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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: 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. davidhariri ◴[21 Aug 25 18:42 UTC] No.44976466[source]▶
Success rate depends on many factors (risk of failure, your value to the business, complexity of the ask), but it's definitely on average much higher than 5% (I sell this technology and look at the results many times a day).

> 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).

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2. sarchertech ◴[21 Aug 25 18:57 UTC] No.44976645[source]▶
>but it's definitely on average much higher than 5% (I sell this technology and look at the results many times a day)

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.