An exceptionally well trained AI customer service has the potential to be amazing.
I only call or try to chat/email with customer service if something has gone way wrong - like outside the typical customer service capability of assistance.
If an AI can realize that my problem is human worthy and escalate it faster, that would save me time in the chat queue talking with someone who barely knows my native language.
Alas, AIs will be poorly trained, so the bad-english CS reps will still be right behind the AI interface waiting for me.
Yup. I was literally born in India, lived there until I was 7, and have an Indian mother who very much still sounds Indian, and even I struggle to understand what outsourced Indian/Pakistani call centre staff say sometimes, especially when there's background noise.
And there's almost always either background noise or a bad connection. Sometimes I go sit in my car and listen over my car speakers, which are decent speakers, and it doesn't even help.
Honestly, I've used some pretty decent AI chatbots. They can help you with basic questions and contact you with a human for things that require it or if you ask for it. Chatbots that don't let you talk to a human on the other hand, those are awful.
Companies don’t want to provide actual service for problems. That costs money. They want you to give up.
Customers hate anything that actually gets between them and someone that can actually help. Not shitty, complicated automated phone menus. Not some underpaid stooge who refuses to da anything except read from a mandatory customer service script. And not AI, which will combine both of the worst aspects of automation and scripted service along with a cheerful idiot that will spare no effort to direct you away from the nearest actual assistance.
I do like it in the sense that people HATE working in customer service. Because people have zero respect and customers make your job day miserable all the time.
Is one of the places where people deserve getting a hallucinating robot as a vengeance for how bad they treated people that worked there.
I talk to about 10 customers each day for no more than 30 minutes and 99% of the time it’s to fix something they messed up on. 30% of those people are jerks.
Thankfully most of my job is NOT dealing with customers and I truly feel bad for people who have to deal with them in high volume each day.
If I call them, I can fix it immediately, if they call in, enjoy the robot. So don’t be mean and the call won’t be disconnected (which I have permission to do fortunately)
Unless they hate it enough to ditch a business or service in great enough numbers that it costs the business more money than they save by outsourcing to a computer, people had better get used to it.
The problem is that consumers likely don't have that choice. The "free market" is really bad in incentivising good long term behavior, they favor short term gains for their stockholders. Thus they likely all switch to practices that seemingly lower cost or raise short term profits. If they can fire employees and replace them with AI, they will do so.
If they would think long term, they would prefer to hire humans instead of AI, because that way they would give their future customers money to buy their stuff. AI will not be their customer. They would pay them enough money to be a happy and good consumer.
Customer choice doesn't matter here, they either just have to buy whatever is cheapest, or die, because their employers (if they even have one) don't pay they enough for them to have choice, because short term profits.
Yeah - that's all part of the "unless enough people leave" point.
It really depends on the market though - if it's not an essential good, it doesn't need to be replaced (online games). If there's adequate competition, there's largely undifferentiated alternatives (utilities around me)... and if not, you probably don't have a choice (your local government services, monopolies, and shallow markets for essential goods).
My point is there never will be enough people to leave. Consumer boycotts do not work.
Between thousands of different factors to consider wherever to buy a product from a certain producer or not, child labor, environmental waste, political attitude of the CEO, etc... it isn't possible to make any decision on what product to consumption.
It isn't about 'unless enough people leave" it is about "unless enough people protest to the government for market regulation" and "unless enough law makers care".
The free market is not self regulating, at least not with a long term positive effect.
I would like it if it actually did something for me, (like automatically doing x, y, or z to my account on the backend based on my request) but instead it just feels like every one of the "AI-Powered" support bots is designed to try and make it as hard as possible for me to actually get anything done.
Are you normally amazed by people hating on environmental disasters which are being marketed as the great solution to the world's problems but are only actually useful in a few industries and not to the general public overall?
Realistically we only dislike it because it’s a half baked solution. I know that if those LLMs actually did anything useful we wouldn’t mind them. But all these LLMs do is spam the documentation, which is already on the vendor website anyway.
I'm already pissed with bots, had to call my ISP yesterday because my internet was spotty, I couldn't talk to a single human, the bot was walking me through the tired modem restart, and then it ended the call and asked for me rate it even though it didn't solve anything!
I worked for an ISP. These problems are rarely ever ISP problems. It goes like this. ISP offers 50Mbps–1.2Gbps. If you are a cheap bastard and opt for the lowest tier plan you get a cheap hardware and if you don't ask for an upgrade you'll run that box until it doesn't work. So you have people rocking hardware that was manufactured in 2009 and installed in 2014 wondering why their cheap ass WIFI4 box installed in their basement doesn't work so well in half their house in 2024.
What's more they have a download speed that would have been good in 2009 only instead of 2 computers they now have 20 connected devices and stream in 4K.
What's worse is the rental on that shit WIFI4 box is about $20 a month or $2400 over 10 years so your paying for a BMW and getting a Pinto.
Smart people buy their own access points preferably wifi 7. Get one per story of your house and connect them with a physical Ethernet cable. Arrange them so that they overlap but not that much so that you don't have dead zones. If you work from home get a proper desk and run a physical Ethernet cable to your device. Also if you have devices that are literally 2.5 feet from each other and they support physical network cables just plug them in. Don't be that guy spending an hour trying to figure out why his router and his printer/tv aren't friends when they are almost touching each other.
So the ISP isn't to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn't for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?
The "wire everything" approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It's only worth the time and money to wire everything if you've identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don't just do it by default.
The hardware the ISP provides is always an ISP problem. Provide hardware that actually works.
Also, unless you're fiber, you don't provide the bandwidth you actually sell people, which is also an ISP problem. Every single customer who can't get their advertised speed at peak load should be a mandatory criminal case of fraud.
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