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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why were unions specifically to blame for your family leaving?
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.
Union versus non-union is a quality versus quantity problem. Unions restrict the labour pool to increase wages. When that protects specialisation, it increases productivity. When it artificially constrains the labour pool, it decreases it.
A unionised job market showing unemployment (or underemployment) is usually an indication of the latter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've gotten pointed to documentation I never would have found and I doubt a human would have found. I've had returns immediately processed rather than waiting 2 days for a RMA to show up in my email. I had a subscription rate lowered (my desired outcome) when I tried to cancel a service. And I've had a software bug escalated to the appropriate team within a couple of minutes. And all these interactions were probably 10x faster, at least, than they would have been with a human.
I love chatbots for customer service. Not because they save the company money, but because they seem to save me a ton of time (no more 20 minutes of hold, followed by being put on hold for 10 minutes multiple times), and they seem to follow policies more "objectively", and they escalate easily whenever they can't handle something. It just seems like more reliable and faster outcomes for "normal" support, and then you still get a real agent for more complicated situations.
What is to say that a lot of the functions that a customer service person does is getting people things they need and that the company resists giving to them. Which is to say that companies mostly need customer service agents because the company's raw impulses are so shitty they need someone with the slight independence of a customer service agent just to provide the services their customers need.
It's like why I never go to company websites despite being very web-savy. These websites only serve the company's idea of what I get and if I'm calling at all, it's because I need more than that.
Naturally, the point is an AI chat can't do customer service because it can't override policy, tell people tricks and similar things.
I’ve worked for small firms selling software to libraries (public and university systems), enterprise managed security services (think anti-Phishing operations), and now in managed medical claims for niche practices.
In all cases, our firm has had the customer-first philosophy to make them love us. Provide rapid responses and quality outcomes, regardless of perceived cost-center metrics. That has always, in my experience, resulted in an easy contract renewal or even having fans of ours jump to a new job at a new firm and buy our product at their new job.
Turns out people aren’t as fickle and price sensitive and still highly value good service, at least when they’re spending the companies money and not their own.
I have never seen someone leave due to pollution, other than just wanting to leave the city.
The poor economic outlook and lack of jobs is directly due to the unions. If there weren't unions, Detroit and Flint would still be the capital of the auto industry, and Erie PA would still be a major locamotive hub. Instead everyone was forced out because of the unions.
I'm literally trying to give them tens of thousands of dollars...I dunno why I bothered even engaging with it, I hoped it would end up taking a report or something, but it doesn't, it just wastes my time.
“ The union took CBA to the workplace relations tribunal earlier this month as the company wasn’t being transparent about call volumes, according to a statement Thursday from the Finance Sector Union. The nation’s largest lender had said that the voice bot reduced call volumes by 2,000 a week, when union members said volumes were in fact rising and CBA had to offer staff overtime and direct team leaders to answer calls, the union said.”
I had to use an Amazon chatbot a few weeks ago. It introduced itself as "Deepshikha". After that facepalm, I started down the path with its various preferred responses to get a refund on an item I bought that never arrived, had no tracking information, and was almost certainly a scam by a third-party seller. I eventually, after a few tries, selected the right combination of things to get the refund processed. But the chatbot wasn't helpful, it didn't make any decisions, and it simply served as a filter for scam refund requests.
I guarantee you that some middle-management PM and some VP at Amazon counted that interaction as a success. I'm sure that's how it ended up on their quarterly graphs and charts. After all, the customer (me) got what they wanted and the right decision was made. And, !bonus!, it used "AI", reduces cost, and had low latency. Raises and promotions are almost certainly incoming!
But the experience was abysmal and insulting, contibuting to the ongoing ensh*ttification of the Amazon experience.
Can you give some examples of complex queries that it's handled?
> Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.
This is bang on. But unfortunately many companies have top down mandates to drive costs down (without backstops for LTV retention) and they look at top line growth as separate from OpEx. It's weird and broken, but it's a side effect of the common organizational structure of most enterprises. There are companies that do not look at themselves divisionally as CX, Sales, Product, Marketing etc. and the ones I can think of do have very high NPS (apple comes to mind).
I talked to the bank and there was no way to close the account without both of us present.
Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me! That's the best success I've had with a CS bot.
Possibly the policy changed in the mean-time or the lack of activity in the account for several years allowed it to happen (though the humans never told me after x years of inactivity I'd be able to close it)
That still sounds like a bot fulfilling a function that should be solved by making the product better. This could have been either 1) an autopay requiring zero interaction, or 2) if you don't want to autopay, a form you can click "pay" on.
A human would have done the same thing but it would be a waste of time for them.
It was actually nice that I wasn't stuck in chatbot hell, I didn't have to ask for human, it just did it at the right moment.
If the humans are in fact more expensive than the chatbots, it's not like the shareholders just say "oh, ok, I guess we'll just take lower compensation for slightly more risk". Instead, they'll pressure management to pass the higher cost on to the customer.
If you want to "protect workers" by making sure they get paid x amount regardless of whether they're the most efficient way to achieve y goal, why not just do that through taxes? You're basically taxing bank shareholders and subsidizing employees, but with a lot of extra steps. Plus, the employees have to actually show up to work every day, which I understand can be kind of a drag.
I think you'd have a very hard time accurately estimating a true success rate because of the number of people who will just bounce off and give up after a maybe successful response. There's no real way to know whether the response really solved their problem other than doing surveys. But survey responders aren't a random sample.
Customer support has been the biggest target for a long time. Companies care only about revenue and people signing up. After that unless you are giving them more business they stop caring. They figure - best case they frustrate you enough that you leave them alone or bad case - they refund you and worst case - they give you a gift coupon.
With that mind, AI chatbots are the best solution. Intentionally make it difficult to solve the issue and then even if you reach human support - they have the old scripts. That means now companies ability to frustrate-out a customer is now supercharged.
Have you filed a support ticket for that? It's clearly a bug. It should have forced you to call an agent so they could upsell you on a premium service. /s
I couldn’t do the regular return flow because hygiene, but the chat bot immediately issued a refund.
Okay, the last one is a stretch but people worried about their money are desperate. Not to go all radical all of a sudden here but fact of the matter is banks hold a lot of power over your average guy. The least that they could do is show some respect for your time.
[1] See: https://web.archive.org/web/20250617083138/https://www.comme... and even the actual page as of this writing.
If a chatbot can reasonably succeed at eliminating some of that workload without also driving existing customers away, it's a net win even if the budget between senior salary time and chatbot query is identical.
Companies need to offer an “advanced support” option - a separate number with big scary warnings where every call whose resolution is due to your own fault or something findable on the docs ends up charging the user a fee. In exchange, it directly bypasses all chatbots and first-line support.
I’ve never heard an argument why companies don’t do that, it seems like it would be a win-win for everyone to get the customers to self-triage before reaching out.
Most people who grew up around unions don't like them, hence why union enrollment in the US has gone from ~35% of the working population to less than 10%.
I strongly believe in the long term benefits of customer service, but the world we live in, does not. It values profits RIGHT NOW, and tomorrow is tomorrow's problem.
The right place would be in software engineering, reporting, accounting, product management, healthcare analysis, routine prescription refills (potentially) etc.
Not only is US freight traffic up, but freight traffic around the world went up as nations industrialized and raw material demands went up in places like Australia. Erie should have had its second coming, but instead everyone has seen what the UE did to the industry and workers don't want to work in union shops, and so the cities population has almost halved since its peak.
I'm not as familiar with Cleveland so I can't really speak on it.
unfortunately, there are no "good" ISPs in my area. xfinity and the other big ones killed most of the competition via undercutting, lobbying and the legal system (ie, tying up municipal fiber/wifi initiatives in bureaucratic hell).
since i no longer work from home, it's mostly just a convenience to have internet service for personal use. i actually use it very little, and pay for the cheapest option available, so it's not much money.
It's a similar problem to how power users only get in touch with support when all other options have been exhausted, and then get annoyed when they have to go through the motions and try everything again, knowing it won't work, which it then doesn't, and only after half an hour of dicking about can support actually do what they need to do. The problem is that Average Joe almost certainly hasn't exhausted every option, and it's even fairly likely that they went to call as their first option over anything else. The only difference now is that a chatbot is now available as first line of defence that doesn't take up the time of an actual human, rather than that being the phone, which very often will need a human on the other end, at least at some point. The chatbot doesn't even need to be good to pay itself back, so long as it solves some problems that then prevent some support calls, since human time is expensive.
We need that XKCD shibboleth or something to fix that, but even that is open for abuse, so I don't think there's an actual solution to be had.
But switching banks is just too much of a hassle for me currently.
Because the workers belong to a union, and in Australia unions have the statutory right to contest mass layoff actions at a tribunal.
Not everywhere is so weighted toward the employer as the U.S.
Walking down the street I receive a text to say my glasses were ready to be picked up. I had not purchased any glasses, and the store that I was to collect them from was not in the city I live in. By coincidence I was approximately 30 meters from a branch of the same store in my town. I popped in to tell them that someone had entered a phone number incorrectly and someone might need to told by other means that their glasses were ready.
The response? "Certainly sir, can I have your name, and address". Explaining how this information was not relevant was not fruitful. I was reluctant to provide this information because about the only thing they could have done with it was to add it to the account that matched the phone number. I wasn't in the mood to engage in identity theft for a free pair of glassees, but the conversation was going in circles. Eventually another staff member observed the rising tension and offered to take care of this difficult situation. She took my phone number, and the address of the branch that had sent the text, said thank you for the notification and she would sort it out with the other branch. I was out of the store within 30 seconds of her taking over.
Several calls and many, many hours later, I was finally able to get the double-billing resolved. But they didn't remove the charges that had accrued. Several calls later I was able to get someone who assured me they could deal with the issue. I demanded a $50 statement credit as compensation for my time.
They flipped the sign on the statement credit, and it was an additional $50 charge.
I got called by their collections department. I patiently explained the issue, and they were very sympathetic. Then they asked why don't I just settle up the outstanding balance now and then we can sort out the billing issue later. For the first time in this ordeal I lost my cool and flatly told them to go fuck themselves.
Several calls later it was finally resolved, but this entire experience was astounding. There was nobody qualified to escalate to. I was completely at the mercy of the random humans the system picked for me to interact with, and there were seemingly zero knobs I could turn or buttons to push to summon someone who could actually assist. To their credit, many of the support staff seemed just as frustrated as I was, but were equally hamstrung by the system they were interacting with.
What really grinds my gears is when they pass the bot off as a human. inevitably you discover its not and thats almost always right about the same time you realize that they cant help you. I would rather not have wasted my time and been told up front "sorry we dont have anyone available to help you right now"
Hah. I had to argue with a chatbot and representatives when a bottle of shampoo arrived shattered and the Amazon package was filled with shampoo.
They literally said "put what remains of the product into a bag and return to UPS Store". I explained the absurdity, but no. So I duly show up at UPS who, to no-one's surprise but Amazon's, didn't particularly want a zip lock bag with 16 oz of shampoo in it.
And then they sent me a replacement bottle that broke similarly.
They didn't try that route again, but similarly, explaining that the "free replacement we sent you" was also delivered damaged, and I was still out money with no shampoo to show for it, also took a lot of effort. "But I see we sent you a replacement item, so you can't also get a refund." "Your replacement is also broken." "Oh, I thought that was the first bottle." "It was, too."
This may even be from the turn of the century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI2xK6zbaoI
I'm pretty sure it's at least once for me, and I think I know a couple people where it's more like 3.
Oh you want us to take it easy on you with the raise %? Remember that time you fired all of us for no good reason? Yeah our bank accounts still have a hole we're gonna fill up now. Nice try.
> due to your own fault or something findable on the docs ends up charging the user a fee.
| But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
- Hitchhiker's Guide