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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

The issue I have with most chatbots, or voice assistants on helplines, is that they're designed to be a time waster before I receive actual help. Either A) I know what I want, and that I can't get it without human intervention, or B) I can't formulate my question, and chatbots do a terrible job to point the relevant doc to me.

They seem optimized for situation C) where I need something that is easily understood/available, but am actually lazy to look it up, which doesn't really happen.

And so, my typical chatbot interaction is me trying to speedrun through the bullshit in order to get to actual help.

There was one notable exception, where the chatbot was actually there to ask 2-3 questions/give informations to prepare for the following human interaction, and made it in such a way that user saw the goal. I wish all chatbots were like that.

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While it may not happen for you, “too lazy to look it up” is the vast majority of CS requests.

My understanding from talking to a couple of CS execs is that these have been a slam dunk in terms of ROI because CS agents don’t need to handle type C requests. I expect we’ll only see more as time goes on.

They're especially slam dunks when they don't provide you with a way to get out of the automated useless system. Looking at you Amazon

shouting "speak to a fucking human" repeatedly seems to work, though i may be suffering from confirmation bias

Actually this does sometimes work because some of the systems now have sentiment analysis baked in and can tell if the user is getting pissed off. I've used this a few times to get through as well.

Be careful, your voice could be used to train the next chat bots, and they could start yelling angrily at customers... actually, if the new chat bot is genuinely helpful, a screaming conversation would be kind of cathartic.

It's dystopian and yet, somehow, soothing.

type `agent` repeatedly into the chatbot and it will let you request a callback

You can get out of the automated useless system. They don't make it easy.

But I once managed to get through to an actual agent with this question:

1. I want to buy a kindle version of this book [amazon link, for the paper version of the book].

2. On the page for the book, there is a link for the kindle edition: [link].

3. That link goes to a page for what appears to be an entirely different book. (Under the same name; this was an edition of the Arabian Nights.)

4. However, I have independently found this page: [link], which appears to be for the kindle version of the book I'm interested in.

5. Given that I want to buy the kindle version of the book linked up in step (1), which one should I purchase?

The agent directed me to buy the book that purported to be the book I wanted, instead of the book that Amazon believed was the book I wanted but which claimed to be something different. I would have assumed that anyway. But a couple days later I checked on the book and the "kindle version" link for the paper version had been corrected.

Unfortunately, while they did correct the issue on the one book that I took the time to point out to them, it's still rampant all over their website.

My guess is the ROI is provided by people giving up before they actually get help from a human.

I wonder that too. If you're only measure one part of the funnel (e.g. CS costs) and not the total funnel (e.g. losses due to poor CS quality like a customer dropping the project) then it's easy to conclude that making CS more painful is a win.

It depends on the business, but the kind of metrics you are talking about are measured and taken seriously. People have absolutely gotten fired for CS quality KPI drops.

I've analyzed support ticket requests before, and that doesn't seem to be the case. At least for the two times I've done this: 1) IT support tickets for a local school, and 2) Tickets for a B2B SaaS app. In both cases the majority of tickets where for things that seemed to me to be obvious. That if the user just bothered to spend 10 seconds looking they would figure it out. But they didn't. Some training helped on the IT side, and some UX improvements helped in SaaS app, but the bar is _sooo_ much lower than many expect.

This should be a lot more obvious to the tech crowd than it is. I suppose it's the familiarity effect (see https://xkcd.com/2501/)--what's obvious to us isn't necessarily obvious to most people, and we heavily undercount the degree to which confusion-of-basic-things exist because it's second nature to us.

And we are talking even more basic than most people on HN can imagine.

Such as:

"Is your device turned on?"

"Are you logged into the site and not just searching google for the thing your want our application to do?"

"Have you actually purchased our product and not a competitor's you just think is similar?"

"Getting through chat bots to get to a human" is the new "getting through tech support to get to an engineer".

https://xkcd.com/806/

I think the path is now Chat bot -> Help Desk -> Engineer.

I just went through that recently, chat bot responded instantly to the mail with the same reply as the FAQ help, then the human responded after an hour asking for screenshots to see that showed I actually tried, then after a day an engineer fixed it.

I don't doubt you, but if that's the case why not make it easy to get to a human? I'm fine explaining my problem to a robot, but if (when) they don't understand what I'm saying, hand me off to a human! For example, it's maddening to call the pharmacy and go through something like this:

    Pharmacy Robot:  Hello, thanks for calling <pharmacy>.  What can I do for you?  You can say anything like, "Check pharmacy hours" or "order a refill".

    Me:  Hi, I have a refill for <specific medication with rules around it> that is due next week but I'll be traveling out of the country to <other country> for a couple of weeks.  I need to know what my options are.

    Pharmacy Robot:  Ok, you want a refill.  Please enter the prescription number now.

    Me:  No, if we try to refill it, the automated system will just reject it.  I need to talk to a h...<cut off by robot>

Pharmacy Robot: Sorry, I didn't get that number. Using your phone's keypad, enter the number of your prescription refill.

Me: Jesus Christ, do I have to hang up and go through this whole thing ag... <cut off by robot>

Pharmacy Robot: Sorry, I didn't get that number. Using...<cut off by human hanging up>

That's just the most recent one I had. There are often better examples of madness...

Because unless the chatbot is both better than a human in every way, and everyone knows that, the first thing people will do is push the button to reach the human. Why wouldn't they? They're calling in the first place because they don't want to make an effort to use the available tools to answer their question. They want a human.

> They're calling in the first place because they don't want to make an effort to use the available tools to answer their question.

That's not correct. I NEVER call without first exhausting every available source because I despise the phone system and it's inefficiencies. Most companies may think they have resources available, but they really don't. And no, just throwing up a zendesk or equivalent "knowledge base" isn't the same as providing tools and manuals/guides/etc.

That said, there is definitely a subset of people for whom calling is step 1 (before even googling). They tend to be older and/or on the tech illiterate side. But if you design and build for the worst-case scenario, you're really screwing over your more self-help customers and even driving them away.

To be fair, LLM-based chatbots are much better about this because you don't need to discover the magic incantation to talk to a human. It's a trade-off because that same property introduces the possibility of hallucination.

I don't know all places but I've implemented a chat system before. We basically had the current employee's answering calls make lists of their most common questions along with logs and recordings we reviewed. The overwhelming majority of calls consisted of 8-10 questions and the rest could be answered with another set of 35-40 questions. Very few calls actually needed a person. We ended up with I think 80 questions it could answer in total.

This was before LLM stuff.

Funny anecdote. The most common question was "what is the price/how much does it cost." Which always was strange to me since if they were on the website with the chatbot the price was right there.

People were likely angling for a discount.

Nope. The actual answer is: people don't like reading. We are here on Hacker News volunteering to read a giant comments section that consists entirely of words, that we're expected to read only after the article which itself consists of lots of words, so we're really weird self-selected people. Of course we find this baffling.

There was an article a while back that said something like most books sell less than 300 copies. I think the real numbers turned out to be higher, but still really low. Reading is not a popular activity. Watching video is popular. Talking to people is popular. These are skills that children acquire naturally without effort. Reading: difficult, slow, isolating. Given a choice between talking to someone or reading, people will go through a lot of pain for the opportunity to talk.

This was one of the hardest lessons to learn in my software career. I still suck at it. It's one of the lowest hanging fruits for me to improve as a developer. Just today I was shortening a popup message that my company's software sometimes puts on the screen [1] at the suggestion of a customer who had to deal with support requests from people who weren't reading it. Kicking myself!

Another popup this software rarely has to generate says "Install failed. The following error has been copied to your clipboard .... <stuff>". 100% of error reports, and I do mean 100% without exception for over two years now, come in the form of screenshots. Exactly zero people have ever read the second sentence and used paste. Kicking myself again! Why did I even think that would work?!

The hardest thing is developer docs. I still don't know how to strike the right balance there. We should make more videos.

[1] Well actually Sparkle.framework, but Conveyor incorporates it. It makes distributing desktop apps super easy, check out bio, it's cool.

There's also another, similar group: people that make phone calls when traveling or being busy with something else.

Could be an electrician or something, driving the car from one customer to the next it's easy to wait in a phone queue and then ask someone for the information. Relative to sitting down and being useless for a while, thumbing away at some badly structured corporate FAQ, that can seem quite attractive. When you're on your break, you're on your break, you want to savour the cinnamon bun and coffee, and would rather not sully it with some boring web page.

Good point, yeah. Multi-tasking is a lot easier with voice interfaces.

> The issue I have with most chatbots, or voice assistants on helplines, is that they're designed to be a time waster before I receive actual help.

Yes, exactly.

And I HATE calling phone numbers for something I need. By the time I'm using the phone to call you, I've already exhausted every possible avenue I have, and I'm also already pretty irritated. At the least, make it so your chatbot tells the human what I've already said so I don't have to repeat myself once I get a human. Also, if the chatbot doesn't understand what I'm saying (which is nearly always), just send me to a human.

I think it's utterly insane that things have gotten so bad that now Google Pixel phones come with a system to handle that automated crap for you. We're now building bots to talk to the bots? I'm extremely grateful for the Google product, don't get me wrong, but the fact that it needs to exist is in my opinion a great example of how terrible things are with phone support.

Chatbots in mainstream businesses are built for one purpose: to reduce the number of staff that are needed to answer phone calls. At this, they are moderately successful. They are built for the 80%+ of customers whose enquiries are routine. As a sophisticated customer with a sophisticated enquiry that needs human attention, your time is collateral damage.

Situation C happens all the time. I guarantee it 1000%, it's the vast majority of chats/calls/emails for many things.

I did phone support for pretty advanced technology things (you had to be pretty involved in IT to even have one of these) and still a decent number were fixed by "read the FAQ, do steps 1 and 2."

I also find chatbots to be useless time-wasters. So much so that if a company forces me to go through one to get support, I consider that to be the same as not providing support at all.

i strongly suspect the demographic of C to be much greater than we would like to belive.

then again, misanthropy is likely the core sales pitch with digitization

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