It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps.
I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send them the laptop and pay $hundreds.
I immediately hop on customer service chat to ask for a refund. I was surprised to be talking to an LLM rather than a human, but go ahead and explain what happened and state I want the transaction for the subscription canceled. It offers to cancel the subscription at the end of the 30-day subscription. I decline, noting I want a refund for the subscription I didn't intend to take. It repeats it can cancel the subscription at the end of 30-day subscription. I ask for human. It repeats. I ask for human again. It repeats. I disconnect.
Amazon knows what it's doing.
If Amazon wanted to give you the ability to get a refund for unused Prime benefits, it would allow the AI to do it, or even give you a button to do it yourself.
They don't trust the LLM so they cripple what it can do, would be the generous interpretation. I actually think they're intentionally crippling the LLMs' access to accounts, though, to reduce their spend not on CSRs, but on CSR actions for, for example, refunds, where the LLM becomes an excuse for the change; they can hide behind what they'll call technical issues or teething pains.
If it was the former, they would help you when you esclated it. So I think they are just becoming more greedy.
All my interactions with any AI support so far is repeatedly saying "call human" until it calls human
Customer support is when all the documentation already failed and you need a human.
At $dayjob our customers are nontechnical so they don't always know what to search for, so the LLM/RAG approach can be quite handy.
It answers about 2/3 of incoming questions, can escalate to the humans as needed, and scales great.
99% seems like a pulled-out-of-your-butt number and hyperbolic, but, yes, there's clearly a non-trivial percentage of customer support that's absolutely terrible.
Please keep in mind, though, that a lot of customer support by monopolies is intended to be terrible.
AI seems like a dream for some of these companies to offer even worse customer service, though.
Where customer support is actually important or it's a competitive market, you tend to have relatively decent customer support - for example, my bank's support is far from perfect, but it's leaps and bounds better than AT&T or Comcast.
I don't agree. AI support is as useless as real customer support. But it is more polite, calm, with clear voice, etc. Much better, isn't it?
Cancel account- have them call someone.
Withdraw too much - make it a phone call.
Change their last name? - that would overwhelm our software, let’s have our operator do that after they call in.
Etc.
That doesn't make much sense. Either your system can handle it or it can't. Putting a support agent in front isn't going to change that.
The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name.
It’s not exactly a difficult design problem. Unless I’m missing some thing.
Haha, not likely.
In reality the org is so drowned in technical debt that changing the last name involves manually running 3 different scripts that hit three different DBs directly and the estimate from the 3rd party dev consultancy that maintains the mess for how long it'd take to make a safe publicly usable endpoint is somewhere between 2 years and forever.
But I can’t imagine ever calling tech support for help unless it is more than troubleshooting and I need them to actually do something in their system or it’s a hardware problem where I need a replacement.
Over the past 3 years of calling support any service or infrastructure (bank, health insurance, doctor, wtv), over like 90% of my requests were things only solvable via customer support or escalation.
I only keep track because I document when I didn't need support into a list of "phone hacks" (like press this sequence of buttons when calling this provider).
Most recently, I went to an urgent care facility a few weekends ago, and they keep submitting claims to the arm, of my insurance, that is officed in a different state instead of my proper state.
I want:
> Respond with terminal command to do X
>> `complex terminal command code block`
> oh we need to run that on all such and such files
>> script.py
Yes, that's literally how you learn things. I can't understand how anyone on this forum thinks otherwise. Hackers are supposed to be people who thrive in unknown contexts, who thirst for knowledge of how things work. What you are suggesting is brain atrophy. It's the death of knowledge for profit and productivity. Fuck all of that.
They might be boring but they are nonetheless foundational
In that case I'm really not sure why professional software developers should be interested in your opinion on the technology at all
That is because search is still mostly stuck in ~2003. But now ask the exact same thing of an LLM and it will generally be able to provide useful links. There's just so much information out there, but search engines just suck because they lack any sort of meaningful natural language parsing. LLMs provide that.
(Might be a naïve question, I'm at the edge of my understanding)
LLMs inherently would introduce the possibility of hallucinations, but just using the vectors to match documents wouldn't, right?
Yes, this is how all the new dev documentation sites work now days, with their much improved searches. :-D
Why invest in making users more savvy when you can dumb down everything to 5 year old level eh
if the service offered is "support" then why is a phone call less acceptable than reading documentation?
I love a good AI to help search through large documentation basis for the particular issue I'm experiencing. But it is clear when the problem I am having is outside of the AI's sometimes infantile ability to understand, and I need the ability to bypass it.
I.e. AI isn't allowed to offer me a refund because my order never arrived. For that, I have to spend 20 minutes on the phone with Mike from India.
Perhaps there is a group that isn’t served by legacy ui discovery methods and it’s great for them, but 100% of chat bots I’ve interacted with have damaged brand reputation for me.
The trouble is when they gatekeep you from saying "I know what I'm doing, let me talk to someone"
i have yet to experience this. unfortunately i fear it's the best i can hope for, and i worry for those in support positions.
AI is not better than a good customer service team, or even an above-average one. It is better than a broken customer service team, however. As others have noted, 99% is hyperbolic BS.