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

(arstechnica.com)
308 points ndsipa_pomu | 4 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. crazygringo ◴[21 Aug 25 18:09 UTC] No.44976089[source]▶
Maybe 75%?

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.

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2. sarchertech ◴[21 Aug 25 19:00 UTC] No.44976691[source]▶
How often are you using chatbots, or contacting support for that matter. I maybe need to use something like this 2 times a year.
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3. crazygringo ◴[21 Aug 25 20:40 UTC] No.44977800[source]▶
I dunno, twice a month? It's just modern life?
4. taylodl ◴[22 Aug 25 12:56 UTC] No.44984056[source]▶
I'm curious - whose chatbots do you find useful? Clearly these are the bots us HNers should be looking at as an example for what we should be building.