The only good thing about is that, with most companies, if you need a refund for something under $10, it generally just gives you the refund and sets you off on your merry way.
The telephone services i had to use in my Lifetime were so insanely bad, thats one of the few things llm could do better than an underpaid person who has no will to live anymore and got yelled at for hours. This shit needs to end.
No. What actually needs to happen is for companies to give GOOD FUCKING CUSTOMER SERVICE!!! Try getting ahold of a real person at Amazon for example. I ended up cold calling the delivery company that handles local deliveries to get a phone number to talk to an actual person.
The next time i called they had turned that number into a robo call center...
I never had issues with Amazon support. To be fair, the last time I needed support was over 4 years ago, but still. I got to chat with some real person relatively quickly who managed to address the issue swiftly.
I love the idea of useful and improved AI-automations, based on the fact every site currently has a “customer service robot” that have never once helped with a resolution at all.
IMO it can eliminate a huge amount of support queries and leave the important stuff to the actual agent if done right. …with the caveat of yeah fuck AI if it’s fully instead of agents.
Fair point but no one wants to deal with my incessant whining, and you couldn't pay me enough to deal with it. Sometimes a scratching post is what the cat needs.
I had the displeasure of being called by one from a vendor. It pissed me off that they couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone and call using a human, with how much we paid them. I canceled that contract and went with a different vendor, and let the sales team know exactly why. LLMs have their place, but my time is not the waste bin.
Hahahahaha!! I was sitting there, on the Pick Username screen for a good 5 minutes, singing that song in my head, trying to think of a good username. After a while, I thought to myself, "that's a good enough username, in done thinking about this", and sang it out loud as I typed it in....... 3
The other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.
I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I forget to take my pill and then I have an extra. After years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.
So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?
Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.
I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those options. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons...
Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
Because they are not trying to design an efficient system. They are trying to design a system that is as cheep as possible, puts off as many customers as possible from interacting with it while not being so bad as to fall foul of regulations. A well designed website that efficiently took you to the right place to make your complaint and get money from them/make them do something would fail requirement 2.
I extremely hate this idea. I I already hate the automated systems that are definitely designed to make you give up just trying to talk to an actual human being. Hopefully, we can get more lawsuits around the world like the Air canada one where they are liable for any bs the ai decides to make up, along with actual laws saying the same. Hopefully, it would discourage them.
Unpopular opinion and rant:
Us, the consumers, brought this on ourselves.
Not intentionally but it was a slippery slope.
No one I know did ever ask the sales representative "does your customer support answer within 5 minutes and will I always reach a representative with att least 10 years of experience, that has the authority to make real decisions?". No, but we were all very interested about the pricing of the service/product.
Then these "Please press 1 for...." happened.... and no one of us really cared about the change because the service providers offered a much lower price than the ones with customer support representatives with 20 years of experience.
Since all of us went for the cheapest provider, the other ones had to cut cost to be able to offer their service on a competitive price level.
So then there were no one offering competent support with representatives that knew their shit.
And it slowly continued to go downhill...
So here we are with shitty services, which we pay for, where we all are treated as cattle.
If people at least started to ask for better customer support there would someone, who wants to climb the corporate ladder, creating a PowerPoint presentation with a real VIP Service Level.
Of course it will cost more money, because real people cost money, but we would att least get what we want.
But no. Consumers will still go for the lowest price.
Nice try. But let's play with the thought that there's no way we can let a rookie listen in on customer calls and gradually work their way into the role until they have enough experience.... What about hiring technicians/professionals that has been working with the products/services for 10 years?
That would be a way of getting competent customer support people, right?
And just to clarify my comment that you replied on:
The problem today is that most often there's no career path for the customer support rookies and the pay is so lousy that most people just work customer support until they get something better.
That's definitively the correct way to avoid getting experienced people in the customer support.
Interestingly, at least where I live, in my experience, the more expensive ISPs, TSPs etc. have worse, almost evil, customer service than the smaller, cheaper providers. Maybe the smaller providers can't afford the most evil money-saving customer service systems, and that's what makes them better?!
I have the same experience as you do, but there's a reason that the big ISPs continue to be big:
The majority of customers seems to prioritize a lower price than a better level of support.
(Also, I'm not just talking about ISPs. I meant customer support in general and how the view has changed from "keeping a customer is much cheaper than gaining one" to "cattle, cattle, castle. If we lose one, there's hundreds to gain".)
Repeat these words over and over. Most automated phone systems are programmed to bail out when its clear the customer is just flat out unwilling to engage with their bullshit.
I usually use the "cuss at the bot" method. Gets out my frustration ahead of time so i can be sweet with the human. Tho one time the computer hung up on my ass haha
Yup, it turns out you'll often get more concessions from a support agent if you can manage to sound both angry at the problem and happy to work with the customer support rep to resolve it.
I've called companies that disconnect the call or "in order to connect you to the right agent, please tell us what you're calling about," them inevitably get it wing enough times to make you sit through a menu of about ten choices that are not correct and disconnect after three rounds of this nonsense.
They may hallucinate but they're less likely to lie for now. I can't count the number of times I saw or heard some bullshit being told to customers to appease rather than help. And it irks me to no end every time I get a rep like that.
I don't blame the workers. I blame the corporate bullshit that actively encourages it by dangling bonuses and taking away if a customer doesn't feel that their issue was resolved. Call centers suck ass for both customers and employees.
How harrowing it is to hear someone a few cubicles away scream at one poor review by the end of the month that lost them a bonus for some bullshit that was out of their control after enduring so much abuse.
There’s a NYT article somewhere, and I’ve been desperately trying to find it, about a woman who worked as some kind of real estate(?) call center AI augmenter. Essentially people would call in about listings or something, and she had to step in when the AI went off the tracks or didn’t know how to answer questions, matching its tone/inflection while refusing to acknowledge that there was a human stepping in. She ended up being super burnt out from the job. So the whole system was just super redundant, awful for the people working there, and as we’ve come to expect from AI, just a half-baked turd sold to some MBAs for a mint.
A lot of "AI systems" are literally just a dude in India. Outsourced human labour is cheaper than building and running a proper AI driven system, but companies want to say they're "incorporating AI" because it makes shareholders dicks hard.
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