If it worked for most shit and escalated to a human when it actually needed to, reliably, I’d be fine with it.
I don’t believe there’s a realistic chance that there’s a lot of overlap between the people willing to invest to actually do it properly and the people paying for AI instead of people though.
The problem is the same as with the telephone answering trees.
If they’re used to help you get where you’re going, then they’re great. But that’s not the best financially motivated decision. Solving your problem costs the companies money. Pissing you off and convincing you that your problem shouldn’t be fixed saves money on support.
So making you go round in circles is the machine doing EXACTLY what they want it to do.
That’s an additional problem.
But the bigger problem is that it’s not actually possible to do a good job without genuine meaningful investment in building out the tooling properly.
That’s just it…… they are building it out properly, their goal is just not what you think it is.
I get one of those meal kit delivery services. Every few weeks I’ll go to their AI customer support and ask for cancellation and it’ll give me discounts on upcoming orders. I keep the service at about 40% off at all times. Also when there’s a problem with the order the chat bot just tosses me a discount. Cases like this are perfect for AI customer service.
Edit
Wow this blew up in a weird way. Just to be clear on a few points:
With the discount I pay $87 Canadian which is $76 untaxed or about $55usd. For 6 different dinners for me and my wife delivered to my front door every Monday. With crazy grocery prices where I live I cannot come close to beating that without giving up something. I won’t eat the same thing every night (Sunday meal prep bros, don’t at me), I don’t want to expend the mental energy gathering recipes and ingredients but I do enjoy cooking a lot. It’s something at the end of the day I can do with my hands free of screens. At regular price this was worth it to me, at 40% off it’s actually saving me money. If they’re still making money shipping this big box off food to me on a weekly basis, then good for them, we’re both coming out on top.
Except they’re selling you the kit at waaaay over cost in the first place, so they’re still making money off of you. I promise you they are aware of the “glitch”, and are not ignoring it out of the kindness of their hearts.
(not criticising you for using the service, if it works for you go for it and get those discounts, but don’t let them manipulate you in to thinking you’ve got one over on them, they 100% account for this kind of thing and are still making money)
If X number of people pay full price and only Y number people go through the hoops of getting a discount the company comes out ahead!
It’s worse then that. They’re actively profiting from that discount rate, meaning they’re ludicrously profiting from everyone who doesn’t spend half their life getting discount codes (the cost of convenience)
I mean most products you’d sell you’re hopefully making at least 40% profit margin so everyone would still be making money. They’re just banking on you sticking around and not canceling. lots of money > some money > no money
How is 2 minutes with a chat bot half of someone’s life?
We humans sometimes use a rhetorical device called “hyperbole” where we use exaggeration to emphasize our point, and it’s usually not meant to be taken literally. Welcome to the planet, hope you enjoy your stay.
Yes but the point you’re trying to get across is this is a huge amount of effort when it’s really trivial.
It’s cumulative dude
Yea but it works out to $87 (Canadian) for 6 different nights of meals for 2 people. Delivered to my door. I suspect their angle is using this to just keep you from churning at a loss in hopes of just keeping you around in case you go back to paying regular price. The amount of meat, vegetables and dairy in the box along with cost of shipping and paying people to assemble this order, the cost has to be damn near $87 if not a little over.
Like I said, I don’t criticise anyone for using the service, and the more affordable it is, the better, but trust that they are definitely not working at a loss, in the same way supermarkets, that would probably still charge less for the same items, do - by making you believe they’re selling to you at just about what it costs them to get by, when they are selling it to you for significantly more.
And it’s quite possible that it’s cheaper for them to give those discounts since they’re not employing as many humans. Humans are expensive.
It’s more likely that the food is so cheap that the company still makes money at 40% off. Like how mattresses are always discounted 30% to 70% .
They certainly do, but they won’t give up that extra margin if they don’t have to. If customers hate dealing with the AI service, it may be cheaper to compensate them with more discounts than put humans back on the phone.
Dropping pricing down to a reasonable amount by making you jump through hoops instead of pricing it fairly in the first place?
That is like praising someone for stabbing you instead of shooting you.
I mean, I’m choosing to use this service. If it felt unfair I’d just buy the groceries myself. They’re not a charity, you’re getting a premium service and there are costs associated with this. I don’t think it’s priced unfairly to begin with, it falls somewhere between buying your own groceries and getting takeout. The value is saving me time figuring out recipes, gathering the ingredients and getting a different meal every night, this is the value you pay for. I don’t know why people expect these companies to just give this service away.
I don’t know why people expect these companies to just give this service away.
Idk if you’ve noticed but there seem to be a lot of people on Lemmy who are opposed to the theory underlying the profit motive. If your product or service is priced above cost then it is automatically bad. 🤷♂️
Pricing something fairly is not just giving it away.
The answer is always, the service will sick until you leave for another company.
Then you’ll find out sucks just as much there, cause you have to buy from someone
In my experience the AI assistant is just trained on the information available on the firm’s website.
In 2024 I never just call a company expecting to be able to be assisted by a person. It’s always quicker and easier to figure out how to interact with said company online. The only times you call are when it’s not possible to resolve your query by interacting with them online.
That being the case, the entire purpose of the AI in this case is just to make it less convenient to call them. “Have you tried to resolve your issue online? Are you really sure about that? Maybe I could paraphrase this blog post from our website written by an intern 12 years ago.”
If it worked for most shit and escalated to a human when it actually needed to, reliably, I’d be fine with it.
If you think that’s how it will be implemented, I have some beans I’d like to sell you.
I’m really not sure how you read my post and got that impression.
I dislike the fact even more then the idea.
Called a bank recently.
They: "please say in a word the subject your call is about so we can immediately connect you to the right department "
Me: “LOAN”
They: you said “limits on your cards”, 1 for yes 2 for no
I tried 3 times, gave up. They won, I guess.
“Talk to a human”
Repeat these words over and over. Most automated phone systems are programmed to bail out when its clear the customer is just flat out unwilling to engage with their bullshit.
I usually use the “cuss at the bot” method. Gets out my frustration ahead of time so i can be sweet with the human. Tho one time the computer hung up on my ass haha
Also surprisingly effective.
Yup, it turns out you’ll often get more concessions from a support agent if you can manage to sound both angry at the problem and happy to work with the customer support rep to resolve it.
Might not have been speech detection, might have been a call center agent with a sound board
Tha poor fucker…“I wanna talk to a human”…“you are beep boop”
Who is your daddy and what does he do?
Sound board? I don’t know what that means. Can they press buttons and computer vooice prompts pop up?
Yeah or something similar.
Oh. Well i hope i didn’t yell at a person. Nothing for it now
I think it was Comcast that refused to connect me with a human unless I said the right thing.
No matter what method, it would either hang up and tell me to try again or just not route me to the right place.
I ended up sending a letter to my state Attorney General. 30 days later my issue was fixed.
I bet I could make an phone app that just repeats that until you get through
I’ve called companies that disconnect the call or “in order to connect you to the right agent, please tell us what you’re calling about,” them inevitably get it wing enough times to make you sit through a menu of about ten choices that are not correct and disconnect after three rounds of this nonsense.
Already out there in certain ways. There’s a restaraunt near me that uses an automated system to collect orders in the drive-thru, and puts them into the system incorrectly.
At least that’s what seems to be its purpose, because it does that really well. That, and piss people off.
I’ve tried that system at a rallys and damn do I hate it. Miserable to talk to and it fucked everything up.
That sounds like what I want to do when working customer service
LOL, as if they care about what consumers want.
We have decided that you want something else instead. Take it. Now.
Hey, I didn’t know Apple had a fediverse account.
Hi, Tim Apple!
Introducing Apple Intelligence Genius. Now you can get technical support from the comfort of your home. We think you’re going to love it.
(It does nothing but tell you to reset your pram and turn it off and on again.)
“You don’t need a 3.5mm headphone jack. We’re removing it, and you’re going to like it”.
But I have several pairs of really nice, expensive headphones that need it.
“You will use this awkward dongle, like it, and thank us for our generosity”
Thanks! I love it!
The funny thing is that Apple chat support was a real person when I tried to create an account last week. Yes, they provided the normal directions to create and account which didn’t work through their account creation website, through an iPad’s settings, or whatever the third option was, but it was very clear it was a real human being.
Ended up finding a suggestion from reddit to go through iTunes and that worked. They use real people to provide the official directions that don’t work!
Yeah, there are some things that have to happen on the phone (Account recovery is one, because it’s a special department and most CS has no way to do anything. They can’t even really do it in the store because they don’t have the access.) But their chat isn’t bad when I’ve had to use it.
I extremely hate this idea. I I already hate the automated systems that are definitely designed to make you give up just trying to talk to an actual human being. Hopefully, we can get more lawsuits around the world like the Air canada one where they are liable for any bs the ai decides to make up, along with actual laws saying the same. Hopefully, it would discourage them.
I had the displeasure of being called by one from a vendor. It pissed me off that they couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call using a human, with how much we paid them. I canceled that contract and went with a different vendor, and let the sales team know exactly why. LLMs have their place, but my time is not the waste bin.
Completely off topic, but I sang your username in my head… It really is weirdly catchy…
There’s this boomer obsession with making it listen to human speech…
Nobody under 40 wants to use human speech to talk to an AI. We don’t want to us human speech to talk to humans most of the time, especially if we don’t know them.
But they always want to jam an AI into areas where human speech is the main communication method.
The absolute last place AI should have been deployed is answering a phone call. Because that is the last resort for most people, but the boomers calling the shots still think that’s people’s go to move before trying anything else
While some of this is cultural, it’s also about accessibility. Old people want to use their voice because their sight is often less reliable and they aren’t as good at pushing the right buttons. My father for example is functionally blind and voice is all he has. So before we get mad at boomers calling all the shots, let’s consider that they’re not just old fashioned. They’re old. and so will you be one day.
The other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.
I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I forget to take my pill and then I have an extra. After years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.
So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?
Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.
I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those outions. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons…
Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
My belief is that this is an unhinged take.
There’s a NYT article somewhere, and I’ve been desperately trying to find it, about a woman who worked as some kind of real estate(?) call center AI augmenter. Essentially people would call in about listings or something, and she had to step in when the AI went off the tracks or didn’t know how to answer questions, matching its tone/inflection while refusing to acknowledge that there was a human stepping in. She ended up being super burnt out from the job. So the whole system was just super redundant, awful for the people working there, and as we’ve come to expect from AI, just a half-baked turd sold to some MBAs for a mint.
Edit: it was a n+1 piece, thanks @Tikiporch@lemmy.world
I think I know what you’re talking about. She was also a chat room operator for an only fans creator too , right?
Edit: I might be mashing a few similar stories together in my head. Anyway, this might be the one you’re taking about https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/becoming-a-chatbot-my-life-as-a-real-estate-ais-human-backup
Edit 2: This is the same person, also a good read https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/
You know what, it was the n+1 piece! Thank you!
A lot of “AI systems” are literally just a dude in India. Outsourced human labour is cheaper than building and running a proper AI driven system, but companies want to say they’re “incorporating AI” because it makes shareholders dicks hard.
When I call somewhere and get a live person I ask for them to give me the machine because a machine is easier to deal with.
They may hallucinate but they’re less likely to lie for now. I can’t count the number of times I saw or heard some bullshit being told to customers to appease rather than help. And it irks me to no end every time I get a rep like that.
I don’t blame the workers. I blame the corporate bullshit that actively encourages it by dangling bonuses and taking away if a customer doesn’t feel that their issue was resolved. Call centers suck ass for both customers and employees.
How harrowing it is to hear someone a few cubicles away scream at one poor review by the end of the month that lost them a bonus for some bullshit that was out of their control after enduring so much abuse.
The companies will profit again now with your voice being used to train AI
Ooh, there’s a fun question:
Would you rather:
An AI handle customer service, or
An overseas call center handle customer service
?
Depends. Can I easily make the AI hallucinate and give me free shit/tell me something I can later use to get free shit?
iirc someone attempted that already with plane tickets.
Canada sided with the consumer, so companies are liable on what the AI will allow.
As it should be. The consumer doesn’t care why the support agent offered something, if it’s offered and advertised, the customer should get it. They can fix their support if it’s costing them too much.
If AI is better than the existing voice-prompt systems, then I’ll take it, but I doubt it will be.
Uber drivers are unphased by this.
AI can only give you the options it was programmed to give. A Human is able to actually think and find a solution or direct you to a solution. Your options are less with AI for customer service. AI works best for applications that it is tailored for. But expecting it to “think” like Humans do is so far off. AI is being fed so much biased information and that is not “thinking” or learning.
To be honest ai could replace Microsoft support. Be it on chat or forums.
- Restart
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth- ???, I gave up with support and just reinstalled
it can give you other options too.
I went through a phase of making the ai robot agree with me that it was the “email flange” that was causing my issue before transferring me to an operator.
