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Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

(arstechnica.com)
308 points ndsipa_pomu | 1 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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taylodl ◴[21 Aug 25 16:29 UTC] No.44974720[source]▶
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.

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1. wat10000 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:59 UTC] No.44975160[source]▶
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.