How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%.
Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true measure of the person is what they do when things are not going well. It's the same for companies. When your customers are experiencing problems, that's the time to shine! It's not a problem, it's an opportunity.
marssaxman · 9m ago
The few times I've let a company sucker me into engaging with a chatbot, it was nothing but a worse interface to searching their support website. It was capable of nothing but directing me to pages which could not help me, because what I needed was not more information about the problem I already know I have, but someone to fix the damn problem.
StevenWaterman · 48m ago
I'm currently working on adding a bot to our support chat at TalkJS. And it's great, it has probably a 90% success rate at handling complex queries. But that's because we're throwing money at it. That chat is normally staffed by senior devs, meaning it's not unusual for a single response to cost $10 of labour.
If you approach it as a cost cutting exercise, you end up with crap. If you approach it as a way to make a better experience while you sleep, it's achievable.
no_wizard · 1h ago
The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions.
I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.
diggan · 5m ago
> I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle
I've had success with just repeating "Agent please" or "I wanna talk to human" if I notice the chat bot isn't a traditional conditional-if-else-bot but an LLM, and it seems like most of them have some sort of escape-hatch they can trigger, but they're prompted to really avoid it. But if you continue sending "Agent please" over and over again, eventually it seems like the typical context-rot prevents them from avoiding the escape-hatch, and they send you along to a real human.
ryandrake · 55m ago
I was about to say the same thing. Amazon pretty much nailed it, at least for simple, straightforward "happy path" returns and refunds. I was actually kind of shocked after the "chatbot" conversation, sitting there thinking "Really, that's it and we're done?" and sure enough the money was refunded!
kjkjadksj · 26m ago
Sounds like a downgrade to me considering the previous return flow was to just press the return link and answer one multiple choice question.
rocmcd · 10m ago
That's still how it is, at least for me in the US. I've never had to interact with a chat bot for anything, but maybe it depends on what you're returning.
fullshark · 5m ago
It has one major use case: Converting natural language into a logged and understood FAQ issue.
IT4MD · 4m ago
>Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.
As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of the US.
duxup · 1h ago
I've had bad luck. Most of it very frustrating where the bot obviously doesn't understand anything.
My best luck with a chat bot was ironically only because of HN.
I was to complaining about amazon's chat bot (it would send me in an infinite loop of directions) and someone who worked at Amazon on HN told me that there were multiple chat bots, and they told me the right one use (I had to click a different link on the amazon webpage than I was clicking).
That one worked ... it took some engineer on HN to make me understand how to make it work.
wat10000 · 1h ago
I bet chatbots are very successful when measuring how much the interaction costs, which seems to be what most companies are measuring when it comes to customer support. The problem is that it's very easy to measure cost (how many person-minutes did it take and what's your hourly cost for support agents, or how much API usage did it take for the bot?) and very hard to measure any outcome the customer actually cares about. Fix this misaligned incentive and the rest will follow naturally, but that requires treating support as a facilitator for the rest of the business rather than as a pure cost center that needs to be minimized.
turnsout · 23m ago
I had an experience recently where the chatbot gathered details about my problem, but then referred me to a knowledgebase article. I just replied "human" and it connected me with a human, but the AI must have given them a detailed summary, because they joined the chat, said "I understand the issue, let me see what I can do," and then two minutes later, said "I went ahead and fixed that for you on the backend."
One way to look at that anecdote is "the AI failed." Another way is "the AI made the human agent about 100% more efficient." I'm pretty sure CS agents don't love gathering basic info.
Illniyar · 22m ago
This is mentioned a lot, but it's still true - people on HN are not representative of the majority of users for customer support.
The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots.
potato3732842 · 18m ago
>The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots.
I think a large fraction of those repetitive requests are covering up gaps in the customer portal/whatever by doing data entry the customer could be doing.
Like "if you need your address changed call support" type stuff.
darknavi · 19m ago
It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time though. As the older generation of folks who generally don't even understand what having an account means on websites exit the customer pool the purpose of support tools could significantly change.
yndoendo · 35s ago
Anyone else fuck around with chat bots? A few months ago I found out that UPS didn't have a character input limit and I could overload it and it would take 15 minutes or more to respond. Finally did it during the day and the chat not developers patched it in real time.
throwmeaway222 · 3m ago
> redundant. At that time, CBA claimed that launching the chatbot supposedly "led to a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week, FSU said.
Yeah it is reduced because as soon as someone calls they're trapped in a 30 minute "I'm sorry I didn't understand, what can I help you with" And people just give up and decide, maybe the $20 ATM fee isn't worth contesting...
Then again, this means the bank may be saving money too.
ranger207 · 48m ago
""a reduction in call volumes" by 2,000 a week" means people aren't calling in as much. How many problems people have per day is roughly constant, so the only change in how many calls they get is entirely dependent on how much people expect calling in is going to fix their problems. So a reduction in call volume means they're not fixing as many problems which means customers are less satisfied
chankstein38 · 5m ago
This was my read of this as well! What a stupid metric. The first thing I thought when I read that was "Yeah, that's probably because people stopped calling and started looking for another bank."
That'll be what I'll do if my bank starts replacing people with AI. Take my money out and go somewhere that isn't trash.
sc68cal · 1h ago
> Now, CBA has apologized to the fired workers. A spokesperson told Bloomberg that they can choose to come back to their prior roles, seek another position, or leave the firm with an exit payment.
So no real consequences to the Bank for these underhanded tactics, since this just returns everything back to status quo before the layoffs, perhaps with reduced overall headcount as some workers choose not to return and take the exit payment instead, but surely the numbers still worked well enough that they will do it again but be more crafty about it so they don't lose the appeal.
toomuchtodo · 36m ago
True, but the union protected its workers from those at the bank. That is the value in the union. In jurisdictions without a union or parity labor policy, these workers would have no recourse for this fraud and the lies.
sc68cal · 15m ago
Absolutely! The union did great. My comment is more about, what is stopping the Bank from doing this again? Because there doesn't really seem to be a downside to attempting it. When they lose, they just have to give everyone their job back, but probably end up ahead due to attrition
toomuchtodo · 6m ago
My only advice is to engage your government representation to strengthen labor regulation in this context.
duxup · 1h ago
A lot of the linkedIn style "we did X with AI and saved Y" stories seem exceptionally vague and maybe entirely made up.
It makes sense that some companies will be foolish enough to believe and to pull the trigger.
Everyone involved in that decision should be the ones fired. It seems entirely avoidable with some basic testing of the chatbot while still employing these people.
mxhwll · 26m ago
Change rarely works, it's the new companies that use AI in these sorts of areas that will show it works and then everyone will follow.
Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true measure of the person is what they do when things are not going well. It's the same for companies. When your customers are experiencing problems, that's the time to shine! It's not a problem, it's an opportunity.
If you approach it as a cost cutting exercise, you end up with crap. If you approach it as a way to make a better experience while you sleep, it's achievable.
I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.
I've had success with just repeating "Agent please" or "I wanna talk to human" if I notice the chat bot isn't a traditional conditional-if-else-bot but an LLM, and it seems like most of them have some sort of escape-hatch they can trigger, but they're prompted to really avoid it. But if you continue sending "Agent please" over and over again, eventually it seems like the typical context-rot prevents them from avoiding the escape-hatch, and they send you along to a real human.
As someone that's worked in basically a service industry my entire life, good luck with this. I don't disagree, I'm just old enough to understand the world that humans build, and this type of long-term approach is dead in the current "Profits over all" culture of the US.
My best luck with a chat bot was ironically only because of HN.
I was to complaining about amazon's chat bot (it would send me in an infinite loop of directions) and someone who worked at Amazon on HN told me that there were multiple chat bots, and they told me the right one use (I had to click a different link on the amazon webpage than I was clicking).
That one worked ... it took some engineer on HN to make me understand how to make it work.
One way to look at that anecdote is "the AI failed." Another way is "the AI made the human agent about 100% more efficient." I'm pretty sure CS agents don't love gathering basic info.
The majority of support tickets are repetitive and answered by a simple formula the representative churns without thinking. Which is likely easily replaceable by chatbots.
I think a large fraction of those repetitive requests are covering up gaps in the customer portal/whatever by doing data entry the customer could be doing.
Like "if you need your address changed call support" type stuff.
Yeah it is reduced because as soon as someone calls they're trapped in a 30 minute "I'm sorry I didn't understand, what can I help you with" And people just give up and decide, maybe the $20 ATM fee isn't worth contesting...
Then again, this means the bank may be saving money too.
That'll be what I'll do if my bank starts replacing people with AI. Take my money out and go somewhere that isn't trash.
So no real consequences to the Bank for these underhanded tactics, since this just returns everything back to status quo before the layoffs, perhaps with reduced overall headcount as some workers choose not to return and take the exit payment instead, but surely the numbers still worked well enough that they will do it again but be more crafty about it so they don't lose the appeal.
It makes sense that some companies will be foolish enough to believe and to pull the trigger.
Everyone involved in that decision should be the ones fired. It seems entirely avoidable with some basic testing of the chatbot while still employing these people.