[sgt101]

I spent a lot of time and effort deploying automation in customer service. The idea was to do it in ways that were really valuable, as opposed to spreadsheet positive. Our management had been toasted too many times by folks selling snake oil, but my god savings were needed.

They just had to be real...

So first issue: developing measures that measure real overall service productivity... this is hard, the gaming is intense.

Second issue: automation generates work. Yup. When your service workers get time they use it to address difficult cases and to do the work that removes regulatory and safety risks. The rest of the time this stuff is ignored, building hidden risk for the enterprise. Relieve the pressure, and it reemerges.

Third issue: peak demands. Ideally automation would help you deal with peak demands enabling human staffing at sensible levels to handle most of the traffic most of the time. Sadly it doesn't. Peak demand often seemed to be for the work that could least be automated.

Forth issue: the tech is a castle of lies. Ok, that's not quite true... but there is a lot of lying. In the academic work the lying is of the form of what is left out of the experiments and evaluations - for example that the algorithm cost $100k to run or something. In the commercial world there is flat out lying - HAL I look at you, you bastard. How many RFI's were derailed by some regional President at a supplier ringing my CIO or CEO and explaining that I was "a problem" and had "an attitude"... well, all of them. The issue is that there is no sanction. HAL is still pushing Holmes and winning contracts, and not delivering what they promise, because it's all a lie. All that happens is that they move to the next sucker and wait for management churn at the old sucker to erase the corporate memory, and this does not take long. In reality they should all be drummed out of the business and no one should ever speak to them again.

But, five years later I am still flogging my guts out and they are all on their boats and golf courses. One of the bastards had his own vineyard.

So, sigh

[mathattack]

How many RFI's were derailed by some regional President at a supplier ringing my CIO or CEO and explaining that I was "a problem" and had "an attitude"

I had issues with this too. The only solution is to prep your CIO whenever you play hardball, and return the favor to the vendor.

[pydry]

For customer service I find that the real automation "gains" tend either to be in debugging the rest of the organization or in driving a customer to give up on finding a human to talk to.

[pjc50]

> debugging the rest of the organization

This is true of automated IT processes in general; for human-operated processes there's always a certain amount of "slack" between how the process is written and what needs to be done to make it actually work. The knowledge for the latter is concentrated in lower-ranking staff - the "NCOs" - and often unknown and unknowable to those running the system. Converting the system to automation only converts the known process, so it tends to fail hard until the slack can be taken up elsewhere or learned and incorporated.

[Cthulhu_]

I've worked indirectly with customer support, in that we built FAQs and flows that made users do some troubleshooting themselves before contacting support - a simple couple-of-steps plan of checking your fuse boxes or checking the website for expected maintenance or known outages before calling support.

The next layer of automation would involve people going through one of those call menus; ideally once the customer ends up at an agent, they will have all their data and files right in front of them already.

[joenot443]

I’m super curious, what are HAL and Holmes?

> algorithm costs $100k to run

I almost choked on my coffee. They used this line on multiple companies??

[extra88]

Oblique references to IBM and their product Watson. I assume they're afraid IBM would otherwise find their comment and sue them for libel (implausible).

For those that need further explanation, HAL is the killer computer in the movie 2001, the name was picked for the movie because the letters are shifted by one from "IBM." IBM's product Watson is named after Sherlock Holmes's sidekick, Dr. Watson.

Edit: the product was named after a prominent, early CEO of IBM, not the character; Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson is what the commenter was referencing (I've thought the Watson name was a Holmes reference since it won Jeopardy).

[easton]

Although the reference here makes sense, I always figured that Watson was named for Thomas Watson, the CEO of IBM?

[extra88]

Oh dang, you're right!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson

[joenot443]

Oh, of course! Thanks for the explanation about HAL and IBM, I actually had no idea that's where the name comes from. Very clever stuff.

[somebody78978]

> the name was picked for the movie because the letters are shifted by one from "IBM."

Actually, the IBM/HAL thing is just a coincidence, according to both Kubrick and Clarke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000#Origin_of_name

[jvanderbot]

Exactly what you would say if you picked it to represent IBM and their evil technology.

[extra88]

Not going to let facts get in the way of a good story. :)

[sgt101]

the $100k thing is referring to the costs of deep learning, in my case these costs torpedoed an otherwise good looking business case. Other things that academics do is to report "human level" results when they mean "10 people I recruited on AWS mechanical turk, who really didn't give a monkeys about what they were doing". For academic papers indicating that technology might be valuable in the real world it's clear that they should be read as "this technology might be valuable after 5 years of development". The problem is that this tech then gets hyped by thirdparties which then obscure the 5 years of work required - sometimes meaning that the 5 years doesn't get done...

[albert_e]

> I’m super curious, what are HAL and Holmes?

HAL is just IBM encypted using Caesar cipher / ROT25 :)

Holmes must be Watson (but "Holmes" is also the marketing name given by another tech vendor in this space to their own AI product inspired by Watson - very creative)

[dna_polymerase]

HAL is IBM, Holmes is Watson.