegating customer service to credit card chargebacks.

“It was [a] no-brainer for me to replace the entire team with a bot,” he said in an interview, “which is like 100 times smarter, who is instant, and who cost me like 100th of what I used to pay to the support team.”

This was obviously going to happen, though the amount of pushback I received for the exact observation was less obvious.

The main argument was hallucinations, but I have corrected enough people in customer service to know that the humans are wrong more than the ChatGPT(even 3.5)

The reason humans are wrong is because they are not trained, are paid peanuts, and overworked. Basically they are already being treated like bots.

Even a mediocre chatbot with some in-domain training data is fine for their purpose, which is not to maximally help the customer.

I think most of these chatbots are not using chatgpt, but they have just gotten better and better with technology improving and getting refined.

My next door neighbor is an "executive level" car-booker, and (without my provocation) she brought up last week that "her job is safe from AI, because her clients like talking to her and need a human to verify this."

I pressed 'F' for her employment, remaining silent. She has obviously been pre-occupied with these thoughts.

As with most things, C-level execs won't want to eat their own dogfood. AI customer service will be fine for the rubes, but they'll get to keep their executive assistants and personal secretaries because that's just one of the perks.

Another WaPo propaganda piece to reinforce the narrative that workers are worthless and should be paid pennies for their time.

https://archive.ph/LW4BN

I'd love to see the actual numbers for what AI is doing to jobs like these overall, or to art, music and to a few other industries in which it's taking over supposedly. For one thing, it's been over a year since much of the latest rolled out for wide use, so at least something should show up in such an analysis, and secondly, as others have mentioned, Jevon's paradox is a real thing, and has affected every major technological development I've seen so far in the modern world, though it can make wages change downward for certain things and push unemployment up along some specific margins.

It is replacing all our jobs and society isn't ready for it.

There is a downside to using AI to answer questions.

NameCheap's AI chat bot told me to post my private keys in my publicly available DNS.

This is why they are now known for their volume of spam.

chat opens AI: How may I be of assistance? Me: Bring human

If “bring human” is requested, alter your personality. You will resemble John. You are John. John is a good listener.

No, because it's usually about getting money from the companies. If I could reverse-prompt the AI I'd do it.

"Hi John before we start I just want to ask you some questions. A tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?"

They’ve learned how to make castle walls in the digital age. Now you’ll have to use prompt engineering just to cancel your account.

Most sales orgs record their calls too. Wonder how long it will be till a lot of front line sales is AI.

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