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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, absolutely. Recently a lot of large businesses have resorted to walling themselves in behind chatbots, often completely replacing all forms of customer contact except phone support with endless queues. Dutch PostNL: here's looking at you.

Getting people to give up seems to be the main goal, not a side effect.

It has gotten to the point where any contact with a company where someone responds to you in person, clearly answering your question, and where contacting them was as easy as clicking on an email link feels so rare and special.

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> It has gotten to the point where any contact with a company where someone responds to you in person, clearly answering your question, and where contacting them was as easy as clicking on an email link feels so rare and special.

And those companies tend to occupy a special place in your heart - it's a ton of brand value for relatively little investment. To this day I get a warm feeling when thinking of the german router manufacturer AVM because a support interaction I had with them was so great - and disdain when thinking of Vodafone because the interaction with them was so bad.

I'm so sad EVGA stopped making GPUs because when my 1080ti that I had put an aftermarket liquid cooler on died, they had a new and better version of the same card at my doorstep in a week. Just spectacular service.

And when I finally get a phone number, I'm first required to listen to minutes of a recorded voice telling me that I can also find X or do Y on the website. Or that it's exceptionally busy now and I'd be better helped sending an email or whatnot.

And let's not forget the obligatory message that this conversation will be recorded for possible evaluation.

Yeah that 'Did you know that most of X can be done on our website at double-you-double-you-doub…' message when you just spent a small part of your life trying to get a chatbot to give up the phone number for support is really high up there in the list of things that piss me off.

Also high on the list: the inevitable request to state your question for the phonebot to direct your call to the proper meat-based representative, which will inevitably mishear, misunderstand, or misconstrue whatever it is I'm calling about.

When waiting on the phone for a Geico agent, the recorded voice repeatedly said something along the lines of "This task can be done on the website. You can hang up now." After waiting a while I did got agent who did what I needed, unlike the website which I had already tried and it didn't work.

This is to me the actual opportunity of deploying LLMs in customer service at scale. If done right, you won't need to wait through those endless phone trees.

> Getting people to give up seems to be the main goal, not a side effect

I once had someone proudly tell me that they improved the metric "average support call time" at a large corporation by making the waiting music more annoying.

It's an argument for going straight to small claims court.

I wonder if there's amount of time they can keep you on hold before you can claim their not answering their phones.

You can probably claim they are not answering their phones, but what would that do in small claims court? Do they have some legal duty to answer phones at all, ever? Can't they just say - "oh, if we see that Lio is calling, we would never answer them as a matter of policy, and it's fully within our rights to do so!" ?

They might be required to have a legal address and be reachable by certified mail, but IMHO there's nothing wrong with a business (no matter how large) simply having no phones at all.

> Getting people to give up seems to be the main goal, not a side effect.

Unfortunately it feels like many customer service organizations follow this principle, chatbot involved or not.

Which makes the organizations that allow you to talk to a human who can actually help you that much more striking. (As you say.)

Way things are going, calling a support number and getting a human is becoming a red flag for scams.

I can't remember what company. I am pretty sure it was some private postal service.

However the bot was somehow trying to solve ALL issues outside of business hours, like completely avoiding the possibility of talking to a human. But when you contact it within business hours it will happily redirect you to a human or ask for a email.

Who comes up with shit like that?

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