[zlwaterfield]

I’ve worked on a few support sites for companies over the years. In all my research I found >40% of customers never look for the answer before contacting support. That’s why you’ll see sites add a bunch of questions with recommendations to answers based on your description before you can contact support. Even AWS support does this.

Bots may be annoying but they can also save the company tons in custer support costs. I’m for it if the UX is good and I can quickly contact an agent if the bot can’t answer my question. This is assuming the bot won’t hallucinate and just tell me random fake facts.

[trompetenaccoun]

I can't think of a single time where a customer support bot was ever useful. Not one. They're incredibly annoying and I categorically avoid them these days. At least companies should make it clear that their bot basically just links to the FAQ, then the rest of us don't have to waste our time.

[IgorPartola]

I can. Chipotle screwed up my order. Their support thing sent me to a chat bot that had me select which items were missing and I was able to get through the process of getting refunded quickly.

Similarly Amazon’s chat bot has helped me straighten out a few messed up deliveries.

This isn’t to say that it wouldn’t have been easier to have a point and click UI where I could just select all this on my own, but the way they had it set up wasn’t bad.

Here’s the kicker: when I recently had an Amazon delivery problem I started with the chat bot but then relatively seamlessly transitioned to talking to a human. The human was very quickly able to pick up on the situation and fix it.

[zacharybk]

This is because the tools that CX teams have been provided by companies like Zendesk or Intercom are no more then IFTTT widgets. These tools are rigid and scream RTFM because they’re incapable of taking action or providing anything specialized to your situation.

What you want is to be understood and treated like you’re a human with unique needs. You need someone or something to look up your account data, listen, and to act based on your situation. The current tools were never built for this.

The next generation of these CX tools will deliver this. Here are ways that they will be dramatically better for customers and companies: - They will learn from successful interactions in the past and mirror those outcomes - Handle customer interactions based on company policies such as escalating bugs - They will surface new insights for the company - Won’t hallucinate

When you watch any CX agent do their job you’ll witness them utilizing 4-5 SaaS applications to get a simple answer for a customer. The hurdle to adopt Generative AI in a company will require that companies care to build read/write APIs for these tools to utilize.

[taneq]

I asked my bank's chatbot if it was an LLM, and it responded with "I'll do my best to help you." The next time I talked to it I told it to go get me a human and it said it would find a human... then put me through a questionnaire before telling me to call the main support line. sigh

That said, and wow I feel like a shill for saying this, I've taken to asking the new GPT4-driven Bing random questions instead of web searching and damn if it's not doing a scarily good job. I'd do this before (ever since I got access) and it started out very interesting and then got rapidly very mediocre, but since the upgrade... it's like being able to talk to The Internet except it's friendly.

[zlwaterfield]

Agree most are crap. But they are getting better. With the ramp up of embeddings, the data they have access to is more useful and with LLMs they can provide you with plain English answers that are customized for you. Good example: look at what the Supabase docs can do. Not a chat bot but demonstrates the capabilities.

[doctaj]

I had one with Amazon once. I was just getting a refund - it did it without any hassle and probably faster than a human. I was super happy - and this was like 2-3 years ago.

[teaearlgraycold]

And for sufficiently well documented and complicated products, like Stripe, a chatbot is actually a great addon. You just need to set expectations that it’ll only be 99% correct.

[2devnull]

You make the mistake of thinking people are all the same and don’t respond to incentives.

I automatically call certain companies rather than try to use their website because get this their website sucks. If I encounter any automated chat support, I will stop using the website and call a person.

I went from 10 years ago doing everything online myself, to now calling by default calling almost every company, because companies and their websites now universally suck. Because they’ve made the foolish mistake of thinking people are all the same and don’t respond to incentives. Some companies are better, I will give my business to them when I have a choice.