[ahzhou]

While it may not happen for you, “too lazy to look it up” is the vast majority of CS requests.

My understanding from talking to a couple of CS execs is that these have been a slam dunk in terms of ROI because CS agents don’t need to handle type C requests. I expect we’ll only see more as time goes on.

[awofford]

My guess is the ROI is provided by people giving up before they actually get help from a human.

[jacobr1]

I've analyzed support ticket requests before, and that doesn't seem to be the case. At least for the two times I've done this: 1) IT support tickets for a local school, and 2) Tickets for a B2B SaaS app. In both cases the majority of tickets where for things that seemed to me to be obvious. That if the user just bothered to spend 10 seconds looking they would figure it out. But they didn't. Some training helped on the IT side, and some UX improvements helped in SaaS app, but the bar is _sooo_ much lower than many expect.

[jcranmer]

This should be a lot more obvious to the tech crowd than it is. I suppose it's the familiarity effect (see https://xkcd.com/2501/)--what's obvious to us isn't necessarily obvious to most people, and we heavily undercount the degree to which confusion-of-basic-things exist because it's second nature to us.

[jacobr1]

And we are talking even more basic than most people on HN can imagine.

Such as:

"Is your device turned on?"

"Are you logged into the site and not just searching google for the thing your want our application to do?"

"Have you actually purchased our product and not a competitor's you just think is similar?"

[bgirard]

I wonder that too. If you're only measure one part of the funnel (e.g. CS costs) and not the total funnel (e.g. losses due to poor CS quality like a customer dropping the project) then it's easy to conclude that making CS more painful is a win.

[ahzhou]

It depends on the business, but the kind of metrics you are talking about are measured and taken seriously. People have absolutely gotten fired for CS quality KPI drops.

[freedomben]

I don't doubt you, but if that's the case why not make it easy to get to a human? I'm fine explaining my problem to a robot, but if (when) they don't understand what I'm saying, hand me off to a human! For example, it's maddening to call the pharmacy and go through something like this:

    Pharmacy Robot:  Hello, thanks for calling <pharmacy>.  What can I do for you?  You can say anything like, "Check pharmacy hours" or "order a refill".

    Me:  Hi, I have a refill for <specific medication with rules around it> that is due next week but I'll be traveling out of the country to <other country> for a couple of weeks.  I need to know what my options are.

    Pharmacy Robot:  Ok, you want a refill.  Please enter the prescription number now.

    Me:  No, if we try to refill it, the automated system will just reject it.  I need to talk to a h...<cut off by robot>

Pharmacy Robot: Sorry, I didn't get that number. Using your phone's keypad, enter the number of your prescription refill.

Me: Jesus Christ, do I have to hang up and go through this whole thing ag... <cut off by robot>

Pharmacy Robot: Sorry, I didn't get that number. Using...<cut off by human hanging up>

That's just the most recent one I had. There are often better examples of madness...

[mike_hearn]

Because unless the chatbot is both better than a human in every way, and everyone knows that, the first thing people will do is push the button to reach the human. Why wouldn't they? They're calling in the first place because they don't want to make an effort to use the available tools to answer their question. They want a human.

[freedomben]

> They're calling in the first place because they don't want to make an effort to use the available tools to answer their question.

That's not correct. I NEVER call without first exhausting every available source because I despise the phone system and it's inefficiencies. Most companies may think they have resources available, but they really don't. And no, just throwing up a zendesk or equivalent "knowledge base" isn't the same as providing tools and manuals/guides/etc.

That said, there is definitely a subset of people for whom calling is step 1 (before even googling). They tend to be older and/or on the tech illiterate side. But if you design and build for the worst-case scenario, you're really screwing over your more self-help customers and even driving them away.

[ahzhou]

To be fair, LLM-based chatbots are much better about this because you don't need to discover the magic incantation to talk to a human. It's a trade-off because that same property introduces the possibility of hallucination.

[malfist]

They're especially slam dunks when they don't provide you with a way to get out of the automated useless system. Looking at you Amazon

[thaumasiotes]

You can get out of the automated useless system. They don't make it easy.

But I once managed to get through to an actual agent with this question:

1. I want to buy a kindle version of this book [amazon link, for the paper version of the book].

2. On the page for the book, there is a link for the kindle edition: [link].

3. That link goes to a page for what appears to be an entirely different book. (Under the same name; this was an edition of the Arabian Nights.)

4. However, I have independently found this page: [link], which appears to be for the kindle version of the book I'm interested in.

5. Given that I want to buy the kindle version of the book linked up in step (1), which one should I purchase?

The agent directed me to buy the book that purported to be the book I wanted, instead of the book that Amazon believed was the book I wanted but which claimed to be something different. I would have assumed that anyway. But a couple days later I checked on the book and the "kindle version" link for the paper version had been corrected.

Unfortunately, while they did correct the issue on the one book that I took the time to point out to them, it's still rampant all over their website.

[codeduck]

shouting "speak to a fucking human" repeatedly seems to work, though i may be suffering from confirmation bias

[freedomben]

Actually this does sometimes work because some of the systems now have sentiment analysis baked in and can tell if the user is getting pissed off. I've used this a few times to get through as well.

[ASalazarMX]

Be careful, your voice could be used to train the next chat bots, and they could start yelling angrily at customers... actually, if the new chat bot is genuinely helpful, a screaming conversation would be kind of cathartic.

[codeduck]

It's dystopian and yet, somehow, soothing.

[RheingoldRiver]

type `agent` repeatedly into the chatbot and it will let you request a callback

[ackfoobar]

"Getting through chat bots to get to a human" is the new "getting through tech support to get to an engineer".

https://xkcd.com/806/

[ASalazarMX]

I think the path is now Chat bot -> Help Desk -> Engineer.

[Jensson]

I just went through that recently, chat bot responded instantly to the mail with the same reply as the FAQ help, then the human responded after an hour asking for screenshots to see that showed I actually tried, then after a day an engineer fixed it.