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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: 0.697s | 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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StevenWaterman ◴[21 Aug 25 17:18 UTC] No.44975447[source]▶
I'm currently working on adding a bot to our support chat at TalkJS. And it's great, it has probably a 90% success rate at handling complex queries. But that's because we're throwing money at it. That chat is normally staffed by senior devs, meaning it's not unusual for a single response to cost $10 of labour.

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.

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1. ori_b ◴[21 Aug 25 18:41 UTC] No.44976456[source]▶
If you're not treating it as a cost cutting exercise, how much are you spending per query on the chatbot, and what is that $10 budget per query going towards?

Can you give some examples of complex queries that it's handled?

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2. zdragnar ◴[21 Aug 25 19:10 UTC] No.44976811[source]▶
Not OP, but I think you're missing one aspect- senior engineer time doesn't scale well, because there's not just wage but also opportunity cost of context switching and taking them away from tasks that might contribute to increased sales or revenue. More sales also means needing to hire more people if the support load is constant per customer.

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.

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3. ◴[21 Aug 25 19:20 UTC] No.44976907[source]▶
4. ori_b ◴[22 Aug 25 14:34 UTC] No.44985185[source]▶
The parent poster was saying that it wasn't about cost savings, and yet all that you talked about was cost savings.