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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI.

These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.

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I've been thinking for a while, that since these chatbots will be optimized for profit (if accounting and legal can be profit centers, why not customer service), we'll see all the same anti-patterns. You won't be able to cancel the monthly payment, or return the part, or fix the excess billing fee. Instead they will be highly trained in giving you the polite frustration and screaming anger without paying a human to absorb it. Likely, they will also gather any additional saleable personal information and legal justification for doing so.

Would you like to sign up for our new personalized support for only $4/mo? The first month is free with credit card - I mean the Nigerian scam works because of self-selection, amiright?

"A well-designed self-service GUI" doesn't exist once the company is optimizing for the opposite of what your are trying to do (cancel subscription, return item, file insurance claim, etc.)

Then use the regulatory pen and make them.

Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

Fuck the market. If that is indeed what it decided, it’s wrong. Markets are wrong all the time. I borrow a line from Rick and Morty, the boos of the market mean nothing to me. I've seen what makes it cheer.

There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

> There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

Better societies but without good market couldn't compete technologically and militarily, so ultimately they lost. Borrowing a line from Rick and Morty: that was always allowed.

A lot of people don't get that the market isn't a reflection of reality. It is reality - the only reality. That's the point of market realism.

That's... a pretty amazing misunderstanding.

Organized human societies predate markets by millions of years. Markets are reality now, kind of, because of the utter failure on the part of liberal governments to keep them regulated and in their place. This is not a desirable nor permanent nor sustainable situation.

Capitalism subsumes all critiques. There will never be anything other than the permanent market.

Tell that to the coal miners who parked trains on bridges and then blew them the fuck up, and got us weekends and 40 hour workweeks.

If people are too rich, dumb, lazy or some combination of all three to not cancel a subscription because of the "barrier" of several web-pages and reading then they are extremely unlikely to use their money for any productive efforts.

I trust Amazon to make society a better place than lead-brained boomers/millennials who can't figure out how to cancel a subscription

> If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

That's not how the free market works. The free market works companies prioritizing profits over people. So what's "important" for people is only visible in the market when it's also profitable.

No it hasn't. Even the most zealous believers in the free market know this isn't true (assuming they're not wildly naive, too).

Cancellation policies fall into two well-known failure modes of markets to actually indicate what they want: information asymmetry and inconsistencies in time horizons between counterparties.

You have no ability whatsoever to assign market preference to this without at the very least ensuring consumers are actually aware at time of purchase of the friction they'd face at time of cancellation AND the chances they'll want to cancel.

That's all leaving aside that a person's preference for Product A over Product B obviously does not mean that a person prefers every dimension of Product A over Product B.

You forgot to add /s.

1. Customers don't know what cancelling is like before they buy a service. This isn't advertised, obviously.

2. Competing on being easy to cancel is a bad thing, actually. However wins that competition is losing money. That's why you see the competition go in the other direction. As in, who can make the shittiest cancellation interface (Planet Fitness, btw).

3. People who cancel a service are cancelling BECAUSE of the service. Why would they go back to a service they disliked enough to cancel, if the service stays exactly the same? They wouldn't. Meaning, "good cancellation" doesn't count for anything.

So it doesn't help you retain customers, it doesn't help you get back customers you lost, and it doesn't help you get new customers.

> every single person in America except for like 200 executives

Oof sounds like the base is pretty divided in this one. Better send it to committee where it can be studied forever.

I laugh because the alternative is to scream.

A well designed chatbot is better than a well designed UI for this use case. A “well designed chatbot” could absolutely do something as common as claiming a return in an online shop.

We gotta compare apples to apples.

The issue, as I see it, is that most of these companies do not have well designed system to begin with. They then attempt to slap on a AI chatbot to deal with their total lack of a coherent systems design.

If these companies had good design, good processes and clearly defined processes, they wouldn't need a chatbot. They could add one to make querying better/easier.

Let's say you go to your ISPs website, because your internet connection is down. Ideally their frontpage would have a direct link to "operational status", but let's be real, it doesn't. You eventually find the status page, it doesn't mention anything about outages. So you call or ask the chatbot, in neither case will you get an answer, because neither the person on the phone, nor the bot has ANY clue that you're internet connection is down. You then switch to a different ISP, who has procedures and systems in place and a link to their status page and they update it before you even think about contacting them. No amount of AI chatbots will fix the problems for the first ISP, because their internal systems suck and can not provide the bot with the required information anyway.

Most interactions with ChatBots and customer service could, and should, be solved with better processes and better systems. We're not even at the point where we can compare the well designed UI to the well designed chatbot, because most businesses can't provide the data and processes for either.

In my experience dealing with Google support across ads, workspace and cloud, the self-service GUI has been preferable because the self-service GUI typically provides zero utility.

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