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Comment by uniclaude | Hacker News Reader

Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes.

I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.

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> Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful.

Has any business actually tried?

Average people would switch to a $10/month service instead of $12/month. For internet, mobile plans, people in all sorts of circles brag about what a deal they were able to get with a service provider by haggling. Even when it's a $2 monthly difference. They are proud about their negotiation skills and how they pitted the service providers against each other to make the lowest bid.

Maybe once after they have received unsatisfactory customer support, they would consider switching, but passionate, skilled, caring and creative customer support would cost far, far more than that. Even if you employ enough customer support to provide a human out of the gate for everyone, you would only get people following the same script as the basic chatbot would. People and especially creative people wouldn't stay at this job for long, dealing with entitled customers. In most cases, it's mostly a thankless, dead end job that will get to your mental health.

> customer support would cost far, far more than that

That's not at all a given. Taking the example of $2 more per month, if the average customer needs a support call every two years, they could spend a whole hour on the phone with a support agent making $30/hr and the company is still ahead since they charged an extra $48 over those two years.

An realistically most support calls don't last an hour. Fifteen minutes maybe.

That's why I use Sonic for my ISP for example. I've only used support a few times in over ten years, but when I do, I want to talk to someone who knows what an IP packet is and what Linux is, not someone who just reads from a script telling me to find the start menu and click reboot.

The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve their problem in a 1min conversation rather than spend hours figuring it out by themselves. The company is extremely profitable btw

Who are your customers? Other businesses or average people?

It's B2B, mostly small businesses

Yeah, with B2B it's possible at least, since the businesses that pay for your services actually make money. Good customer support can directly and visibility impact their bottom line by reducing hours on debugging and any costs from downtime.

Average people wouldn't be willing to pay enough to provide such level of service.

Just recently where I work, we dropped a major supplier of single board computers because their customer service was almost entirely unresponsive the one time we needed their support. We spent a million or two a year with them. Small potatoes in the big picture, but still significant money that is now going to one of their competitors.

That change was a significant cost to us as well, as it meant that the system we were using the boards in had to be redesigned to accommodate a different board.

Google has Google One that includes support (including by phone) and Drive/Mail/etc storage. You can literally pay them to get support and other things if you want to.

I don't know how well it's selling, but going off Internet comments here and there, people seem offended they are asked to pay to get support for an otherwise free at the point of use service.

LLM support bots have literally never been helpful, their only purpose is to save costs and to drive you away

Oh, one has been spectacularly useful to customers, by hallucinating a new, more customer friendly refund policy that courts held the company liable for:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

We absolutely need more chatbots like that.

Oh that is just excellent. I love the pathetic excuses they came up with trying to weasel their way out of having to honor promises made by their agents.

> Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.

This is disappointing, though. Can I weasel out of contracts if I say that the information I'm providing may not be accurate before signing?

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