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

(arstechnica.com)
308 points ndsipa_pomu | 2 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:58 UTC | HN request time: 1.254s | 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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Illniyar ◴[21 Aug 25 17:44 UTC] No.44975783[source]▶
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.

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1. potato3732842 ◴[21 Aug 25 17:48 UTC] No.44975834[source]▶
>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.

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2. Marsymars ◴[21 Aug 25 19:54 UTC] No.44977274[source]▶
I recently changed my email address on file for every account/service. Probably 80% were straightforward to do myself, but there was a long tail of probably 10% where customer support had to do it for me and 10% where I was told that changing email addresses was impossible and I'd have to create a new account and submit a request to have my old one deleted.