Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal? Now whenever I reach for customer's support chat or phone I get an AI agent replying to me and I get into a useless loop for a couple of minutes before I start begging it to link me to a real person. Will companies start losing customers because of that or people will eventually get used to this? |
Second, the best support line is one where no one calls in. So there are strong incentives to make it hard to do so, either positive (create good self service options) or bad (hide the number, hide emails, etc).
If you don't want this future then make sure you always ask for the human and constructively provide feedback that you will penalize any supplier that relies on it.
We are already in a K shaped economy wrt call centers. Being a very frequent Hilton hotel guest, say, gets you a separate call center number, US based live human support, people who can solve your problem, etc. Not being a Hilton member gets you the 45 minute wait and a bot.
There's always a viable alternative. But not for customers who are always looking for the cheapest viable products or services.
So those customers will spend too much time and frustration with bad customer service, because they think it's outrageous to consider a competitor who is a little bit more expensive.
Tell that to my insurance provider, the only insurance provider I am allowed to choose by my employer.
Or my doctor's office, the only doctors office that treats my ailment that my insurance provider calls in their network. They use AI customer support. They just fired 80% of their receptionists and replaced them with kiosks.
Or my pharmacy, where I get a choice of 3 whole local/mail-in pharmacies I can go to, but each one of them uses AI customer support.
I would consider anyone who's more expensive, if I were allowed to pay for it. Most of the time there is no options. I'm seeking a new employer in the hopes that some other insurance network will be better, but this seems to be the direction that all things are going: full corporate cartels squeezing the life out of everyone.
Meanwhile, Gemini gave me the url and explained what I needed to know in one reply. Problem solved. Same question to ChatGPT gave me the correct answer as well. I bet Claude or Grok would have also found the correct answer.
This is where things take a turn: Google.com/ddg/bing failed. amazon's own search failed. Its worth knowing that the good results from the chatbots pointed at Amazon's web.
Based on this one example, I could begin to think document style search engines are dead.
Presumably Amazon were trying to put me into their little Voice AI microcosm. They'd obviously (?) record my voice (yes) of me getting increasingly annoyed (likely) at some Voice Chat Bot (likely) and then they'd apologize (?) for not knowing (probably?).
Is that the goal? Waste 30 minutes of my time for what could have been answered by a chat bot but not a web search?
The underlying situation seems even weirder than simply trying to cut costs. I think Amazon has cut so many corners they have forgotten what shape they are trying to create.
I have only one answer so far: Their customer support has no idea how to navigate their own website and this is by design. This is NOT the customer support people at fault. Let that all sink in: Someone got a bonus for this service design. This is somehow optimal according to Amazon. Yet this style of service design will only get worse for paying customers. It will be much worse for non-customers.
Progress!
I don't think this is restricted to Amazon either. I think this is industry wide. The in-page chat bots are usually just as broken.
Elevenlabs using a completely incapable voice agent for sales outreach made me wonder if they were actively trying to dissuade customers.
It feels like the sort of thing a disinterested engineer implemented to appease a manager fixated on the shiny.
At $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, they prided themselves on having the best support operators, with deep technical prowess of their specific knowledge domain. Their L1 were better than some other business' L3s infrastructure specialists. This lasted for more than a decade, right until a merger with another business that also had their own human support department and certain "strategic opportunities" were identified. At first, some operations were consolidated, and some people were fired. Once the corporate machine saw the numbers, they just kept going. Nowadays, its almost full AI.
Today, I get ai support which fails to resolve my problem until a human steps in.
ai support is the new elevator music
Give it 12-18 months and for routine support flows the gap between a well built voice agent and a human will be hard to notice. Complex or emotional cases are where humans stay, which is fine, that’s where they add value anyway.
1. Native understanding of most languages
2. Full knowledge of everything in the company's knowledge base
3. Is never rude, annoyed, lazy
4. Can work 24/7
Something that was table stakes in the past would now be seen as crazy for a company to spend money on
There are commercial lists of people who have histories of using customer support.
Companies use them to determine economically rational levels of resources to commit when servicing customers.
Support agents are a brand’s first line. It hope they invest is good agentic support to protect their brand. Time will tell I guess.
That being said, if the technology can remove the need for human escalation, I’ll certainly change my view.
What? Do you mean the only insurance provider your employer will give you for free, or do you mean your employer can control your contracts with other parties? Are you in prison or on a slave plantation?
I don't know if your employer is paying for health insurance as a benefit for you, in which case they are the customer and can choose whatever crap provider they want. Or if they are deducting this cost from your salary, in which case they are robbing you.