The Day We Almost Let a Bot Lose Us a Loyal Customer | Hacker News Reader

The Day We Almost Let a Bot Lose Us a Loyal Customer

cacm.acm.org

4 pointsvisha1v5 comments

The only reason for a customer to contact support is because they need a decision which can only be made by a human working for that company.

Therefore AI in customer support is always completely useless and a negative for customers and for the company.

If an action doesn't need a decision from somebody working at that company, then let your customers do it as easily as possible through an intuitive interface. Make sure that you don't lock actions behind a support wall unless needed.

A company putting AI into their support system is a company which is run by incompetence.

My bank AI support says it solved my problem, fixed my account and so on. And then precisely nothing happens. It's maddening. I just go into the bank now, and talk to a VP. How does that improve the situation?

Pretty much every time I contact phone support, it's because I'm trying to do something through a web interface, but for some reason what I want to do isn't possible, but is through the support agents interface, so I end up with someone reading to me what the computer says, listening to my response, then typing it into the computer, despite me being perfectly capable of using a computer.

Sometimes it's just a matter of the web interface being so needlessly complex that it easily brakes, so I can't use it, but most of the time the company just wants the extra inconvenience in place.

I'd also rather they get an intuitive and working interface, but if not, the future may entail us using bots to talk to their bots, so we can eventually get the pertinent data into a computer.

The AI did at exactly what it was built to do, and that still wasn't enough.

How many companies actually have a human in their response chain? (I can name an undeservedly giant company that doesn't)

Given that everyone has a bot front-end, how many can be bypassed by one or two secret words? Spoiler, the one I use is in this reply.

I just hate it.

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