[sltkr]

“Customer support by AI” sounds even worse than the current practice of having customer support provided by utterly clueless and unhelpful “support” from barely-English-speaking-people from the lowest-wage-country-we-could find (stereotypically India).

How did you come to hate people so deeply that you made it your life goal to make an already abysmal experience even worse?

[laborcontract]

I was on a small team of 10 that experienced very strong growth in our product. One of the consequences of success is that we had to take hundreds of calls per day. We eventually had to hire dedicated customer support people but after hours were an issue.

There are large outsourced customer service companies but those cost $1 a minute and those people have to deal with CS calls from many different companies, so it took them forever to find scripts relevant to the customer’s request. Most calls failed - that outsourced CS was a glorified voicemail box.

Our success rate with outsourced CS was very low, partly because we didn’t have the resources to fly over to Austin to train a workforce that didn’t show to be particularly promising.

AI voice bots would have been able to helpfully answer and deflect 90% of our calls, and do so in a much faster and humane way.

I understand the sentiment behind your comment, but I cannot agree with your assessment of the outcome.

[stackskipton]

>AI voice bots would have reduced been able to helpfully answer and deflect 90% of our calls, and do so in a much faster and humane way.

Would they have? I've worked at companies that had AI voice bots, they required a ton of care and feeding like a script. Only reason we used them is they were better at following the script and they didn't cause massive customer backlash compared to customer backlash we got when it was offshored.

[laborcontract]

So many of our calls were informational with a predictable/scriptable answer set. 90% may be high, but I know 80% of the calls would have been squashed by an AI bot.

There's definitely a ton of care that you have to put into creating it aside from just retrieval, like control flow, but the state of our outsourced CS was really, really bad. 5 minute wait times just to get connected to someone that mispronounced our company name and mostly told people to call us in the morning. The costs were absurd for the quality of service we got and they ended up making customers angry.

[tmpz22]

> 90% may be high, but I know 80% of the calls would have been squashed by an AI bot.

Which one is it 90% or 80%? Is it possible it could've been 70%? 60%? 20%?

[hakimk]

I understand where you're coming from - poor support experiences are are the bane of my existence.

Preventing poor support experiences is the exact reason we started Fini. With a long career as a software engineer in the support industry, I have seen first hand when and why these initiatives fail.

Unfortunately, when growth-stage companies experience a surge of signups, they face the choice between either 1) delay responding to all support issues by weeks, due to lack of staffing, or 2) trying to automate/offshore support, leading to poor coverage and accuracy.

Both of these options usually lead to horrendous support experiences such as the ones you mention.

Thankfully, with recent advances such as LLMs, we are one step closer to bridging this gap. In our most successful projects we are able to reach 95% accuracy specifically thanks to keeping a close eye on human evaluations.

That's why we are launching this package as well, which we believe brings us one step closer towards our mission of helping millions of end-users receive the high quality support they deserve within seconds rather than weeks.

It's a challenge which very few (if any!) companies have pulled off well, which is why we have decided to put all our effort into making scalable and hassle-free support our first priority.

[ethanwillis]

> In our most successful projects we are able to reach 95% accuracy

Is this the 95% of issues that are common between customers that could be and are handled at scale with a FAQ/knowledgebase that is surfaced to a user automatically through prompts?

How does it actually do on the smaller percentage of questions that are complex?

And that 95% is on the most successful projects. But what does the distribution of accuracy look like across all projects? If 2 projects out of 1000 are 95% accuracy that doesn't mean much to me.

[hakimk]

FAQ/knowledgebase are not enough to reach 95%. If that was the case then this problem would've been solved long ago with the advent of semantic search engines.

You also need the following:

1) General principles of instructions split across topics - essentially distilling a support training manual into a flow chart of prompts.

2) Algorithms to detect best past resolutions to create new knowledge-base material on the go.

3) Continuous retrain and feedback loops which we have written models to perform on behalf of customers.

And continuous R&D effort into how these systems can improve.

[bee_rider]

It seems like a very convoluted path, but if people are for some strange reason more apt to end up at the FAQ via “chatting” with a tool like this rather than just looking it up directly, this still seems useful, right? I mean what’s the alternative, is there a “more self-directed users as a services” offering out there?

[leobg]

You may have written this yourself, but it totally sounds like a ChatGPT answer. If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

[yunwal]

Change my view:

If a company has successfully automated a support action (e.g. “help me link 2 accounts”) then it’s a part of the application itself. “Automating customer support” is just a cop out. It’s saying, “we’d love to have this be part of our application, so we don’t have to throw human support at the problem, but we’re not actually sure our automation works”.

[troyvit]

Taking a step back though, where has hyper-growth gotten us as an industry and as a society? What if, instead, start-ups throttled their growth to keep a sustainable level of support so that the growth fuels the support instead of just fueling more growth?

[bee_rider]

The whole startup industry is a bit silly but that isn’t really actionable from any one person’s point of view.

[solardev]

Not to disprove your point (cuz I know how rare this is), but anecdotally: I currently work for a small, bootstrapped company of about 12 people. We never took VC money, was founded by two partners, and just slowly grew by organic word-of-mouth.

I'm one of just a handful of customer support people there, but we try really hard to provide good help to our customers across emails, forums, and live calls in several time zones. We're a headless CMS company, so the questions tend to be a mix of stuff like "how do I do this with your API" and "my Next.js site isn't working, fix it" (even though it's not our code) and "halp, the internet is down" (occasionally it's our infra, but more often it's just a regional outage).

We serve a variety of customer types, from experienced devs to marketers who've never coded before. We try our best to help with all of them, sometimes providing in-depth troubleshooting and mini code reviews for their frontends, all at no additional charge. We're a tiny company in a small niche to begin with, but our customers tend to like us a lot and stick around for a long time. We'll never hyper-scale, but our customers, founders, and employees are happy. None of us will ever become the next tech billionaire, but we have good work-life balances and families and hobbies outside of our jobs. It's sustainable as long as our core product remains relevant. I wish more companies were like that!

In my experience, this sort of setup is more common with smaller companies who deliberately want to maintain an intimate relationship with their customers (and employees, for that matter). As companies get bigger, the human element tends to get lost in the anonymous seas of profit and loss statements. I know it's rare these days, but I really wish we had more small-biz tech companies of a dozen or two people rather than the global (and soon, interplanetary?) hyper-scalers.

I think biologically we just function best at the scale of small villages, where we can actually build rapport and trust over time. Whether it's customer support, a vendor-customer relationship, or even an organic community like a subreddit (or HN), people work together better when they feel like they're part of the same in-group (or at least a federation of allies working towards aligned goals). At a certain scale, personal relationships get replaced by impersonal bureaucracies instead, and then trust and accountability start to crumble. It takes deliberate effort to stay under that scale when the allure of hyperwealth is so strong, but it IS possible.

The last few companies I've enjoyed working at were also smaller outfits, small enough where I could personally answer all web inquiries from our customers. It wasn't technically part of my job description, but I'd go out of my way to try to build trust – a rarer and rarer commodity on the Web these days. If someone complained about a bug on our website, I'd take the responsibility to apologize, find and fix it, and let them know what happened. And at the bigger companies where I wasn't able to have that sort of direct connection with our customers, I'd still work with the customer support team to make sure they at least had a direct line of communication/escalation to me and the other devs. I'd also take time out of my days to learn from the support team to better understand their jobs, how they do it, what their pain points were internally, and what our common customer complaints were. Again, it's rare, but it IS possible, and far easier/more common in the few remaining small companies who actually still care about customer experience and that human touch.

The TLDR is I'd highly encourage people in our field to work for smaller/mid-sized businesses wherever possible :) There is almost always a wage tradeoff, but as long as it's a livable wage, it's totally worth it for the sanity, autonomy, and happiness you get in exchange. And as a customer, I'd far prefer to do business with small companies who have good support vs faceless megacorps.

[dragonsky67]

When the obvious desire of 90% of customer support is to make the customer go away being able to use a box rather than a person to get rid of them seems a perfect solution.

Support is a cost centre, the people calling support are not the ones who will be making purchasing decisions so why provide anything close to decent support. Vendor lock in, subscription services and other ways to reduce the chance that the customer will go elsewhere all contribute to the downward spiral in support.

Truth is, if they can manage to provide proper feedback to the AI for when the support that is provided is actually useful or successful this may actually learn to be better than employing someone to read off a support flowchart that hasn't been updated in 20 years.